The Inheritors by William Golding

Welcome to Backlisted. This is the first of a series of reruns of our back catalogue and the book that we are rerunning today is William Golding's The Inheritors and the show is now six years old. It was from June 2020. What do you remember about this one? What do you remember about it? I remember it being one of the better ones. there's the hard sell for anyone who's tuned in now thanks nikki thanks thanks for that that positive endorsement what i remember andy is this book was on that little list that we made in le pulo po in 2000 and maybe even 2014 or early in 2015 the very original list of books that we thought would be fun to talk about you said yeah william golding everybody wants to talk about lord of the flies who wants to talk about the inheritors and i said the inheritors is my favorite william golding novel is that what is that literally what i said yeah i thought in fact that was almost maybe a little bit maybe that was almost your impersonation of me wasn't it hey it's really not my impersonation of you i don't impersonate you andy i do impersonate a lot of people as you know It's hard to hang on to. As my dad used to say, my dear departed dad, he said, I don't know. I can't tell either of you apart. I don't know when you're speaking. I said, why does that matter, Dad? Well, I want to know what you're saying. I said, yeah, well, you know, anyway. Actually, John, I hate to break it to you, but your dad liked me more. Almost. That, Andy, goes without saying. Well, we're off topic. This is a rerun, isn't it? Yes, this is a rerun. And one of the reasons we're putting this episode out again now is there is an adaptation on the BBC, on the iPlayer and possibly coming to Britbook soon as well, of Lord of the Flies. And I found that very interesting, John, because as you've just told people, one of the founding principles of Backlisted, when we do an author people have heard of, we much prefer not to do a book that they've also heard of. In other words, if one were to do George Orwell, it wouldn't necessarily be terribly interesting to do 1984, but it might be more interesting to do, say, keep the Aspidix or a flying. And in the case of William Golding, that is an author with a significant back catalogue of important work. But the only novel that ever really seems to get talked about or dramatised is Lord of the Flies. And here we are 10 years later. Here's a dramatization of Lord of the Flies. John, what I remember about this particular show is I would advise people, don't give it away, anybody. I would advise people to listen to the very, very end of this show. Because John provided a bit of a bit of grams, a bit of audio, which made everyone howl with laughter when it played through on the actual show. I don't think either of you can remember it. No, I can't remember it. What I do remember is it was in that strange summer of 2020 that recorded it. I remember really enjoying the discussion because we had, let's be honest, our two most loyal, interesting friends of the show, who now can't go on to be a presenter of the show as well, Una McCormack and Andrew Mayle. and I think everybody all I felt all four of us were in the room really wanting to talk it's a really great book I I can't even remember whether what I need whether I said this on the podcast I'm not I don't like Lord of the Flies as a novel I've never really liked it never really got on with it and I but I've always thought The Inheritance was it's you know I read it again quite young and it It really stuck with me. And I think everybody had had a similar experience. Yeah. Like John, I, too, prefer William Golding's early B-sides. Unsurprisingly, then. Of which The Inheritors is arguably one. And you're right, John, we were probably learning how to make these shows down the line then, weren't we? That was six years ago. Crikey. So this is our first of what will be a series of reruns. and we will have little introductions like this. Loose. Loose introductions like this. But we're also worth just telling you about some stuff we're doing with our patrons coming up. If you are interested in some of these shows, head to our Patreon at patreon.com forward slash backlisted because we've got in a couple of weeks we are doing a special show. Very exciting. Where we are going over the first of our backlisted booker shows where we are taking one of the Booker Prize winner. In fact, which Booker Prize winner are we starting with, Andy? On March the 16th, if you sign up at our Patreon, you can join a discussion of the very first winner of the Booker Prize for Fiction, P.H. Newbies, Something to Answer For, which won the prize for 1969. I haven't started reading it yet. I am going on holiday very shortly and I'm taking it with me. Everything I understand is it's an awful holiday read. So we'll find out, won't we? Are you going to Egypt by any chance? Because that would be really helpful because it's set in Egypt. Sadly, no, I shan't be able to take a snap of it in front of a pyramid here. On March 16th, it's actually a live show. So live from your home and you can kind of comment and join in. And then the show will be available also to our patrons as well. So, yeah, if you're interested in that. Nikki is neglecting to mention the most exciting element of this whole project. Posh Bingo, as our book show is going to be called. Thank you, Julian Barnes. At the end of every episode of Posh Bingo, I will produce a big, like Santa's sack. So excited. So excited. Of titles of every single winner of the Booker Prize. And so, like a FIFA draw or something, but not as corrupt, I am just going to pluck out of the bag at random the title of any Booker winner of the last 60 years nearly. And that will be the book we read next time. And we will not fix it. And we will not muck about. And we will, if Hotel Dulac comes out, all well and good. But if on the other hand, I don't know, The Bone People appears, we'll all be reading The Bone People together. So I'm really, really