The Inheritors

This is a unique and fascinating novel and demonstrates Golding’s inventive narrative powers. In this novel, the reader is taken into the lives and minds of very primitive men with few verbal skills but who have learned to live in harmony with the rough and challenging natural world. The story is told from the perspective of a family unit that spends the cold months by the ocean living on shellfish and then moving in the warm months into the mountains to escape the heat. They migrate to find food sources. They eat insects, often protein rich grub worms that they dig out of rotten trees. They worship a goddess they call the ice woman which appears to be a glacier which releases fresh water as the glacier gradually melts in the heat of summer. The melting glacial ice becoming fresh water streams is analogous to a nursing woman in their beliefs. The story is told through the eyes of these people with their very basic linguistic skills and conceptualizations. Their thoughts are not complex and they indicate to each other their “pictures” or visions. They depend much more on sense of smell than do Homo sapiens. They refrain from killing large animals such as deer but will eat deer if it has been killed by a tiger or other large cat. They will frighten away hyenas from a kill to obtain the meat. Golding is able to evoke the world prior to technology when conscious creatures were required to live in absolute harmony with changing seasons, plant life, and food sources. The natural world around them was the only information they had for survival and interpretation. This small band of eight Neanderthals, a family unit, is confronted with invading homo sapiens who have more advanced cognitive skills but who may have other negative traits and characteristics. This is the theme of the book, that homo sapiens can be a cruel and destructive force. We create painful weapons, we create and use alcohol and the negative consequences that follow, we think the natural world is there for our taking and entertainment as exemplified when the homo sapiens capture two Neanderthal children. Lok, the primary Neanderthal character, is amazed and mystified by the technologies of bow and arrow and the use of canoes and paddles for transportation. Lok continues to think the canoes are logs since he has difficulty mentally grasping the technology. But for the most part the Neanderthals are terrorized by the destructive force of the homo sapiens and it is to Golding’s credit that the reader absorbs this sense of terror and horror that the Neanderthal’s experience. I found that I read the novel very fast and realized that the lack of complex dialogue and the dependence on the action of the characters accounted for this feeling that I was speeding through the novel. Golding takes the reader into the primitive mind of Lok and Fa and the way that they conce...

Golding takes us back to one of the earliest clashes between Homo sapiens and another culture, that of Homo neanderthalensis. In doing so, Golding seems to be pointing out that humanity's distrust of, and often violent response to, alien beings and ideas goes back a long, long time. The Neanderthals are the protagonists for most of this story and we see virtually all the action through their minds. They have a different way of thinking about the world in which they live and in communicating about it. They are the innocents who have the misfortune to encounter an encampment of Cro Magnon men. At the very end, Golding switches the point of view to the Cro Magnons and provides us with a different take on events. As a teacher, I've found this to be a terrific novel for teaching about the clash of cultures, fearing what we don't understand, different ways of seeing, thinking about and imagining the world in which we live. Students never fail to enjoy it.

This is an older novel. I didn't like it at all at first: confusing to follow and know the main characters and their relationships to each other. But it is written from the point of view of the Neanderthal-like pre or very early homo sapiens, and I came to feel that even though there has been a lot of discoveries since this novel was written, it is quite a plausible understanding of both their and the early homo-sapiens advantages and disadvantages. By the end, I found it quite moving in the two species' reactions to each other.

The book gave a tale of our ancestors as promised. It, however, was very confusing in some aspects of the inaccuracy. The bookshelf was pretty difficult to interpret and hard to keep up with all the characters. I wouldn’t recommend to anyone who doesn’t read on a very regular basis. Also, many of the characters were unnamed, causing a dissonance with caring about what would come to happen of them.

Great price, excellent condition, fast shipping... all the good stuff. The hand-written "thank you!" note from Rusty along with his personal email (in case I had issues or concerns) was icing on the cake, and it's this little touch that will make me inclined to think of Mockingbird Media in the future. Online shopping has all but destroyed local bookstores & the personal touch I miss, and I'm all about supporting small merchants who haven't lost the sense of importance (despite the size of their purchase) of treating each customer like they're valued & appreciated.