The Inheritors

Years ago I wrote here about Chesterton’s definition of bigotry as “the failure of the mind to imagine any other mind.” Chesterton wrote of contemporaries refusing to see one another’s political or religious perspectives—a distance that is difficult enough to bridge at any time. But what about perspectives separated by millennia? The Inheritors, William Golding’s second novel, attempts to reaching deep into prehistory to imagine a mind far more alien than any political or cultural opponent we resent today.

The Inheritors follows Lok, a Neanderthal man who is one of the junior males in a dwindling family group. The group is led by Mal, the eldest male; the old woman, who the reader gradually infers is Lok’s mother; Fa, Lok’s mate; Liku, their young daughter, to whom Lok is affectionate and devoted; Ha, another young man; Nil, his mate; and the new one, Ha and Nil’s infant boy.

When the novel begins, Lok’s group are returning inland from a winter by the sea. In the first of an series of troubling complications, Lok’s group discovers that the log they have always used to cross a river in their path has gone missing. They find another shorter, thinner log and lay it over the water and all cross safely except Mal, their capable but aging patriarch. He falls off as he crosses and though he is able to crawl out to safety, the chilly river, swollen with snowmelt, breaks his health. By the next evening, as the group shelters under a cliff overhang by a large waterfall upriver, Mal lies dying. And Lok has begun to notice that their group, despite the precautions they take against wolves and big cats, are not alone.

Snatches of strange voices and glimpses of figures and fires through the trees alarm Lok, who tries both to investigate the strangers and to warn the rest of his group about the “new people.” But Mal’s sickness, death, and burial, the delay in their journey, and their constant need for food distract and disperse them. When the scale of the threat the new people pose finally becomes clear, it is too late. The new people kill several of Lok’s band and kidnap Liku and the new one.

Lok and Fa are able to escape and observe the new people from high in a tree for one long, terrible night. The new people not only use fire—like Lok and his band, who relied upon the old woman to carry live coals from stage to stage on their journey upriver—but make it. They build roaring bonfires around which they gather, eat, and argue. They make artificial caves to shelter in at night. They can cross the river at will in hollow logs. They wear skins and furs and jewelry. They make honey-smelling liquids that provoke wild and violent behavior. The men and women intrigue with and against each other. And they carry bent branches with which, when they catch sight of Lok, they attempt to “give” him sharp flint-headed twigs.

The middle and end of The Inheritors follows Lok’s epiphany that, with Mal dead, he is the new Mal, a startling and terrifying realization of responsibility in the face of danger. The Inheritors is, then, a coming-of-age story of a kind. With Fa, Lok, the newly minted leader of their threatened group, determines to save Liku and the new one from the strangers. It is not a spoiler to say that their rescue attempt does not end well.

The final chapter shifts perspective from Lok to one of the new people—a group of modern man, Homo sapiens, in flight after their leader stole another man’s woman—and ends the novel with a note of tragedy and a deep sense of foreboding. After all, for the modern men who encountered Lok and his band by the river, this only the beginning of the story.

The Inheritors does several things I really love in a novel. First, it drops the reader into a completely foreign time, place, and mindset and trusts the reader to keep up and figure it out. Golding narrates this world in a stripped-down, direct, and forceful style with a deliberately limited vocabulary. He involves the reader in Lok’s perspective immediately—it is totally absorbing. Golding makes this alien world comprehensible and carefully prepares the way for the reader to understand while never spoonfeeding information. It’s expertly crafted.

This is because, second, Golding commits totally to telling this story from the point of view of Lok, who has an alien mind. The Neanderthals, in Golding’s telling, are intuitive rather than rational, relying on mental “pictures” that they can communicate to each other through minimalistic callbacks and shared memory. Their world is a flux of habit, play, affection, fear, and hunger. This attempt to bring the reader into the Neanderthal mind could have gone horribly wrong—but Golding executes it brilliantly.

That’s because, third, Golding uses the immense dramatic irony of this perspective to provoke suspense, horror, and above all a deep sympathy. I’ve written before about how the irony of a past person’s limited knowledge and understanding is a tricky, distancing authorial tool, one more often used to scorn or belittle characters than to understand them, but Golding evokes nothing but pathos for Lok and his people. He treats them and their situation seriously, and their fates as genuine tragedies. Lok may not have a word for the love he feels for Liku, but Golding makes us feel it as Lok feels it. And the dread—a far more powerful emotion to me than mere horror—that Golding generates is nearly unbearable. Fa, who sees more and understands quicker than Lok, is perhaps the most compelling character in this regard. The conclusion of their night watching the new people from the tree, in which Fa turns Lok’s face away from the fire in the clearing while she watches the new people with wide, unblinking, tear-shining eyes, is the stuff of nightmares.

I have to point out that the Neanderthals as described by Golding don’t match what we know of Neanderthal life today. Unlike Lok and his group, Neanderthals made and used tools, hunted and waged war, built dwellings, ate meat, and wore clothes. (My own, personal, non-expert suspicion based on Neanderthal archaeology is that Neanderthals were really just a funny-looking subgroup of modern man.) I actually wondered a few times if Lok’s people were not some yet earlier form of man and the new people Neanderthals, but these modern scientific terms are not used and it doesn’t ultimately matter. The Inheritors may not be a textbook description of Ice Age early man, but as an invitation to imagine ourselves and our nature from a radical and unflattering alternate perspective it is unmatched.

I began Griswoldville with three epigraphs, one of which was this favorite line from an essay by Richard Weaver: “It is good for everyone to ally himself at one time with the defeated and to look at the ‘progress’ of history through the eyes of those who are left behind.” The Inheritors is perhaps the ultimate such imaginative alliance, one that not only shocks and moves but should cause us to consider the cost and meaning of progress.