looking forward to the whole thing. It's going to be fun. And there's one of these a month. Of course, once we get into this, it's going to get more and more exciting the last four people you know you've got a one in four chance of we're figuring out what the you know what's we've done 50 55 of i think it's 57 book of winners all together although there'll be another one this year coming along soon um so that's very exciting and then we'll go on to international then we'll go on to women's prize for fiction oh now you know what that's actually come on that's a good idea nikki so we're copywriting that now live in the room very excited about the way this this is kind of it's not it's fun to do new stuff and as as i said it is posh bingo so there's another thing that patrons get um if they subscribe at the lot list 11 they get andy's amazing inventory which is his honorable unreliable guide to his record collection which has been running for some months and it's what we're still are we still in c andy andy i think we are aren't we he's going through his record collection alphabetically that's what we just not every record it's it's important to say but beautifully curated and and brilliantly written essays last week i wrote about julie covington did i loved that for this week for contrast i've been writing about the cramps never seen together in the same room apart from on my record shelves of course so in addition to inventory which i write john has begun to contribute an excellent column of his own called Cannon Fodder in which he takes a book from his life and intersects it with the lives of others who he may or may not have met. Do you think that's a good description? I think that's brilliant. The book I've written about this week is The Black Prince by Iris Murdoch which I think is uh it's certainly my favorite of all her 26 novels and it was very much written uh with uh that all that shakespearean reading kind of a front of mind it's really really really great book yeah so yeah you can get this inventory both in uh written form but you can also get inventory and cannon fodder being read by andy and john so lots of extra audio content on our patreon patreon.com forward slash backlisted right um so that's all coming up on our patreon for the time being please travel back in time with us to the summer of 2020 for a discussion of william golding's the inheritors I watched the whole of She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, which I can strongly recommend. Amazing. Was that for work? No. That was just for pleasure. Where do you find such deep content? I find it on Netflix Children's. Oh, wow. That's great. But I'm not going to tell you the treasures on Disney Plus are just unbelievably great. Absolutely amazing stuff. On Disney Plus, are you a Mandalorian fan? Oh, God, yes. Yeah. It's marvellous, isn't it? Absolutely incredible. The greatest Herzog performance ever, I think. It's amazing. It's just proper good. Much better than it has any right to be. Proper good music as well. I wonder, John, if you could give us some clue as to how it sounds. Well, he's just playing a baddie, you know. he's actually playing a character in the thing I think he's a some kind of uh gangster some kind of um yeah it's just it's just Werner it's clearly Werner it doesn't make makes no attempt to be anything other than Werner Herzog really but uh it's proper brilliant it's proper good it's joyous yeah how did you feel about the big reveal when you saw what he looked like did that feel did you get to that point in the series I haven't seen all of it no because the Mandalorian he never takes his mask off and then he does and you're like oh oh that's not right just some guy it's just some bloke that's that that's we're now calling them because of my inability to type we're now calling those things spoliers in our house listeners that won't be the last time you hear about star wars in this podcast um una where are you uh i'm in cambridge uh which is a city in the east of England, I believe, because I haven't seen anything of it in about two months. I haven't been beyond my garden in two months. It's a lovely garden. But beyond it is Cambridge, which I currently know only through Pokemon Go stops. Andrew, where are you? I'm in South Norwood in South London. I'm in my bedroom. You're in one of the literary hubs, aren't you there? Yeah, absolutely. where Raymond Chandler lived and D.H. Lawrence lived and Arthur Conan Doyle is about four houses away from this house as well, the house that Arthur Conan Doyle was born in as well, it's a bit of a dump it might not have been while he was sorry, I hope no, the person who lives in Arthur Conan Doyle's house isn't listening so it's fine, it's an absolutely fine house, yeah what a thought if they all lived in the same road at the same time Stella Street or Bloomsbury, yeah yes hello and welcome to backlisted the podcast that gives new life to old books today you find us in a forest skeins of light dapple our skin and the sound of the silver river fills our heads we're driven by hunger and see pictures of fat grubs crawling from logs and green bowls pushing through the dark soil but on the wind there is a new smell and an unfamiliar sound i'm john mitchinson publisher of unbound the platform where readers crowdfund the books they really want to read and i'm andy miller author of the year of reading dangerously and joining us today are multiple returnees good eggs and official friends of backlisted dr una mcormack and mr andrew mail welcome back guys thank you thank you thank you marvelous dr una mcormack is a new york times and usa today best-selling writer of science fiction Her most recent novel, The Last Best Hope, is a spin-off from the TV series Star Trek Picard. She is particularly interested in women's science fiction, and this is her fifth appearance on Backlisted. Her previous episodes were number 30, Venetia by Georgette Heyer. Number 49, Look at Me by Anita Bruckner. Number 71, The Return of the King by