The Inheritors

Golding tells almost the entire novel through Lok's consciousness, a Neanderthal who lacks metaphor, deceit, and causal reasoning as tools of thought, so that the reader experiences the arriving Homo sapiens exactly as Lok does, as bewildering, half-glimpsed threats performing incomprehensible magic, a stick that stings from a distance, a drink that steals a man's legs from under him. Golding wrote the novel partly as a direct rebuttal to the assumption, one his own Lord of the Flies had been read as confirming, that humanity's rise represented reason triumphing over animal savagery; here the more rational, more articulate newcomers are also the more violent and more self-deceiving species, and Lok's limited understanding is the only honest vantage point available.

Lok and his mate Fa register the band's dwindling, first Mal the elder succumbs to cold and age, then others vanish or are killed, with a grief and attentiveness to each other that Golding renders as more emotionally intelligent than anything the technologically superior humans display toward one another. When the children Liku and the infant called the new one are taken by the human band, Lok and Fa's uncomprehending pursuit becomes the novel's most wrenching stretch, proof that extinction doesn't require the exterminating species to possess more feeling, only more effective tools for acting on less of it.

The Neanderthal band's spiritual life centers on Oa, an earth-mother figure they invoke instinctively rather than through anything like organized ritual, and on the red deer stag whose antlers and hide Lok associates with vitality and protection throughout the novel. Golding gives this belief system real coherence and comfort within the band's world even though he never explains it to the reader the way a conventional fantasy anthropology might, keeping the Neanderthals' inner life legible through feeling rather than through the kind of systematic doctrine only the literate, tool-building newcomers could construct.

Golding said directly that The Inheritors was written against the too-comfortable moral of Lord of the Flies, which many readers had taken simply as boys reverting to savagery once civilization's rules were removed, implying that savagery was the aberration and civilized restraint the norm. By making the toolmaking, fire-controlling, alcohol-brewing newcomers the actual savages of this second novel, murderous, terrified of what they don't understand, and already inventing religion to excuse their own violence, Golding pushed back against any reading of his first book that let modern humanity off easy.