Like Lord of the Flies, The Inheritors began life in a Bishop Wordsworth's School notebook.[2] This handwritten manuscript and the typescript that ensued are now held in the University of Exeter's Special Collections Archives, where they can be used for further research and study.
Golding began work on The Inheritors in the autumn of 1954, mere weeks after the publication of Lord of the Flies; Golding was concerned that he would be unable to write another novel[3] and had sent a 'long, anxious letter in return' to his editor Charles Monteith when asked what his next publication would be.[4] He had started writing a novel exploring the father-son relationship through the mythical character of Telegonus (son of Odysseus), titled In Search of My Father, a year prior; Monteith requested a chapter, the typescript for which demonstrates 'some of Golding's most spectacular prose'.[5] Monteith was 'enormously interested',[6] but after favourable reviews of Lord of the Flies, it was left unfinished owing to Golding's belief that it would come off as a cheap imitation of other historical epics.[7]
Golding finished his first draft of The Inheritors on 11 November 1954, though he deemed his own handwriting illegible and worked on the novel significantly over Christmas, redrafting, reworking, and typing the manuscript to submit to Monteith.[8] The following February, Monteith received the revised typescript along with a letter from Golding featuring a host of disclaimers that betrayed his nervousness surrounding the novel that would follow up Lord of the Flies.[9] Golding had also wanted to finish the book sooner rather than later; after moving house to the Victorian vicarage across the road, his increased rent had made him 'consequently hard up'.[10] But Golding had no reason to worry and, in fact, soon found that the book would be completed more quickly than he had previously anticipated; after a few proof readings, Monteith saw that the book was fit to publish.[10] There was little editing required and, although he was initially unsure about having cavemen as the subject of a novel, Monteith knew that the book was a masterpiece that was 'perfect as it stood'.[11]
Plot introduction
This novel is an imaginative reconstruction of the life of a band of Neanderthals, consisting of an old man (Mal), an unnamed old woman, four adults (Ha, Nil, Lok and Fa), a little girl (Liku) and a baby, simply referred to as "the new one". It is written in such a way that the reader might assume the group to be modern Homo sapiens as they gesture and speak simply among themselves, and bury their dead with heartfelt, solemn rituals. They also have powerful sense impressions and feelings, and appear sometimes to share thoughts in a near-telepathic way. As the novel progresses it becomes more and more apparent that they live very simply, using their considerable mental abilities to connect to one another without extensive vocabulary or the kinds of memories that create culture. They have wide knowledge of food sources, mostly roots and vegetables. They chase hyenas from a larger beast's kill and eat meat, but they don't kill mammals themselves. They have a spiritual system centering on a female principle of bringing forth, but their lives are lived so much in the present that the reader realizes they are very different from us, living in something like an eternal present, or at most a present broken and shaped by seasons.
One of the band, Lok, is a point of view character. He is the one we follow as one by one the adults of the band die or are killed, then the young are stolen by the "new people", a group of early modern humans. Lok and Fa, the remaining adults, are fascinated and repelled by the new people. They observe their actions and rituals with amazement, only slowly understanding that harm is meant by the sticks of the new people.
The humans are portrayed as strange, godlike beings as the Neanderthals witness their mastery of fire, Upper Palaeolithic weaponry and sailing.
All save the last chapters of the novel are written from the Neanderthals' stark, simple stylistic perspective. Their observations of early human behaviour serve as a filter for Golding's exercise in paleoanthropology, in which modern readers will recognize precursors of later human societal constructs, e.g., religion, culture, sacrifice and war.
The penultimate chapter employs an omniscient viewpoint, observing Lok. For the first time, the novel describes the people the reader has been inhabiting through the first-person perspective. Lok, totally alone, gives up in despair.
In the final chapter, we move to the point of view of the new race, more or less modern humans fleeing in their boats, revealing that they are terribly afraid of the Neanderthals (whom they believe to be devils of the forest) and of pretty much everything around. This last chapter, the only one written from the humans' point of view, reinforces the inheritance of the world by the new species.