J.R.R. Tolkien. and number 98 Ridley Walker by Russell Hoban and so Dr McCawback you joined us to discuss the author of Lord of the Rings you're here today to discuss the author of Lord of the Flies and so when we do an episode about the work of Michael Flatley you'll be the first person we call well I did Irish dancing as a little girl So you better had to call me, I think. I think that would be the most amazing episode of Backlisted we ever did. The Riverdance episode. Yeah. Interpretive dance for radio. Yeah. Also joining us today is Andrew Mayle. Andrew is the senior associate editor of Mojo magazine and writes on TV, books and film for The Guardian, Sight and Sound and The Sunday Times. This is Andrew's sixth appearance on Backlisted, which we think is a record. Is that a record? I think it is a record. He joined us for episode 10, The High Window by Raymond Chandler. Episode 24, Cold Hand in Mind by Robert Aikman. Episode 52, We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson. Episode 78, Ghosts by Edith Wharton. And episode 104, The Breaking Point by Daphne du Maurier. These last four being Halloween specials. And he'll be back, back, back later in the year for another Halloween special. And in fact, we think Dr. McCormack, too, will be back later in the year to discuss an author. We can't reveal who that is yet, but you and I have discussed it. Don't look like you don't know what I'm talking about. The penny has dropped. I've remembered. Yeah, I've activated those brain cells. Yeah. And as is traditional on Andrew's appearances, if you've been listening to this podcast for several years, you'll know we always try to remember to ask him this. Andrew, we're here to talk about The Inheritors by William Golding. if the inheritors were a gene kelly film which gene kelly film would it be brigadoon of course brigadoon it would be brigadoon i thought okay right okay what we'll do is we'll come we'll come back to that to your answer later on yes because i know you're worried that if we discuss brigadoon too early it might give away the ending of the inheritors I thought you were going to say Gene Kelly's film Inherit the Wind. Ooh. Because it's about a debate in a courtroom about whether man is or isn't descended from apes. I thought that was too obvious. Yeah. I thought you'd have been disappointed with that choice. I think Brigadoon is much, much better. Yeah, it's a brilliant choice. Yeah, we're here to talk about, as Andy said, The Inheritors by William Golding, his second published novel after Lord of the Flies first released by Faber and Faber in 1955 and it's one of the titles on the list that Andy and I made when we had our very first backlisted meeting and we were talking about books that we might like to feature I know exactly what we said John we said I can remember saying to you like if we did William Golding we could do any of his books except Lord of the Flies that was and then we said but if we did it wouldn't it be amazing if we did the inheritance so here we are and here we are later five years later anyway before we slip into the dappled pre-lapsarian woodland uh of that novel uh andy what have you been reading this week i've been reading a book called square haunting by francesca wade uh which was published by favor at the start of this year um subtitle five women freedom and london between the wars. Francesca Wade has set this book, non-fiction, in Mecklenburg Square in London, on the fringe of Bloomsbury, physically and arguably symbolically. Mecklenburg Square was a place with a sort of a base of academics, feminist activists, artists, bohemians, and among those were five women, the five women that she focuses on in this book. And they were H.D., the modernist poet, Dorothy L. Sayers, detective novelist, translator of Dante and much more besides, Jane Ellen Harrison, classicist and translator, Eileen Power, historian, broadcaster and pacifist, and last, but by no means least, some woman called Virginia Woolf. and there is no one scene in the book where all five of those women meet but at various points they either come close to sharing a flat meet somewhere pass in the street and what the book is really about i think is women in that era forging their way to find a space where they could work and live independently so to make the obvious comparison where they could find rooms of their own from which they could go out and thrive as people so it's a group biography it's clearly a literary biography if you are interested in HD or Dorothy L Sayers or Virginia Wolf or Hope Murleys. There's a woman called Hope Murleys who, Una, I assume you know a bit about Hope Murleys or a lot about Hope Murleys, partly because of her reputation as a fantasy novelist. Yeah, I think the novel of hers that stayed in print was Lud in the Mist, which is a very joyful and a bit like Rossetti's Goblin Market, actually. That stayed in print. It was sort of very well known amongst science fiction and fantasy readers. And then at the same time, she's kind of being rediscovered as a modernist poet particularly that her 1919 poem Paris which has just been reissued hasn't it by um by Faber yeah yeah I've just read it I've just read it one of the things I wanted to say about Square Haunting is apart from the fact that it's extremely enjoyable well-written informative um thoughtful book in its own right like several other books I've talked about in the last few episodes of that listed like Romantic Moderns like John Piper's Bright and Aquatint. It's also a book that gives you loads of other things that you that you want to read. I mean, I jotted down half a dozen things immediately. I finished that. I thought I really want to try and catch up with that. So Lud in the Mist, which was reissued about 18 months, two years ago, 18 months ago. I think it's it's pretty much stays in print. I think Golanks have got it, haven't they? In their fantasy range. But this edition of Paris is and if you haven read Paris it just it amazing No it amazing I was just going to say