The Inheritors [Paperback]

There's no real story here. Neanderthal man encounters cro-magnon, and is killed off. While it sounds like an exciting premise, this book actually consists of little more than endless, repetitious, vague landscapes, repeated over and over and over again. These landscapes, which describe each and every leaf, rock, patch of dirt or sparkle of light on the water of a flowing river, take up literally sixty percent of this brief but agonizingly slow moving novel's pages. Along with the landscapes, we are told in painfully tedious detail of each character's physical movements as he or she walks among the minutely described leaves, rocks and patches of dirt, while looking at the sparkle of the light on the river. These details take up most of the rest of the book. There is very little here that actually constitutes narrative; instead, there is only description and accumulation of sentences.

The two main characters, Fa and Lok, are quite different. While Fa is a smart and resourceful Neanderthal, Lok, who stands at the center of the descriptions, is extraordinarily dense and slow-witted, even for a caveman. Within a few pages, this reader found Lok annoying and exasperating. Why Golding chose to make him the center of the book is a mystery.

One last point. This novel seems to have been edited severely (and not particularly carefully) from a longer manuscript, since many pages and the entire second-to-last chapter don't flow together in a coherent fashion. This only adds to the book's inertia and mystification. It's amazing that this was ever published in any form.

I really wanted to like "The Inheritors." Unfortunately, I had to force myself to finish it and ended up loathing it as much as any book I've ever read.

Within the pages, the author's imagination, ideas, and symbols are used at their best removing the reader from the world of 2001 into a consideration of the earth and stars alone, untouched by any sort of technology. Essentially it is Lok and his small Neanderthal band that are faced with other humans, unlike themselves, for the first time. The 'other' (homo-sapiens) is armed with bows and arrows, sharpened tools made from bone and an ability to cross rivers and lakes by rowing logs. Golding possibly was inspired by the scientific find of a primitive people who could cross the water discovered sometime in the early 1950's. In any event this is a story that readers will find to be absorbing and has the potential to provide an insight into a daily life of a society devoted to survival with only the earth as a guide to how. Wiliam Golding tells a stirring, astonishing story with a writer's technical virtuosity applied as only he can do.