The Inheritors (1955), by William Golding

 The Inheritors is an astonishing novel.  I picked it up from the library shelves on the strength of William Golding's name because Lord of the Flies (see Jennifer's review) is unforgettable and Pincher Martin took my breath away.  But even so, the imaginative power of The Inheritors floored me.  I've never read anything like it.

This is the blurb:

When the spring came the people - what was left of them - moved back by the old paths from the sea. But this year strange things were happening, terrifying things that had never happened before. Inexplicable sounds and smells; new, unimaginable creatures half glimpsed through the leaves. Seen through the eyes of a small tribe of Neanderthals whose world is hanging in the balance, The Inheritors explores the emergence of a new race — ourselves, Homo sapiens — whose growing dominance threatens an entire way of life.

I had thought that this was going to be a kind of First Contact book, and in some ways it is. But what I had not expected was that Golding tells the story through beings so like and yet unlike ourselves, that the narration is like reading not just a language that I only poorly understand but of a being who does not think as we do.  Golding has not just imagined a language which, as John Carey says in the Introduction, incorporates gesture, dance and a kind of telepathy, but also a different way of thinking.  The small, fragile band of Neanderthals think in pictures which they can share; they scent like animals do; but they can't connect thoughts or sequence ideas.  Carey explains it better than I can:

The greatness of The Inheritors does not depend, however, on Golding imagining what Neanderthals might have been like.  It depends on the language he fashions to express it.  He accepts the colossal stylistic challenge of seeing everything from a Neanderthal point of view.  By feats of language that are at first bewildering he takes us inside a being whose senses, especially smell and hearing, are acute, but who cannot connect sensations into a train of thought.  This is a being whose awareness is a stream of metaphors and for whom everything is alive.  Intricate verbal manoeuvres force us to share the adventures — and the pathos and the tragedy — of a consciousness that is fearless, harmless, loving, minutely observant and incapable of understanding anything.  (John Carey, Introduction, p xi)

This, in Chapter One, shows the reaction to a log bridge rotting in the middle and floating away:

The onyx marsh water was spread before them, widening into the river.  The trail along by the river began again on the other side on ground that rose until it was lost in the trees.  Lok, grinning happily, took two paces towards the water and stopped.  The grin faded and his mouth opened till the lower lip hung down. Liku slid to his knee then dropped to the ground.  She put the little Oa's head to her mouth and looked over her.

Lok laughed uncertainly.

"The log has gone away."

He shut his eyes and frowned at the picture of the log.  It had lain in the water from this side to that, grey and rotting.  When you trod the centre you could feel the water that washed beneath you, horrible water, as deep in places as a man's shoulder.  The water was not awake like the river or the fall but asleep, spreading there to the river and waking up, stretching on the right into wildernesses of impassable swamp and thicket and bog.  So sure was he of this log the people always used that he opened his eyes again, beginning to smile as if he were waking out of a dream; but the log was gone. (p.2)

Ha is more thoughtful than Lok, the man for an emergency, but when Fa and Nil share a picture of what Ha is thinking, it was this:

He had thought that he must make sure the log was still in position because if the water had taken the log or if the log had crawled off on business of its own then the people would have to trek a day's journey round the swamp and that meant danger or even more discomfort than usual. (p.4)

Only the elderly shaman Mal has a solution, retrieving a childhood picture from his mind.  It is not like remembering: it is just an image of a 'wise man' who 'makes men take a tree that has fallen.' But he cannot convey this image to the others.  They follow his instructions blindly.

So you can just imagine their bewilderment and admiration when they encounter Homo Sapiens with his paraphernalia of trinkets and tools.  The Neanderthals have not made the evolutionary steps towards inventing containers so they can't carry or store food and water.  They can't make fire, only carry it and protect it when lightning strikes start it.  They have no tools, except a stick to convey food to Mal's mouth when he is so ill he must be fed.  But the new people not only have pots for food and water, and fire to cook with, they also have clothes, and necklaces to confer status, and they can make paintings on the rock walls.  And — unfortunately for the Neanderthals — they also have spears, bows and arrows for hunting.

And as we saw in Golding's merciless depiction of savagery in Lord of the Flies, these new people already have no compunction about taking what they want and killing the innocent...

William Golding won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1983.

Author: William Golding
Title: The Inheritors
Introduction by John Carey
Cover illustration by Neil Gower
Publisher: Faber and Faber, 2011, 223 pages, first published 1955,
ISBN: 9780571273584
Source: Kingston Library

© Lisa Hill

Cross-posted at ANZ LitLovers where you can join in a conversation about the book if you want to.