absolutely incredible just been republished by Faber so that widely available in print with a full commentary built into it as well It hard to think that T Eliot hadn read it when he wrote The Wasteland And it describes a walk by a flaneurs across Paris at a specific historical social moment. I found that really exciting to read. And I also read Between the Acts, which I talk about on the last lot list that we recorded by Virginia Woolf. So I'm not going to read anything from Square Haunting because I don't think I nearly need to. I think, you know, this has come praised by Sarah Bakewell and Edmund Gordon and Sally Rooney and all sorts of people. It's just come out in the States. And it's one of those lovely books that kind of transcends genres, really. it kind of manages to do that thing about being deep and chatty that's a good trick if you can pull it off and that's what Francesca Wade has done here. John what have you been reading this week? So the book I'm going to talk about hasn't been published yet it's called Staying Human and it's the fourth in a series of now pretty legendary anthologies produced by the independent uk independent poetry publisher blood axe uh started in 2002 with a volume called staying alive which went on to sell i mean more than any other anthology of that year probably of any year it's over 140 000 copies i think in the uk alone and there have been two subsequent volumes uh being human being alive and now this volume staying human but that's like a lot of independent publishers have suffered badly as a result of Covid and this book is scheduled to be published on October the 1st National Poetry Day so not only will you get the most brilliant collection of poetry these are wonderful wonderful wonderful anthologies from poets taken from all over the world 500 poems from all over the world addressing the world as it stands at the moment So they're inspiring. They are political. They are there are love poems. There's every really the whole of human emotion is is covered by them. There are even some poems and I'm going to read one in a moment that get right up to date and talk about life under lockdown post covid life. yeah long before i think people were talking about poetry for as a sort of pharmacy uh these books were the books that people gave one another as gifts for comfort and solace but also for inspiration they're so international so rich i discovered more poets i think through these anthologies than any other because neil ashley the editor the founder of blood acts is such a careful and sensitive editor so some of the poets that that you you'll find have been have been featured on on backlisted before Fiona Benson, Jay Bernard, Raymond Antrobus but also if you're if you you know want to answer that question what is it I can do how can I how can I read more writers of colour how can I read more interesting black writers there's an amazing collection here from UK writers like Roger Robinson and Kwame Dawes and Jackie Kay and Malika Booker and Zvita Benson, two amazing American writers, famous ones like Audre Lorde and Claudia Rankin, Wanda Coleman, but also new generation, Danes Smith, Jericho Brown, Joshua Bennett, Terence Hayes. It's a really, really rich, rich thing. So I'm going to read one poem from the book by the British poet, Pakistani-born British poet, Imtiaz Dhaka, who happens to be published by Bloodaxe and famously was one of those poets who was considered for the laureateship she didn't take it but she continues to produce I think really beautiful and important work and this is called Cranes Lean In and it was written on 22nd of March 2020 the Barbican London that I think you remember is the day before full lockdown so Cranes Lean In Cranes Lean In waiting for an all clear that will not come Forehead pressed to glass, phone at my ear, I learn to sail on your voice over a sadness of building sites. Past King's Cross, St Pancras, to the place where you are. You say nothing is too far. Mothers will find their daughters, strangers will be neighbours, even saviours will have names. You are all flame in a red dress. petals brush my face you say at last that cherry blossom has arrived as if that is what we were really waiting for thanks there you go uh staying alive edited by neil astley published by bloodax out on the 1st of October. I think we should now, as Andrew and Una have been good enough to answer the blast on the backlisted conch shell and arrived here to be ritually killed by us later. No, to discuss The Inheritors by William Golding but I'd like to ask them both first The Inheritors was William Golding's second novel published in 1955 only a year after more or less after the publication of Lord of the Flies written first draft written in less than a month finished in four months and the same four months in which Golding also wrote Pinscher Martin. Dr. McCormack, even by your standards, that's prolific. That's sickening, actually. It's absolutely sickening. I mean, I can write a book in four months, but I can't write the inherited. Can you remember when you... Well, it's almost an impossible question. Yeah. because it's so ingrained in all our lives and in the culture we've grown up in. But can you remember when you first might have read Golding or Lord of the Flies? Well, the only Golding I had read before reading for this was Lord of the Flies. And, oh, I guess along with everyone else, I must have been, it must have been a book that was set at school or a book that was being passed around school or a book that you felt you had to tick off in some way. But that was all that I had read. And my perception of Golding was, oh, no, I had read The Pyramid. I'd read The Pyramid for a reading group. I bounced off it slightly. But my perception was sort of C books. I think I sort of had it, you know, a kind of hierarchy with Horatio Hornblower or Master and Commander Patrick O'Brien, something like that, but a bit more pitch literary. And then when I opened this, I kind of went, oh, okay. Hand me the rest