The Inheritors: Introduced by Ben Okri

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 conceptualize their dilemma and the strategies they develop for survival are fascinating. Golding is able to create vivid characters without the use of complex verbalizations from these characters. However the underlying message of this novel is not lost and is a fascinating warning sign to modern man about our own destructive nature.

This book is a deceptively simple story of a Neanderthal family and their first contact with Homo Sapiens.Golding has managed to tell the story through the eyes of Lok, a Neanderthal male who has the ability to feel but not really to think.He "thinks" via pictures which seem to often be shared with other members of the tribe through some form of telepathy or quasi-animalistic instinct, as though Neanderthals had not quite made it as "Man", or at least "Man the Thinker". The superior planning ability of the Homo Sapiens who infiltrate Lok's valley contrasts strongly with Lok's inability to see ahead; to plot and plan, to use tools , to see the significance of what he sees. It is different from probably any other book you have ever read and for this reason alone, is worth a try, apart from the obvious talent of William Golding, author also of Lord of the Flies and Pincher Martin, among others

Hard story to follow. You would think " Illustrated meant drawings of caveman erai scenes to help the story but what you get is Vanity s hots of the author kind of sad? Thanks

The Inheritors by William Golding is a superb novel. The writing shines, with a poetic character that makes every scene a delight. Golding succeeds in entering the mindset of persons who live in prehistoric times, and possess very little speech, nonetheless conveying their thoughts, aims, passions and fears. The reader is drawn into their world and cares very much about what happens to them. When they eventually come into contact with "the other", whom I will not identify more precisely since it would be a spoiler, one is astonished at what Golding has achieved with his choice of focus.The background is still, several decades after first publication, probably reasonably accurate from an archeological angle. The sweep of the novel is similar to Golding's iconic first novel (Lord of the Flies), starting fairly gently and building up to a powerful conclusion. Thematically Golding is, as usual, concerned with moral issues. One is not surprised that this writer went on to win a Nobel Prize for Literature.

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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.

To approach this story as any other is to board a train going the wrong direction. Before reading the first page you have to understand that this tale begins before human intelligence, and that every thought, every sight, sound, smell, taste, and feeling is a simple interpretation by a lower order of being. Just as many have spoken of much of what is written in the Bible as things interpretted by those less technologically advanced as ourselves, Golding endeavors to strip away a million years of evolution and learning and to think like a neanderthal. To enjoy the book the reader must do the same. This is the tale of the extinction of a species and their lack of understanding of what is happening. In that the book is very contemporary. The neanderthals attempt to understand; to put what they see into ideas they can understand, just as we do the same today. Golding bears that philosophical point like a club. However, reading the thoughts of a primitive beast, as interpretted by Golding, isn't so easy as one would think and the story tends to be as hard to follow as a mountain trail. In the end though, I think it's a story worth reading.

Golding includes you in prehistory by example of the development of conciousness perception and communication at the dawn of humanity.