Pincher Martin (1956), by William Golding

 Pincher Martin is a most disconcerting book.  First published in 1956, it was William Golding's third novel after his wildly successful debut novel Lord of the Flies (1954) and while it likewise depicts the human condition in extremis it is not, as Wikipedia describes it, merely a novel that records the thoughts of a drowning sailor.

To explain why, I need to depart from my usual practice and consider the plot, spoilers and all.  You have been warned...

BEWARE SPOILERS

I read the first few pages both enthralled and appalled: the third person narration describes the desperate struggle of a sailor fighting for his life in the cold waters of the Atlantic.  The blurb had told me that he was the sole survivor of a torpedoed destroyer and I could hardly bear to read his frantic efforts to breathe:

He was struggling in every direction, he was the centre of the writhing and kicking knot of his own body.  There was no up or down, no light and no air. He felt his mouth open of itself and the shrieked word burst out.

"Help!"

When the air had gone with the shriek, water came in to fill its place - burning water, hard in the throat and mouth as stones that hurt.  He hutched his body towards the place where air had been but now it was gone and there was nothing but black, choking welter. His body let loose its panic and his mouth strained open till the hinges of his jaw hurt.  Water thrust in, down, without mercy.  Air came with it for a moment so that he fought in what might have been the right direction.  But water reclaimed him and spun so that knowledge of where might be was erased completely. (p.1)

Even knowing from the blurb that he ends up stranded on a rock in the middle of the Atlantic didn't alleviate the power of this prose to make me think the sailor was going to drown.  (It reminded me of Richard Flanagan's Death of a River Guide where Aljaz Cosino is a river guide, trapped in The Cauldron on the Franklin River as the water rises). Christopher 'Pincher' Martin's struggle to clamber onto the rock is epic, as you can see that it would have been, if you Google the 1943 RAF photo of the rock with waves breaking over it.  (Golding himself might have seen this rock during his war service in the Royal Navy; it would be an unforgettable sight even from a distance, as I'm sure most prudent navigators would have ensured it was).  I am indebted to a reader at Goodreads for the discovery that this rock is thought to be Rockall, and to Wikipedia for its exact location between Ireland and Iceland, which makes it clear just how icy the waters would have been.

Not knowing at the time of reading just how small this rock actually is, I breathed a sigh of relief that Martin wasn't bashed to death against it.

But his troubles are just beginning.  He is badly injured from being hurled against the rock by the waves, and he is exhausted.  His clothes of course are soaked, and he is freezing.  He has to climb from where the waves have deposited him to higher ground and his hands are too cold to feel his way with handholds in the rock.  He has nothing in the way of resources, just a knife, his lifebelt and his oilskin.  He has to find some source of food and water, find something in the way of shelter, and deal with the threat of his own madness brought on by his total isolation.

And all this is utterly convincing.  Even as Martin's mind deteriorates under the stress and loneliness of his situation, Golding makes it completely real, and what's more, he sets up the reader who has to juggle empathy for Martin's ghastly predicament with the revelations through his fractured memories that he is actually a truly horrible person, guilty of dreadful crimes and utterly unrepentant even now that he fears for his life.

And then...

SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER

And then there is the final chapter which tells us that Martin's body is being recovered to take back to the mainland.  The text makes it clear that Martin drowned as soon as he hit the water and that there was never any hope of his survival.

Mr Campbell took his eyes away from the stretcher.

"They are wicked things, those lifebelts. They give a man hope when there is no longer any call for it. They are cruel." (p. 222)

The reader is utterly baffled by this turn of events...

Philippa Gregory in the Afterword puts it like this:

This is an afterword, rather than a foreword, because any study of this extraordinary novel has to consider the ending: the most important section in the novel.  Read at their simplest, the final pages are a 'twist in the tail' like the playful reverse of a traditional short story, but these pages are far more than this: they are a shocking revelation to the reader that the whole novel has been an illusion of the narrator Pincher Martin.  In place of illusion we suddenly see a snapshot of the real world, and a suggestion of what has really taken place.