of them immediately. I'll read those. So and I think the reason I did was because I opened them within three pages. I went, oh, he's a science fiction writer. OK. All right. So I'm all right. I know where I am now. We're going to we're going to explore. But did you not feel that when you opened Lord of the Flies? Well, I was a much younger reader, for one thing. So I was probably about 14 or 15 or 16. So I wouldn't have been reading it as intelligently, I think, and possibly an obligation to read. and you never like books that are set for you, do you? But no, I hadn't sort of twigged it. Because whenever you get asked, oh, is a science fiction writer ever won the Nobel? And you go, well, Doris Letting. And then, okay, all right, Golding as well. I just hadn't realised. Really interesting response. I want to come back to this. But Andrew, let me ask you, can you remember when you might first have read anything by William Golding? Absolutely. It was for my O-level. So I remember reading numerous mock O-level questions about Lord of the Flies. And I did my English, one of my English literature questions was on Lord of the Flies. And the weird thing about that is, because it's kind of related to how the Inheritance is similar but different to Lord of the Flies. One of the questions that always came up in the mock O-level and all the O-level papers was how would you describe the island in Lord of the Flies in terms of its geography? And the reason why I think that's important was two reasons, really. One, it was the question I always avoided because I was terrible at geography and scared of that question. But the point is, it's basically saying how brilliant Golding maps the island and it gives you a sense of space so you know where you are at every point in the book. And I think when we move on to what's different about the Inheritors and maybe why the Inheritors is not so much of an easy in, I think that's an important point. It's about his ability to manage space and geography and what he holds back in the Inheritors in terms of what he gives you in Lord of the Flies. And you told me a thing about which I wonder if you would pass on to the listeners about when you read The Inheritors, you had a kind of like a double take with it, didn't you? It's an important thing to do with the perspective shift at the end of The Inheritors. And we've already had a perspective shift at the end of Lord of the Flies when you move from the children's world to the naval officer arriving and how the naval officer suddenly sees the children. and you realize it's a completely different world. But you mentioned to me something about the ending. So I was prepared for there to be an ending. I was waiting for this change at the ending. And I read it and I go, oh, it's exactly like the ending of Lord of the Flies. There's a perspective shift. You move from one world into another world. And I thought, it's a nice trick, but that's all it is. And I finished the book about half 11 at night. I just, you know, plowed through those final pages. And so I went to sleep. Then I woke up and it was literally like that. You know, the gif of the guy's mind exploding. It was literally it was literally like that. I suddenly that perspective shift picked up meaning and it had ripples and it grew and it grew. And I was just thinking, how the hell did he do that? That is astonishing. And I couldn't think about anything else. other than the numerous different levels upon the way that ending works. Before I go to John, Nikki, I think I'm right in saying, aren't I, that you've owned a copy of The Inheritance for many years. Yes, it's been with me for some time. It's been on my shelf since I was 20. Only I hadn't actually... Ten years. Only ten years ago, yeah. Thanks, Andrew. no yeah but I didn't the problem is I thought that meant I'd read it but um it turned out that I hadn't read it I just had it with me from house to house to house for 25 years and has the experience of reading it changed how you feel about it as opposed to it just being on the shelf yes I'm quite proud of the fact that I've read it now I'm going to look at it and think I've read that little baby that little spine i've actually i know what it's about there's actually got a sticker inside with my mom's name on it which is how i can date it because she hasn't lived in that house for a very long time and now i'm going to cross out that sticker now it's finally you finally own it you've you've inherited it properly and um let's see what you did there john okay but i'm coming to you because when did you first read the inheritors so i first read the inheritors i guess i would have been 17 and it um it'd be fair to say that at the time it blew me away um because it was i was fascinated as a kid always been fascinated as a kid i got a ladybird book stone age man in britain and i used to spend my weekends loved going looking for arrowheads and i think very early on i got this idea that there was a strange tension between homo sapiens and neanderthal I became quite interested in the Neanderthal. Like everybody else, I had to read Lord of the Flies at school. We all remember it. But I picked up that he'd written a novel about Neanderthals. So I read the book. And as I say, I can't say I understood all of it. I can't say it didn't take me quite some time. But the language and the story is one of my holy books. It's a bit like we might probably talk about Ridley Walker later. It was one of those books that I feel somehow was written out of something already inside me. And the reason that it became even more famous for me is I fairly obviously, when you read this book, you think, what happened? Why did they die out? And what happened? And I am afraid in one biology lesson, I was being told that by my biology teacher, there was no evidence that there had been interbreeding. and i got up and i said i i said imaginatively and on every other level i think that's absolute nonsense it must be nonsense i discovered one brilliant fact is that a female