This is by William Golding (1911-93). It's his second novel, and it was published in 1955, a year after the one that everyone talks about (and I've never read).

Very briefly (but spoiler-ladenly), we follow a small group of homo neanderthalensis as they not only face the usual rigours of their environment (hunger, cold, water, wild animals...), but now also have "new people" -- homo sapiens -- to contend with. It's a catastrophic encounter, and most of this rather endearing little band, whose sensitive, innocent, and increasingly bewildered perspective we've grown close to, end up dead. Sailing off into the sunset, on the other hand, are the distinctly unlikeable tribe of homo sapiens who have wrought all this destruction. I was going to say "blithely wrought". It's not quite that. But it's certainly unnecessary destruction, whose scale exceeds their awareness.

David Dawson narrated my audio-version really sensitively. But this is a book that requires close attention, so you really do need a text as well. There's one available on Internet Archive.



I read The Inheritors in conjunction with Simon Haisell's book group. It's another of those titles that I wouldn't have even thought of reading without the external impetus, and because it was quite a tough read, the notes and guidance were really welcome.

Why is it a tough read? Certainly not because it's prosaic or dull. On the contrary, the language is very beautiful, poetic even; and it's a tense read because you really are worrying all the time about what is going to happen to Lok, Fa, Liku, and the baby, who are soon all who remain of the original band (Mal, the oldest man, dies of natural causes quite early in the story; the old woman, meanwhile, plus Ha and Nil, are killed in the first brush with the "new people").

Rather, what makes it challenging is that Golding tries to get us inside the head of our point-of-view character, Lok, and he's a hominin who sees the world in a very different way from us. (In case you're wondering, the word hominin is now used to refer to living humans and their extinct ancestors, while hominid is the designation for all Great Apes, including humans, and their extinct ancestors.)

Lok and the rest of "the people" have speech but, as Haisell puts it, "They lack abstract thought, expressing ideas, memories and dreams as pictures." They're also people who are much closer to the animal world than we are: "Their sense of self is strangely amorphous: Lok is an assemblage of limbs and sensory organs. His feet are clever. His ears speak to him, posing wordless questions -- '?' -- that his mind cannot answer... Lok’s nose is its own major character in the first three chapters."

And, of course, when Lok starts observing homo sapiens, and is completely bamboozled by shelters and canoes and clothes and rituals and weapons, what goes into his brain doesn't easily translate into language we understand.

So, it's very cleverly done, but I confess to being five steps behind a lot of the time, and I failed to notice and/or construe tons of detail. (Not just me. Many of the group experienced the same problems.)

Haisell's notes were therefore super-helpful. Sometimes, he'd point out things that I realized I'd missed when I'd listened, but even when I went back to the text, and looked carefully, I STILL couldn't find -- until I'd gone through it several times.


This utterly exquisite map of the terrain described in the book was shared by Janet Cook, a member of the reading group. A lot of us found it hard to picture the locality, and this really helps

So..., join the book group! It's absolutely invaluable for a novel like this... Because The Inheritors really was worth the effort. At the end of the day, semi-bewildered though I remained till the end, I found it a thought-provoking and hugely moving text.

I can understand why it was Golding's personal favourite. And his daughter, Judy, maintained that its central characters, Lok and Fa, were based on her father and mother.

Fa is Lok's bright, enterprising, and compassionately protective mate, who's sometimes frustrated with the shortcomings of her lovable but slightly dozy male.

Lok, until confronted with this mortal threat, is indeed insouciant. He's naturally exuberant, someone who enjoys entertaining the others with his foolery. Here he is at the beginning, joyfully recognizing the summer place they have returned to, before everything goes horribly pear-shaped:

"'The stone is a good stone,' said Lok. 'It has not gone away. It has stayed by the fire until Mal came back to it.'

"He stood up and peered over the earth and stones down the slope. The river had not gone away either or the mountains. The overhang had waited for them. Quite suddenly he was swept up by a tide of happiness and exultation. Everything had waited for them: Oa had waited for them. Even now she was pushing up the spikes of the bulbs, fattening the grubs, reeking the smells out of the earth, bulging the fat buds out of every crevice and bough. He danced on the terrace by the river, his arms spread wide.

"'Oa!'"

Oa is the earth deity they invoke through simple gifts and rituals. The shaman figure of the homo sapiens group, and the practice of sacrifice, form a much scarier belief system.


The first edition cover of The Inheritors features "The Sorcerer". The artwork is based on a sketch by Henri Breuil depicting cave art from Trois-Frères in Ariege, France

Lok doesn't realize it when he does his Oa dance, but things have already started to go wrong. When they tried to cross the river (on the way to the overhang), the log they'd habitually used was no longer there. Mal, the elder, showed them how to improvise a crossing using a fallen tree, but he himself fell into the water, and the resulting chill was what precipitated his death.

But they don't know that yet. For a few pages, we participate in their lives. Food and fire and companionship are what matters most.

And then they encounter the new people, and with them, killing and destruction and abduction.

Lok's reaction, as he observes them from a protected vantage-point, is not pure repulsion. He is also fascinated and attracted. Fa, on the other hand, sees a horror that Lok does not witness (the killing of her daughter). She is implacably hostile to the interlopers, convinced of their infernal origins: "Oa did not bring them out of her belly."


Painting from El Buxu Cave, which we visited in 1994. The frieze of which this is part ("one of the most significant") is given an estimated date of 19000-11500 BCE

***

The Inheritors is a reaction to old perceptions that saw Neanderthals as brutish, stupid, and aggressive. Golding's epigraph is a quote from H.G. Wells, who talks about "an extreme hairiness, an ugliness, or a repulsive strangeness", and quotes Sir Harry Johnston's suggestion that our "dim racial remembrance of such gorilla-like monsters" may be the root of the ogre figures that crop up in folklore.


Original illustration for The Grisly Folk, by H.G. Wells

Golding is giving us a totally different picture. His Neanderthals are winsome and likeable, gentle and respectful towards each other. It's the homo sapiens crowd who display unthinking cruelty and ritual violence, both to each other and to the Neanderthals. The more we read, the more we're horrified by our direct ancestors...

And these ancestors are overwhelming. To describe them, Lok and Fa have to learn about metaphor: "They are like a fire in the forest... They have gone over us like a hollow log. They are like a winter... They are like the river and the fall...; nothing stands against them."


The Ile Kere Kere caves, Timor Leste, 2014. This site has been occupied by humans for about 35,000 years, but the paintings are of more recent origin (about 2,000-6,000 years old)

Having followed Lok's perspective for most of the novel, we split off from him in the final part. First, there's a haunting section where Lok is now "it", "the red creature", the only one of his kind remaining in the big forest, his kin all dead. "The narrative," says Haisell, has begun a process of fossilisation, reducing the Neandertals from loving/fearing people to the silent skeletal remains of something not-quite-human-enough. The lengthy descriptions of Lok’s body mimic the palaeontologist's scientific eye. We are losing Lok. He was a good man, but he has gone away."

It's an unutterably sad description, for we have learned to love Lok by now.

We close with homo sapiens, and the perspective of Tuami, who is steering the boat. Haisell again: "To read the last chapter of The Inheritors is to awaken from a dream. In shifting perspective to the new people, the language broadens out into the great lake of a modern human’s imagination. The familiar vocabulary and grammar; the intentional inner world lashed securely to its external environment. Reading Tuami is easy compared to what came before; it is almost a relief to be in the boat and in a mind we can understand. We are home. And that’s the point. The contrast and sense of relief implicates us in what happened in the hills. We are Tuami’s descendants and the inheritors, the people of the fall. The book’s title alludes to Christ’s Sermon on the Mount: 'Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.' In this fable, it is the meek who perish and the strong who triumph."

And yet Tuami is not wholly unsympathetic. He's an artist, and he's capable of reconstructing the series of events he's just lived through, and regretting what happened.

So it's not black and white. Our human cleverness puts paid to the innocence of our forebears. But we're not irredeemable.

And the current state of our knowledge -- that homo sapiens and homo neanderthalensis actually interbred, and many of us today carry Neanderthal genes -- makes the conclusion even more complex. The ogre was not an ogre. And we didn't exterminate him. Not completely, anyway. He became part of us.


This is the kind of overhang I imagined our Neanderthals reaching on that first night

***

I won't attempt to say anything scientific about the Neanderthals. Nothing I read seems to quite concur with anything else, and it's a story that we're apparently still piecing together, very painstakingly.

I will quote this, however, by Peter Kjaergaard et al, which gives a bit of the paleoanthropological context:

"Neanderthals evolved over 400,000 years ago, most likely from an earlier ancestor Homo heidelbergensis. They were extremely successful and spread across an area from the Mediterranean to Siberia. They were highly intelligent, with brains on average bigger than Homo sapiens's.

"They hunted for big game, collected plants, fungi, and seafood, controlled fire to cook, made composite tools, made clothes from animal skins, made beads from shells, and were able to carve symbols on to cave walls. They took care of their young, old and weak, created shelters for protection, lived through harsh winters and warm summers, and they buried their dead.

"Neanderthals did meet our ancestors on several occasions over the course of tens of thousands of years and the two species shared the European continent for at least 14,000 years. They even mated with each other...

"To the Neanderthals extinction happened gradually. They eventually lost their world, a comfortable home they had successfully occupied for hundreds of thousands of years that slowly turned against them, until existence itself was unsustainable."

So the "actual" story didn't always play out in the way that Golding depicts, but that doesn't really matter.


William Golding, in 1983

Rebecca Wragg Sykes, who has written a broadly acclaimed study of Neanderthal life, really rates The Inheritors, describing it as the "foundational text" for the literary history of how we have tried to imagine and write about homo neanderthalensis. "It’s not strictly accurate," she says, "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... I find his attempts to do that fascinating, it’s the beauty of this book."

Ben Okri also argues: "It is wrong to measure a novel against the changing finds of archaeology. It is not the rightness or the wrongness of the science that counts, it is the truth of the world created, the imaginative feat itself. To fashion a story around this encounter so that it radiates forward to our times is the true achievement of this work."

For Haisell, this is a fable. It depicts the kind of struggle that goes on in every epoch, both within individuals and societies: "A struggle between being in the world (like the Neanderthals) and trying to manipulate and control it (like Homo sapiens). Of course, we must be and do both, which is the paradox and the dilemma."



***

The Inheritors, according to Golding's daughter, is a complex expression of the author's war guilt, naivete, and alcoholism.

"He felt guilt," she says, "not only over the people that he himself had killed during the war -- and he was completely clear he had done so -- but also for the role of his species in creating the whole machinery of war. This conviction, in itself a kind of hunger -- a consuming guilt -- finds expression in the cry from one of the New People at the end of the novel: 'What else could we have done?' My father felt the excuse was insufficient, and recognised his own share in it...

"My father was always keen to avoid the simple conclusion. He thought that humans, Homo sapiens, were complex and contradictory, and had both good and evil sides. In the novel he, my father, chooses to show two sides of himself -- in Lok, almost a holy innocent, and Tuami, the artist among the New People." When we see him for the last time, Tuami is sharpening a blade (which he considers using against the current leader of their band), but he's also planning to sculpt its handle with representations of Vivani ("the fat woman") and the new one who was stolen from the Neanderthal group. "The novelist carefully tells us that the sculpted haft is 'so much more important than the blade'... In the ivory knife my father portrays his own and his species’ capacity for violence, together with a possibly saving grace – the capacity and desire to create, the awareness of something touching and beautiful. And surely it is no accident that the figures in the ivory combine Tuami's people and the Neanderthals. The New One joins the New People and lives to share in their future."

***

One day -- but not just yet -- I will revisit this, and spend a bit more time with it.