Dictionary Thesaurus Word Dynamo Quotes Reference Translator Spanish

The Inheritors (William Golding)

The Inheritors is the 1955 second novel by the British author William Golding, best known for Lord of the Flies. It was his personal favorite of all his novels and concerns the extinction of the last remaining tribe of Neanderthals at the hands of the more sophisticated (and malevolent) newly-evolved Homo sapiens.

Plot introduction

This novel is an imaginative reconstruction of the life of a band of Neanderthals. It is written in such a way that the reader might assume the group to be modern Homo sapiens as they gesture and speak simply among themselves, and bury their dead with heartfelt, solemn rituals.

The plot centers on one neanderthal, Lok, who rises among his small band to prominence when the elder members are killed by a group of early humans. The humans are portrayed as strange, godlike beings as the neanderthals witness their mastery of fire, neolithic weapons and sailing.

All save the last chapter of the novel are written in a stark, simple style, reflecting the animal-like perspective of the Neanderthal group. Their observations of early human behavior serve as a filter for Golding's exercise in paleoanthropology, in which modern readers will recognize prefigurations of later human spirituality and culture. In the final chapter, after the conclusive showdown between humans and Neanderthals over the young kidnapped neanderthals, the humans ultimately flee the area in their boats, revealing a terrible fear on the part of the humans who believe the neanderthals to be devils of the forest. This last chapter is the only one written from the humans' vantage, and here Golding's style assumes full depth in the humans' ability to describe and comprehend what has happened.

References in other works

The novel inspired the title song of the album A Trick of the Tail by progressive rock band Genesis. Written by keyboardist Tony Banks, the lyrics tell the tale of "a beast that can talk" that lived among many of his kind in a "city of gold"; until he left "in search of another for sharing his life", and came upon a human village - "they've got no horns and they've got no tail" -, whose inhabitants capture the "beast", and decide to display it in a cage.