neanderthal apparently they were stronger they had twice as much upper body strength as a homo sapien male and i thought well if there's a group of neanderthal women as it were in the next valley you're gonna want to go and check them out it's just it's just it is as as golding would say it's human nature so this idea that we lived side by side and didn't interbreed in europe for 30 40 000 years it seemed totally implausible anyway he publicly humiliated me in front of the class and then years later obviously of course science has now proven that that other than in sub-saharan africa almost everybody on the planet except in sub-saharan africa has somewhere between two and four percent neanderthal dna which is very likely to have been through in breeding so i was right what was that thing was right what was that teacher's name your alan partridge moment is here what was that he was he was called mr watson and actually watson he was he was he was on many levels he was biology teacher on many levels he's very good and he was just he was just spouting the party line but it it taught me it taught me actually sometimes because of course famously we'll probably talk about this again this book is not based on on deep research into neanderthals and in fact charles monteith who will talk about the editor at faber said you know had there been had he sent it out paleoarchaeologists it probably would have inhibited uh golding's ability to tell the story but there is a truth about it the truth that he captures and that the the genius of the novel is sort of more true than in some ways more true that it took the science 30 years to catch up with it so that's one of the reasons it's important to me okay so i've got the blurb here from the original first edition dust jacket so this was written by golding and charles monteith in 1955 and bear in mind what everything that we've just been saying uh about what a challenging book this can be the first time you read it um and we should also add that lord of the flies had been published to a sort of it did okay right it did okay and they were sufficiently keen on it to to to get another book out of that author quickly but you're still trying to place the author and you're trying to place the book in 1955 where people don't really know what Lord of the Flies is. So here we go. When the spring came, the people, what was left of them, moved back by the old paths from the sea, across the river to the steep places and the waterfall and the island where they had never been, and to the cave. But this year strange things were happening, things that had never happened before, terrifying things. There were inexplicable sounds and smells, unimaginable creatures half-glimps through the close curtain of spring leaves, new creatures, men. Though they did not know it yet, though they were never really to know it, the day of the people was over, it had ended a long time ago. This novel is a vivid avocation of the world before history, of man's predecessors and of man's entry into his inheritance. Its characters are almost unbelievably real and alive and their story is as deeply moving as it is compellingly exciting. William Golding is the author of Lord of the Flies, which when it was published in 1954 had one of the most remarkable and enthusiastic receptions given to a first novel in recent years, The Inheritors is a worthy successor. Like Lord of the Flies, it is distinguished by superbly good writing, great narrative skill, and above all, vivid and profound imagination. Drawing on Jacket by Anthony Gross. I think that's worthy of acclaim, that blurb. It's a very, very good blurb, isn't it? Do you know what's interesting? They've basically, for the most recent version of The Inheritors they've basically kept an edited version of that original blurb on the back The Inheritors didn't receive many contemporary reviews but it was reviewed in the Times in a round-up and here's the review of it in the round-up Mr William Golding goes further back in time, back to the period when Neanderthal Man was giving way to man. It is hard to make characters called Loc, Oa and far of any passionate interest, although Mr Golding has a keen eye for creatures and landscapes that no longer exist. Perhaps it is wiser to keep Neanderthal man behind the bars of an outline of history rather than to encourage him to run wild through luxurious forests of imaginative prose. Wow. That's one of those reviews that if I had written this book, which I should not have done, I would not have written it like this. But isn't that almost exactly what the American publishers say when they turn the book down because they you know they say oh god first school children are now cavemen well monteith monteith actually when he first got the manuscript he says that evening i started to read it and after two pages put it down filled with intense and utter dismay oh god i said to myself first it was school boys now it's cavemen bloody cavemen but i took it up again and apart from a hurried supper didn't put it down until i'd finished it it was another masterpiece and actually it does begin to so arthur kursler uh famously says that it gave him the impression of an earthquake in the petrified forests of the english novel in the sunday times and john davenport also says you know this is he's the most purely original english novelist of the last decade so he gets a kind of he does get literary acclaim but it doesn't get published in the u.s no and in the u.s faber do a terrible thing they allow um i think it's harcourt brace to to not publish it. They don't, and then won't give it to anybody else. Well, we're talking about Charles Monteith. Charles Monteith is the editor, later one of the directors of Faber and Faber, who famously, after Lord of the Flies had been rejected two dozen times by other publishers, picked it up off the slush pile in his third or fourth week working at Faber and Faber, recognised something in it, worked with Golding on it. That story is very well told but I