Customer Reviews

The Inheritors

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

Golding simply holds up as an excellent, if not classic, author no matter what subject he researched and pursued. I couldn't put this novel down. Golding takes his readers on a journey into a world seen through the eyes, visions, and emerging language expressions of primitive man. His sensitively drawn characters, whose language is limited, form `pictures' in their minds and use this mental illumination to guide them to food, to their seasonal homes and to acquaint them to possible dangers. The descriptions are marvelous: cold, wet, hungry, dependence on a sense of smell (you find yourself sniffing a lot), stones for weapons, hyenas signaling a kill for the band of our earliest ancestors to steal, recipes cooked in a style that remind one of haggis (no refrigerator raiding is elicited in this read by the way) and a lush plant entwined forest of the early spring replete with mystical ice women to be worshipped.

Within the pages, the author's imagination, ideas, and symbols are used at their best removing the reader from the world of 2001 into a consideration of the earth and stars alone, untouched by any sort of technology. Essentially it is Lok and his small Neanderthal band that are faced with other humans, unlike themselves, for the first time. The 'other' (homo-sapiens) is armed with bows and arrows, sharpened tools made from bone and an ability to cross rivers and lakes by rowing logs. Golding possibly was inspired by the scientific find of a primitive people who could cross the water discovered sometime in the early 1950's. In any event this is a story that readers will find to be absorbing and has the potential to provide an insight into a daily life of a society devoted to survival with only the earth as a guide to how. Wiliam Golding tells a stirring, astonishing story with a writer's technical virtuosity applied as only he can do.

I haven't been so emotionally involved in a book since...well, for a long time.

This novel is about a family group of Neanderthals who travel to their cave for the warmer part of the year and meet there a group of modern men. The resulting events are as intense and terrifying for the reader as they are for the Neanderthals. Because Golding shows everything from their point of view, we are often left as puzzled and uncomprehending as they. The descriptions of objects the we know about -- bows and arrows, boats, alcohol -- are written as the Neanderthals saw them. The actions of the modern humans -- their rituals and hierarchy -- Golding makes successfully foreign -- but when we sit and think about what we've read, we realize, wait, I *know* this, this is what humans do.

The characterization is achieved deftly and sensitively, Lok and Fa are compelling as is their fate. Prehistory was very likely *not* like this -- but the themes stand, and this book is powerful.

I do not think Golding is doing a disservice to our species, because this is how we are. He is telling a damn good, if tragic, story. I will re-read this book over and over again, I know. Golding is truly great, and this book is greater, in my opinion, than the oft-assigned "Lord of the Flies."

This amazingly inventive piece of fiction takes on some of the same themes the author dealt with in Lord of the Flies, but in a surprising way. In this novel, the protagonists are the last of the Neandrathals who are in deadly conflict with emergent Homo Sapiens for their survival. Golding imagines these people as being essentially pre-verbal and it is a testiment to his skill as a writer that he can create effective characters without the tool of dialogue. Because of this convention, and the need to keep the story from the Neandrathal's (not quite human) point of view, it takes some time for the reader to achieve an understanding of what is happening and why. It becomes, nevertheless, a very moving story and one of the more inventive tales in serious modern literature.

As a companion piece from the current Homo Sapien point of view, one might want to read Beards novel about a hypothetical new jump in evolution, Darwin's Radio.

This book is complex but worth the effort if you have an IQ of more than room-temperature.

The comment by a previous reviewer is worth taking up:"And now I have an even bigger reason to dislike this book. I happen to hate reading screeds that trash the author's own ancestors. I'm sure homo sapiens were not perfect, but please show me a race or culture of people who are." Well, I'd agree, strongly. But it's not as simple as that: the Homo Sapiens Sapiens in The Inheritors are not shown as deliberately and strategically wiping out the last Homo Sapiens Neanderthalus. Rather, they are terrified of them. They think they are defending themselves against horrifying demons - why do they submit to the discipline of the whip to drag the canoe up the portage? Plainly they are half out of their minds with terror, which the Neanderthals cannot comprehend. Further, the Neanderthals, though gentle and innocent, are plainly inadequate. The process of their replacement by the Homo Sapiens Sapiens, or Cro-Magnards, is cruel but it is not morbid. The Neanderthals, it is clearly demonstrated, are at a dead-end (they are only a vestige of a tribe at the beginning of the story). The survival of the Neanderthal infant means some of their gentleness and innocence may survive into the new world. It is actually a relief to get into the Cro-Magnards' minds in the final chapter after the limitation of having to see everything from a Neanderthal point of view. The Cro-Magnards are at one point called "the people of the fall" - in religious terms they are the people of the "Fall" indeed - Postlapsarian Man. Unlike the Neanderthals, they do have knowledge of good and evil, and we see at the end even the rudiments of conscience - which is not to say the end of the Neanderthals is not utterly tragic.

Like all Golding's earlier works, this is the exploration of difficult moral dilemnas. There are lessons there but they are not easy.

Golding's better-known "Lord of the Flies" examines humanity at its most primitive, and creates a painful but inarguable image. He does that again in "The Inheritors," but this time from an outsider's view of humankind. He takes the unique perspective of Lok, a Neandertal, in the brief period when our two species coexisted.

The greatest achievement of this book may be in Golding's creation of a whole mentality that is intelligent and articulate, far from the human norm but still comprehensible. His Neandertals are visual people, who think in images. They reason by matching the here-and-now to visual memories. To understand someone means 'to see their picture.' (I've known visual artists who almost seem to work this way.) Their animistic world is a place where fire may wake up, and where a log decides how to place itself in the river. Despite the harshness of their world, they are gentle, affectionate, and hopeful. "People understand each other," says one, early on.

Although heartfelt by its speaker, the book treats that statement with cynicism and disdain. Homo sapiens arrive, clever, complex, and surrounded by mysterious made objects. Saying much more would say too much - but H. sapiens is a very poor neighbor.

Although I like this book, it could have been proportioned differently. I would have looked for more of the interaction with H. sapiens, and described Lok's people more succinctly. I'm not the Nobel winner, though, and Golding is. It's a meaningful, if discouraging look at what being human is all about, from the viewpoint of someone who doesn't.

//wiredweird

The basic requirement of reading is to remember and connect. I would ask those who have a distaste for such activity to refrain from criticing a book for its ambition and complication. To write successfuly through the eyes of a species whose experience of the world is different from ours is a difficult feat and one which remarkably, Golding has managed to pull off with both relative spareness and grace. Golding's "ancestor bashing" is, in truth, nothing more than a reminder and exploration of a given truth- the "darkness" in the heart of man and a human history full of violence and savagery. Moreover Golding's exploration is complicated- no simple black and white message is being propagated. The carving that one of the Homo Sapiens Sapiens works on at the end of the novel symbolises a future where the surviving Neaderthal will interbreed with the new race of Homo Sapiens. The idea is that modern man is comprised of both the innocent and caring nature that characterises the Neaderthals and the immorality of the more "advanced" species. Darkness visible by its very nature shows both light and darkness.

The Inheritors is a fascinating fable of the time in history (not so long ago - only five hundred generations or so before you, valued reader), when Neanderthals co-existed with homosapiens. Golding brings all his imaginative powers to bear to imagine himself in the Neanderthal consciousness. Simple named characters such as Lok and Mal and Fa witness strange things happening in their limited world - such as the disappearance of their precious log bridge across the river. Horrific things start happening, which shake their world view, their limited conceptions of events as 'pictures' rather than a human consciousness, comunicated in linguistic form. This is the era of the end of their people.

Golding draws the human conquerors as advanced only in the sense that they have mobilised natural resources to more sophisticated ends - such as hollowing out trees to make boats, and developing more sophisticated tools than the rudimentary Neanderthal implements. Morally, they are far more savage than the primitives they displace - a cruel, selfish species who will kill those alien to themselves, capture their young and become inheritors of the earth. The Neanderthals are an endearing, enclosed people with tender rituals of caring for each other and burying their dead. Their knowledge of things is fatally limited, and they struggle to express their horror of what is happening to them as they cannot muster up the language. They rely on their simple religion, Oa, the earth goddess who is a far more gentle and tender influence than the harsh pragmatic religion of the homosapiens with their savage stag mutilating rituals.

By the end, the last Neanderthal is hunched in a ball, gibbering with grief and bewilderment as he has witnessed the end of his people. The humans, meanwhile, sail aimlessly in their log boats on the river, struggling themselves to make sense of their aims and purpose in a world without structure or meaning.

Thirty thousand years later, are things any different?

The Inheritors takes you back to a time when the gentle Neanderthals became faced with the emergance of Homo-Sapiens, a collision which could only favour the Darwinian imperative of the survival of the fittest. The story unfolds in such a way as to make you identify with our Neanderthal cousins, who, skilled in their own environment but lacking in technology, must face the sheer ignorance of a more technologically advanced "master-race" which sees them as nothing more than strange and dangerous animals. The poignancy of this unequal contest is conveyed in a way which none the less makes Homo-Sapiens bad by accident rather than design. A lesson to all in these days of "ethnic cleansing" and fear of those from other cultures. A haunting morality tale which has you praying for "the other side" to win.

I read this book about six years ago and I still frequently think about it. The book is brilliant and as savage and ruthless, in its own way, as Shakespeare's Lear. I actually read the book in the first place because I had gotten interested in real Neanderthals: what did they look like, what were they like, where and how did they live, why did they die? etc. I soon discovered that these questions were largely unanswerable; frustrated, I remembered that Golding had written a "Neanderthal novel," and, science failing, I turned to art and read it.

One of the chief virtues of the book is its invention of "Neanderthal consciousness," a rather uncanny and striking sensibility which is definitely superior to animals, and definitely inferior to humans. We are drawn into the intimate--outer and inner--details of their world, and in the end of course they die. Humans populate the book as well, but in a far different way. I cannot say too much more without giving away a critical feature of the book's structure, except to say that the reader has no idea how good the book is until he/she finishes it. You must read it all, and then you will know.

Why do the human beings behave the way they do in the book? It is not really possible to answer this question. The eye cannot see itself, and we who are human cannot see....this.

I read THE INHERITORS back in the early 60's when I was a home mother with six kids. The book was so intellectually stimulating that I could not forget it. I have been a Great Books leader, a journalist, and a novelist in the forty or so years since reading THE INHERITORS and I still consider it a classic. I have been asked to nominate a book of the 60's to Pinellas County, Fl. libraries for discussion and have chosen THE INHERITORS. It combines the depth of literature with an implicit concept of the underpinnings of the 60's. My books are STAND FAST and FREEDOM'S COST.