The 'twist' is the total inversion of the story.  We readers thought that we were reading a story about survival, in which the survival of the material world, of the mind and body of a profoundly materialistic man whose very nickname, 'Pincher' implies grabbing, is the drama and chief concern.  It seems to be a novel rather like one of the earliest novels ever written: Robinson Crusoe - a novel about marooning and survival.  Shockingly, in the last pages we learn in a few brutal phrases that the story was not, as we thought, about life, but was all along about dying a death so fast that the narrator did not even have time to kick off his seaboots and swim, but was dragged down to drown, and the story which we have followed was nothing more than his last anguished thoughts, as drowning men are said to have. (p.225)

 Like Philippa Gregory, who freely confesses that it is a very puzzling novel, I found aspects of the story very confusing indeed, even as I found it utterly compelling in its vivid depictions of Martin's delusions. Like her, I found one reading inadequate, and like her, I found two were not enough.  I'd love to hear from other readers who have tackled its mysteries.

William Golding was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1983.

Author: William Golding
Title: Pincher Martin
Publisher: Faber & Faber, Faber Modern Classics edition, 2015, first published in 1956.
ISBN: 9780571322749
Review copy courtesy of Faber & Faber via Allen & Unwin Australia

© Lisa Hill

Cross-posted at ANZ LitLovers where you can join in a conversation about the book if you want to.

Lord of the Flies by William Golding

1954

Reviewed by Marianne
from Let's Read

A very disturbing dystopian novel, probably because it concerns children and makes us human beings look even less human than some of the other ones I read. (See my list of dystopian novels here.)

What makes people behave in an inhumane way? In this case, children are left to their own device after a plane crash. We can tell from the beginning that there are two different kinds, some that see the final goal, they want to be saved and work for that, others that just want to have instant gratification, i.e. food and are willing to fight for that.

I can see why this novel has become so successful, it is not just the story being told but all the underlying hidden meanings, as well. There are signs everywhere. They boy with the glasses (Piggy), for instance, represents the first group, the more rational thinking.

As in most other dystopian novels, we can see the background of the novel easily. 1954, World War II had been over for almost a decade. Did people go back to being human and treat each other accordingly? I don't think William Golding saw it that way. On the contrary, he feared that there might be a repetition of the hell everyone had just been through, he had fought in the Navy himself so certainly had a lot of bad memories. He had seen that people were not born to be peaceful, that civilization was just a thin line that you could fall off any minute.

This is the main reason I love dystopian novels, it's another way of dealing with history and trying to avoid its repetition. It's another hope that there might be a peaceful time one day.

Great book, should be on everyone's reading list.

From the back cover:

"A plane crashes on an uninhabited island and the only survivors, a group of schoolboys, assemble on the beach and wait to be rescued. By day they inhabit a land of bright fantastic birds and dark blue seas, but at night their dreams are haunted by the image of a terrifying beast.

In this, his first novel, William Golding gave the traditional adventure story an ironic, devastating twist. The boys' delicate sense of order fades, and their childish fears are transformed into something deeper and more primitive. Their games take on a horrible significance, and before long the well-behaved party of schoolboys has turned into a tribe of faceless, murderous savages."

William Golding received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1983 "for his novels which, with the perspicuity of realistic narrative art and the diversity and universality of myth, illuminate the human condition in the world of today"."

Read my other reviews of the Nobel Prize winners for Literature.

Original Post on "Let's Read"

Darkness Visible by William Golding

Originally reviewed by Edith LaGraziana

on Edith's Miscellany

Fairy tales like The Beauty and the Beast should have prepared us for the fact that in life appearance often deceives. And yet, we all tend to neglect this ancient wisdom judging the world and especially people by what we see or otherwise perceive instead of taking a good look under the surface. Thus we can be deeply shocked at recognising that something beautiful is fundamentally evil and stunned at finding good in the ugly. Unfortunately, it isn’t always so easy to distinguish the one from the other because there are many shades between the light of Heaven and the dark of Hell. The hell of Darkness Visible by William Golding is a very human one. Starting in the inferno of World War II the novel tells the story of disfigured Matty with a mystical vocation in life and the beautiful twins Sophy and Toni who turn to crime or terrorism respectively.

Lord of the Flies by William Golding

Some were naked and carrying their clothes; others half-naked, or more or less dressed, in school uniforms, grey, blue, fawn, jacketed, or jerseyed. There were badges, mottoes even, stripes of color in stockings and pullovers. Their heads clustered above the trunks in the green shade; heads brown, fair, black, chestnut, sandy, mouse-colored, heads muttering, whispering, heads full of eyes that watched Ralph and speculated. Something was being done. – from Lord of the Flies, page 13 -

A plane crashes on a deserted island, leaving in its wake children – the only survivors. These children are British school boys, civilized kids with manners and well-versed in respect for authority. There are very small children – the “littluns” who don’t seem to understand the enormity of what has happened. And there are older kids, boys who quickly recognize the need for a leader, a chief of sorts. A new society is forming, and before long survival demands a return to one’s baser instincts.