thought you just like to hear a little clip of Charles Monteith himself describing it Every Tuesday morning a professional reading lady came in and we call her Miss Parkinson That's not her real name. And Miss Parkinson was a terrifying figure to ask because she was said to have an eagle eye, have incredible shrewdness. And she had also a great gift for summing up a book with a telling phrase. And it was a great guide to ask for amateurish creatures from Ween. That's about four editors. Came in the afternoon. and I picked up this very unappetizing looking manuscript and Miss Parkinson had looked through it and she read a test comment at the top which said rubbish about boys on a desert island, reject. She actually said considerably worse than that but we won't dwell on it. I wanted to just make the point about two reasons why Charles Monteith was such an extraordinary editor. the first is not the first is he discovered Golding and he discovered Lord of the Flies and the first point I wanted to make was you have to remember that he was owned that Golding's great piece of luck was not merely that he found it but that Monteith had only been doing that job a few weeks because if Monteith had been working at Faber for even a couple of years he wouldn't have been digging into the slush pile looking for books so there's every possibility that it would have stayed in the slush pile with the other rejections it had been rejected so widely and the second thing to say about Monteith brilliant editor collaborator with Golding throughout his whole career when Golding needed help and with the inheritors Monteith's genius is he reads the inheritors as you were just saying John and he recognizes that it doesn't really need anything doing to it it just so whereas Lord of the Flies had needed all this extra work on the other hand Golding writes the inheritors pretty much in less than a month hands it in and Monteith has got the the eye to be able to go we can publish this this is a must also I think the the point that um John makes as well if he had if it had gone for changes and if it had have kind of gone to experts then probably Golding would have crumbled. He could have already saw that aspect in Golding's character. I mean, it's really a good point. And you say about the newness in the job. I mean, I always use, as I'm sure it's such a famous story, Lord of the Flies, that he noticed that the first 20 pages of the manuscript were kind of thumbed and yellowed and the rest of it hadn't didn't look like it had been. and actually what there is at the beginning of the book of the original manuscript is this kind of rather lurid kind of a description of a nuclear war and the aftermath of a nuclear war which is the preamble to before they get to the island and Monteith did that thing that it's very easy not to do he read beyond that and read into the story and could see that by actually by taking the beginning out and moving things around there was actually a brilliant story to tell So it's one of those things when you're kind of talking to junior editors, don't just read the first 40 pages of anything. Una, I want to pick up what you were saying when we started about this being a science fiction novel, The Inheritors being a science fiction novel, or Lord of the Flies for that matter, being a science fiction novel. The Inheritors was also reviewed in the TLS, although some months after it was published, and it was reviewed in a joint review with, do you know what? Go on. The Chrysalids by John Wyndham. Yeah, I can't straight there, isn't it? Yeah. And Golding gets a good review and Wyndham gets a less good review in that instance. We know that Golding was a big science fiction reader, right? Yeah, complete addict. So why don't we why don't we think of these books as science fiction? Well, I think there's obviously there's obviously questions of kind of snobbery around genre, which is which is unfortunate. That's just a shame. I think science fiction as a genre changes significantly in the 60s and it starts to diverge from literary fiction. But there just seems to be a straight line for me from Wells, who is the epigram in this book. He quotes Wells and, you know, he's responding to a sort of fictionalised essay by Wells called The Grizzly Ones about the Neanderthals. There's a line for me straight from Wells through Golding to people like J.D. Ballard and Nigel Neill. And then if you opened a book by Christopher Priest or Chris Beckett, you've just got an absolute straight line there, I think, of literary British science fiction. And somewhere along the lines, I think people lose their courage over science fiction. They stop reading it. They stop thinking of it as literary. And some people carry on. But the minute I opened this, I read a few pages and I went, oh, now I know why Andy's asked me. OK, all right. He's he's not the ship guy because it does those two things that science fiction does. It does estrangement. You're immediately immersed in this completely alien perspective. And science fiction does that straight away. Now, this is one reason people don't like it, actually, is that they they don't want to have to decode a book. they don't want to sit down with a book and go ah today i need to be an anthropologist and you do need to do that you have to slow down and read at the pace of these people and and start to unpick their their otherness their difference so he does that and then the other thing he does and it's a classic science fiction it's a first contact story it's it's an encounter of one civilization with another but but also it posits the homo sapiens are the aliens yeah absolutely it's an a it's an alien invasion story with and man is the alien man is the invader is seen through the eyes of the neanderthals as an invader yeah and you're being asked to pull entirely into their perspective and to to live with them and be with them to empathize to find a a common humanity or a common homininity i don't know uh and then the shock of realizing who you are