The Inheritors was published on 16 September 1955, when Golding's literary reputation was still in its nascent stages.[12] However, though few in number to begin with, reviews of the book were largely positive: two separate critics—Philip Day from The Sunday Times and Peter Green (who was later a friend of Golding's) from The Daily Telegraph—described the novel as a tour de force,[13] whilst Isabel Quigly called it "a many-dimensional and astonishing book" in The Spectator[14] two weeks after its initial publication, along with similarly positive reviews from myriad newspapers and literary journals. These sat amongst two more negative reviews: one from a leading member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, Margot Heinemann, who found the book hard to understand and disapproved of its allegedly negative portrayal of man's ascension; and one from The Times, that would have preferred it if Neanderthals were the subjects of history books and not fiction.[15]
The novel sold 1800 copies by 3 October and 3000 by 28 October.[16] Sales figures of Golding's previous book in America affected American publishers' opinions on the novel, who worried that a novel like The Inheritors would only receive 'ivory-tower appreciation' and consequently chose not to publish it at the time.[17]
In a recent review of 2021, Ben Okri in the Irish Times admires its invention of the language it uses:[18]
One of the great achievements of the novel is the language in which it is rendered. There is a special quality to the writing. Golding not only invents a world but invests it with a high degree of linguistic intensity. The language owes something to the liberating achievement of Joyce, Virginia Woolf and stream-of-consciousness. But its achievement is wholly Golding’s own.
The Neanderthal Parallax, a trilogy of novels written by Robert J. Sawyer depicting the effects of the opening of a connection between two versions of Earth in different parallel universes: the world familiar to the reader, and another where Neanderthals became the dominant intelligent hominid.
Citations
↑ "Golding, William". SFE: the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. Retrieved 23 November 2016.
Lord of the Flies is a 1954 novel by the Nobel laureate British author William Golding. The plot concerns a group of British boys who are stranded on an uninhabited island and their disastrous attempts to govern themselves. Themes include the tension between groupthink and individuality, between rational and emotional reactions, and between morality and immorality.
Sir William Gerald Golding was a British novelist, playwright, and poet. Best known for his debut novel Lord of the Flies (1954), he published another twelve volumes of fiction in his lifetime. In 1980, he was awarded the Booker Prize for Rites of Passage, the first novel in what became his sea trilogy, To the Ends of the Earth. He was awarded the 1983 Nobel Prize in Literature.
Cro-Magnon is an Aurignacian site, located in a rock shelter at Les Eyzies, a hamlet in the commune of Les Eyzies-de-Tayac-Sireuil, Dordogne, southwestern France.
Pincher Martin is a novel by British writer William Golding, first published in 1956. It is Golding's third novel, following The Inheritors and his debut Lord of the Flies.
"The Ugly Little Boy" is a science fiction short story by American writer Isaac Asimov. The story first appeared in the September 1958 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction under the title "Lastborn", and was reprinted under its current title in the 1959 collection Nine Tomorrows. The story deals with a Homo neanderthalensis child which is brought to the future by means of time travel. Robert Silverberg later expanded it into a novel with the same title published in 1992.
The Clan of the Cave Bear is a 1980 novel and epic work of prehistoric fiction by Jean M. Auel about prehistoric times. It is the first book in the Earth's Children book series, which speculates on the possibilities of interactions between Neanderthal and modern Cro-Magnon humans.
The Spire is a 1964 novel by English author William Golding. "A dark and powerful portrait of one man's will", it deals with the construction of a 404-foot-high spire loosely based on Salisbury Cathedral, the vision of the fictional Dean Jocelin. In the novel, Golding utilises stream-of-consciousness writing with an omniscient but increasingly fallible narrator to show Jocelin's demise as he chooses to follow his own will as opposed to the will of God.