Lord of the Flies is a classic. Penned in 1954 by Nobel Laureate William Golding, it is a novel which asks deep moral questions and examines what happens when the civilized world is stripped away and individuals are left to create their own society.

Two main characters emerge early on. Ralph is a sandy-haired boy who is quickly chosen to be the “chief” and who focuses on building shelter and maintaining a fire to attract rescue. He holds “assemblies,” where participants are called to participate with a blow from a conch and are designed to maintain order. Jack is a charismatic boy, the leader of a choir of boys, who quickly establishes himself as the hunter, tracking down the wild pigs on the island with a sharpened stick as a spear. Before long, Jack and Ralph are in a competition for leadership with Ralph being the voice of reason, and Jack appealing to the more savage aspects of the boys’ personalities.

Another character, Piggy, emerges as the philosopher and the scapegoat. Piggy is obese, bespectacled, afflicted with asthma, and a bit of a know-it-all. Despite his wisdom (or maybe because of it), he is bullied.

There had grown up tacitly among the biguns the opinion that Piggy was an outsider, not only by accent, which did not matter, but by fat, and ass-mar, and specs, and a certain disinclination for manual labor. – from Lord of the Flies, page 60 -

There is also a fourth character, Simon, who plays an important role in the novel. Simon is a loner, but he is also reasonable and practical and gifted with an insight which the others lack. When talk of a beast begins, it is Simon who refuses to acknowledge a physical beast and instead recognizes that the beast is the fear within them.

These four characters – Jack, Ralph, Simon and Piggy – take center stage in a novel about the disintegration of morals and the descent into savagery.

I first read this novel in high school…and my memory of it is inexact. Of course, I remembered Piggy for his victimization, but in terms of theme, my memory was lacking. During this re-read, the story returned to me and I found it so much more compelling from my adult point of view. Classic literature is defined as something which stands the test of time…and there is no doubt that The Lord of the Flies meets that definition with its memorable characters, shocking twists of plot and ruminations on what it means to be human. Written in the 1950s, it could easily have been penned today.

Lord of the Flies is a novel which will generate great discussion in book groups and in the classroom. It is not an “enjoyable” read, and yet it is an engaging one. There is a good deal of violence in this slim book and I found myself anxious as the plot unfurls and it becomes obvious that things are going very, very wrong.
This is a classic, dysptopian-type novel about good vs. evil, but it also forces the reader to look within and to examine his or her role as part of a larger society.

Highly recommended.

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Rites of Passage by William Golding

Rites of Passage is Book One of a trilogy that was made into a BBC serial called To The Ends of The Earth, and it won the Booker in 1980. It's a comi-tragic sea journey and a coming-of-age tale about Mr William Talbot, a young aristocrat on his way to Australia to take up a government position procured for him by his wealthy godfather.

En route, this rather naive, pompous and yet good-hearted young man learns a lot about the world and himself. As in Lord of the Flies, an isolated community tests the boudnaries of civilised behaviour, and is found wanting. Mr Colley, an irritating and fawning parson is victimised and humiliated, subjected to barbaric rituals in the crossing-the-line ceremony, and then worse. When he wills himself to die of shame, Talbot is called on to help by Lieutenant Summers, a man who has worked his way up from the ranks - but in this decisive moment risks his career by demanding of Talbot (his superior in British class-ridden society) that he take some responsibility for what has happened.

All efforts fail, and Talbot finds himself compromised by Captain Anderson's 'enquiry'. Having boasted about his journal of events, Talbor has made Anderson aware of the need to cover up his own aggressive behaviour towards Colley - because it was that which made others on board feel that they could bully him with impunity. The enquiry is a whitewash and Talbot is left with no recourse but to lie to Colley's family about the truth.

The TV series went on with other events including the near loss of the ship in the Antarctic, boarding by another ship, a romance for Talbot and the death of the athiest Pettigrew. I'd like to read the sequels on which these are based if they're as good as this one was, deftly written in a C19th seafaring style and showing Talbot's painful self-growth towards maturity.
I finished reading and journalled this book on 23.2.2008.

Lisa Hill, ANZ LitLovers
Cross posted at The Complete Booker.