in the book at the end on the the sci-fi thing i think that that continues into the next book as well with pincher martin because although it's ostensibly you know another shipwreck story uh the visions that he has and then of course the brilliant twist at the end which i won't give away if you haven't read pincher martin but it's a big one i even think you you know i was thinking this morning that the spire it's like a space it's like a spaceship it's like it's kind of like I read Aspire as science fiction. I completely read it as science fiction. They're on a generation ship. It's a tight crew of people in a hermetically sealed. It's a bunker story. And they're trying to get they're trying to get the navigational system to work with a promise of a sort of goal that they'll eventually get to. It's incredible that the trappings that he takes and then reformulates them through, I don't know, Paradise Lost or, you know, Thucydides. And Una, you can prove this, can't you? You can prove this theorem because you discovered an excerpt from, I applaud your deep dive to bring back this poll. You found a Star Wars anecdote about William Golding. I did. This is great. Well, the website, Golding's website is incredibly well maintained. I think it's maintained by his daughter. Her memoir of him actually is superbly good. Wonderful. Really, really good. But but bless them on May the 4th. So, you know, May the 4th be with you on Star Wars Day. They posted this year. They posted this snippet in his unpublished journals. William Golding writes that on Saturday, the 18th of September, 1982, he watched Star Wars six times with his grandchildren. Star Wars is entrancing the grown-ups. However, by half past one in the afternoon, it has already been on three times. Four times. Perhaps five times, I'm not sure. Six times, which equals about 700 minutes. Hard to believe, but a fact. Judy Golding notes that he was particularly fond of the film's music and the Mos Eisley scene well we're all fond of the Mos Eisley scene in 1983 he tried to hire The Empire Strikes Back but the film was not yet released on video his response to that movie is not recorded I like to think he particularly liked as we all do the blue elephant who plays the keyboards whose name is Max something, isn't it? I'm not so good on Star Wars. I'll butter your knowledge there. I was thinking more of the appearance of Harrison Ford, of course. All right, well, let's go back to the book. Here's a clip from the early 90s of the novelist Penelope Lively talking about The Inheritors, a book that she's read and re-read. I suppose I first read it maybe 20 years or so ago, and it's a book I read every five years or so. And I've often seen it as simply about the nature of evil. The last and most recent reading, I saw it as in fact being a novel about contingency, about the direction in which human nature has gone, whereas it might have gone in a completely different direction, being as it is about the encounter between the Neanderthalers and a group who sound like Stone Age men, and are obviously Homo sapiens who wipe the lot of them out. And the suggestion seems to be that, but for the evolutionary twist, a whole other direction might have been taken. Whereas, in fact, because Homo sapiens has this awful propensity for evil, as well as this capacity for creativity, it's gone in our direction for better and for worse. It was a very risky thing to do. And of course, the huge risk he took was in giving them language. as soon as he made them speak he had to then use our assumptions and and our way of seeing things so this was the huge test that he put to himself and and he had to then think of a way to give them the sort of capacities that would have been theirs rather than ours so i think that's very interesting what she says at the end there about the imaginative leap that golding has to make he sets himself a challenge and one of the things I found really exhilarating about reading this book is seeing somebody set themselves a seemingly impossible task and then pulling it off I think there's a there is there are sustained passages of imaginative description in this as good as anything I've ever read it really astonishingly well done and consistent on its own rules anthropologically correct we we don't know but in terms of setting world building and in all senses it's extraordinarily good una do you have a a bit you could um read us so we can get a sense of that yes i do and i've chosen a bit which is sort of a uh almost a creation myth it's the old man um mal is is talking to them what i think is really clever not just the world building and the language and the immersion is uh golding's technique is so good that uh when he chooses to come out of the tight vocalization and give an editorial block a kind of authorial gloss uh a kind of nudge to you it's seamless you you you you could go oh well they wouldn't know that word or they wouldn't have that um but it's so carefully crafted and carefully done and those are almost the bits to worthless those the extra bits are worth listening out for i think but this is a moment where the old man is talking about their creation myth. Now Mal spoke. There was the great oar. She brought forth the earth from her belly. She gave suck. The earth brought forth woman and the woman brought forth the first man out of her belly. They listened to him in silence. they waited for more for all that mal knew there was the picture of the time when there had been many people the story that they all liked so much of the time and it was summer all year round and the flowers and fruit hung on the same branch there was also a long list of names that began at mal and went back choosing always the oldest man of the people at that time but now he said nothing more. Locke sat between him and the wind. You are hungry, Mal. A man who is hungry is a cold man. He lifted up his mouth. When the sun comes back, we will get food. Stay by the fire, Mal. We will bring you food and you will be strong and warm. