The Inheritors

"I have a lot of affection for this book because I find it interesting in many different ways. Lord of the Flies was Golding’s first published book—it was published just a year before The Inheritors . This one is interesting because he is trying to imagine the world of Neanderthals, and specifically, their world as they encounter our world, the world of early Homo sapiens . He also lets himself go beyond the archaeological knowledge of the time: it’s not strictly accurate and he’s not really trying to be, so, in a way, it’s actually a little bit closer to what we might think of as speculative fiction now. It’s not truly a historical book in that sense, or historical imagining. What he tries to do for almost the entirety of the book is to let you see the world through the eyes of a different kind of humanity, essentially, that’s what happens. It’s written from the perspective of one tiny group of Neanderthals and particularly from that of the protagonist, Lok , a young male. He lives in a little family group and they’re doing their own thing, as they always have done: existing out of time, in a sense, although they are aware that there is a history to their own people. Then, they experience what to them is a series of very frightening and baffling incidents. You start to slowly realise that it is Homo sapiens that they’re encountering. What they encounter seems so monstrous that they can’t even compute the physicality of the Homo sapiens individuals at first. They’re talking about these horrible, ‘white bone’ faces and things like this. That’s interesting, historically, because it was the assumption at the time that the sapiens populations in Europe had white skin, which we now believe not to have been the case. It’s a story, but it’s also about playing with writing, in terms of how you describe the experience of encountering a thing or an object or a scene that you’ve never seen before. How do you get a character to describe that, using language that’s unfamiliar to the reader as well? You want it to be unfamiliar, so you’ve got to use phrases that make sense to us but are also surprising to the reader, in order to create this distance at a cognitive level. I find his attempts to do that fascinating, it’s the beauty of this book. For example, there’s a perception that the landscape itself is alive. All the way through the book, the trees are engaging with the Neanderthals, they are their own presences, and the water has an animism to it. In terms of how we have imagined Neanderthals and how we have tried to write about them, it is the foundational text for the literary history of this. There are novels written earlier that involved Neanderthals, but this is one that seriously tried to engage with them as a creative literary problem. How do you get into a different mind, how do you envision that, and how do you communicate that to a reader? It’s a lovely book. The most powerful aspect is that you go through the whole story, and you feel their emotion, their wonder, their awe, their fear. And then, the very last chapter completely flips it, and you’re in the minds of the Homo sapiens , seeing things as they do, and the language totally changes as well."

"Indeed. The narrative is a remarkable rendition of the state of mind of the last group of Neanderthals as they try to survive—with all the perils that they usually face, but with an additional threat of the new Homo sapiens people, who are logical and successful and have already developed weapons and other survival strategies. “I think his books appeal to writers because you can see what he’s doing, and admire it as a writer, while also having an incredibly vivid experience” The Neanderthals are mild, gentle people who have trouble with logical thought, communicate by telepathy, and have a mode of thought organised in pictures. The novel tells the story of how the peoples come into contact with one another, and that contact is an astonishing piece of writing. I know it is used by some people teaching about sensory perception, because it’s an exercise in showing how somebody perceives something without having the preconditions for understanding it. A piece of white bone was placed under [the eyes], fitting close, and where the broad nostrils should have shown were narrow slits and between them the bone was drawn out to a point. Under that was another slit over the mouth, and their voices came fluttering through it. Indeed. And when the Neanderthal character Lok realises that he’s looking, not at a mask, but a face, he’s really shocked. That’s a marvellous moment, because it allows us to see the threatening quality of the new people, ourselves. It’s an extraordinary piece of writing. I should also note that there are lots of very beautiful descriptions in this book—a description of the waterfall, and of the ‘ice women’—crevices of ice, that lodged in a particular cave. I do believe The Inheritors claim. The manuscript actually has the relevant dates written on it, it was just after the Lord of the Flies had been published, finally, after being rejected many times. And then he was facing the second novel problem. He put two possible novels to one side, and suddenly, just before Christmas 1954, he realised how to develop the story and went ahead. You should remember that not only did he write it in a very short space of time, but he had a full-time job too; he was a teacher. Presumably he just got it down on paper as fast as he possibly could. It’s an extraordinary thing, because so much of the final novel is there as well."