Earth's Children is a series of epic historical fiction novels written by Jean M. Auel set circa 30,000 years before the present day. There are six novels in the series. Although Auel had previously mentioned in interviews that there would be a seventh novel, publicity announcements for the sixth confirmed it would be the final book in the sequence.
Tragg and the Sky Gods was a comic-book title published by Gold Key Comics in the mid-1970s. The series was created by writer Donald F. Glut and artist Jesse Santos. Later, artist Dan Spiegle would work on the title.
Stanley Albert Gooch was a British psychologist and author who is probably best known as the proponent of a "hybrid-origin theory" of human evolution.
Gnarrk is a fictional character in DC Comics. He is a caveman who has been a member of various versions of the Teen Titans in the comic books in the early 1970s.
Cro is an American animated television series produced by the Children's Television Workshop and Film Roman. It was partially funded by the National Science Foundation. Every episode has an educational theme, introducing basic concepts of physics, mechanical engineering, and technology. The show's narrator is an orange woolly mammoth named Phil, who was found frozen in ice by a scientist named Dr. C and her assistant, Mike. After they defrost him, Phil tells both of them about life in the Ice Age, including stories about his friend Cro, a Cro-Magnon boy.
Dance of the Tiger is a novel by Finnish palaeontologist Björn Kurtén, published in 1978 and English translation in 1980. It is a prehistoric novel dealing with the interaction between Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons. A sequel, Singletusk, published in 1982, continues the story of the family.
Anthro is a fictional superhero character published by DC Comics, presented as the "first boy", a caveman born to Neanderthal parents. Anthro was created by cartoonist Howard Post; he first appeared in Showcase #74.
Hermann Schaaffhausen was a German anatomist, anthropologist, and paleoanthropologist.
The Scorpion God is a collection of three novellas by William Golding published in 1971. They are all set in the distant past: "The Scorpion God" in ancient Egypt, "Clonk Clonk" in pre-historic Africa, and "Envoy Extraordinary" in ancient Rome. A draft of "The Scorpion God" had been written but abandoned in 1964, "Clonk Clonk" was newly written for the book, and "Envoy Extraordinary" had been published before, in 1956. "Envoy Extraordinary" became a play called The Brass Butterfly which was performed first in Oxford and later in London and New York.
The prehistory in the Valencian Community refers to the period from the Paleolithic, including the appearance of the first populations, until the appearance of colonizing peoples, in the territory of the Valencian Community.
Grimaldi man is the name formerly given to two human skeletons of the Upper Paleolithic discovered in Italy in 1901. The remains are now recognized as representing two individuals, and are dated to ca. 26,000 to 22,000 years ago and classified as part of the wider Early European modern humans population of the late Aurignacian to early Gravettian.
Cro-Magnons or European early modern humans (EEMH) were the first early modern humans to settle in Europe, migrating from western Asia, continuously occupying the continent possibly from as early as 56,800 years ago. They interacted and interbred with the indigenous Neanderthals of Europe and Western Asia, who went extinct 40,000 to 35,000 years ago. The first wave of modern humans in Europe left no genetic legacy to modern Europeans; however, from 37,000 years ago a second wave succeeded in forming a single founder population, from which all subsequent Cro-Magnons descended and which contributes ancestry to present-day Europeans. Cro-Magnons produced Upper Palaeolithic cultures, the first major one being the Aurignacian, which was succeeded by the Gravettian by 30,000 years ago. The Gravettian split into the Epi-Gravettian in the east and Solutrean in the west, due to major climatic degradation during the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), peaking 21,000 years ago. As Europe warmed, the Solutrean evolved into the Magdalenian by 20,000 years ago, and these peoples recolonised Europe. The Magdalenian and Epi-Gravettian gave way to Mesolithic cultures as big game animals were dying out and the Last Glacial Period drew to a close.
Chancelade man is an ancient anatomically modern human fossil of a male found in Chancelade in France in 1888. The skeleton was that of a rather short man, who stood a mere 1.55 m (5.1 ft) tall.
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