Book of the Week

The Inheritors by William Golding

Recommended by Hari Collins

The Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico believed that all human speech started with poetry, by which he meant not that it was in metre or divided into lines but that it was richly metaphorical and symbolic. One of the finest achievements of William Golding’s The Inheritors is its exploration of how such a language could have worked.

 

The book is about a small group of Neanderthals, the last of their kind, and how they are gradually killed off by the ‘new people’: us, homo sapiens. The Neanderthals (who call themselves simply ‘the people’) do not communicate as we do, using regular sentences; instead, they ‘share pictures’, which involves a combination of ostensive actions, basic descriptions and telepathy. Thinking for them involves effort, but they have much more highly developed senses than we; in particular, their sense of smell is far in advance of ours.

Trying to show the reader how such people experience the world may be thought hard in itself, but Golding makes his task all but impossible by telling the story through the voice of Lok, the least intelligent of the people. Nevertheless, he manages it, by the use of an highly original style. It is a combination of direct and specific sensory descriptions of the world, always of very particular things or impressions – ’He was curled up, grey against the brown’, ‘the smell curved away from the river under the trees and came to the tumbled rocks and branches’, ‘the confined waters swirled and sent a trail of glistening streaks down the river’ – and a use of metaphor which is so constant it becomes almost imperceptible, and which often either anthropomorphises the landscape and the natural world, or describes the human body in the form of nature – ’his flesh was like fat that the fire was melting’, ‘the red spot ate and the flame grew strong’, and calling the feet of those good at climbing ‘clever’, which personifies that part of the body. Furthermore, the rhythm of Golding’s sentences is very constant; almost every one is of a very middling sort of length, not calling attention to itself by being aggressively short or relaxedly long, which seems appropriate for a species which simply notices everything in great detail, which registers everything around it fully, but finds longer or more abstract flights of thought very difficult. The impression the reader gets is of a people who is deeply aware of the natural world, who regards itself as inseparable from it, and whose members think of  themselves as tied inescapably to one another; in other words, humankind in a prelapsarian state. The technical originality required to portray such a people is immense, but because Golding does not use an obviously experimental or very unconventional style, the difference between this way of viewing the world and our own are not immediately apparent. The Neanderthal way of life is insinuated into the reader.

It thus comes as much more of a shock when ‘the other’, homo sapiens, arrives. As we have become familiar with a very different way of seeing the world, we look at things we thought quite easily comprehensible – sex, religious rituals, political conflict, art – with almost the same combination of horror and wonderment as Lok and his companion Fa do. This only increases as the new people start killing the Neanderthals, and it reaches its most terrible point when Lok and Fa’s daughter, Liku, is murdered in a religious ritual with her parents looking on. Only Fa, the cleverest of the Neanderthals, understands what is happening, so reading about it from Lok’s perspective is almost unbearable; I had to force myself to continue for those few pages. From that moment on, we realise, if we had not already, that the Neanderthals are all going to die, and that their innocence will vanish forever. Fa is killed, Lok dies of grief, and the description of him crying, where his beard is compared to a series of caverns and the tears to lights within them, is astonishing in the sudden dignity and pathos with which it invests Lok, as well as in its sheer beauty. Just at the moment when we most fully can identify ourselves with Lok and his people, the book moves away from his perspective, calling him ‘the creature’ and using a cold, anthropological tone. He, and his way of seeing, is dying out.

This is a disturbing book. It forces us throughout to consider our notions of superiority and inferiority, and to wonder whether the fundamental structures of our thought are really as fundamental as we usually imagine. But perhaps the most disturbing chapter is the final one, which does not talk of the Neanderthals at all, but instead uses the voice of Tuami, the artist of the homo sapiens. Suddenly, almost with relief, we realise that the rest of the book has been missing the complex articulation of emotion or sustained discursive argument, and that without these things it has been uncongenial to us. We realise that the Neanderthals were not able to reflect, and that Tuami, in his restless enquiry into every aspect of his life, is a great deal more like us – that we cannot possibly be like the Neanderthals. But we also see that he has more sinister emotions that we cannot imagine the Neanderthals having; in particular, he is repeatedly said to be ‘bitter’, an emotion which a Neanderthal would simply have lacked the mental resources to have. He is bitter because Marlan, the leader of his people, is his competitor in the love of Vivani and has treated them very poorly; as such, he wishes to kill Marlan. And so we are forced, suddenly, to truly appreciate how far we have fallen; what the loss of our innocence really would have meant – that now we cannot understand the world, that it somehow remains out of our reach, and that, like Tuami, we must look at ‘the line of darkness’, and like him, cannot ‘see if the line of darkness had an ending.’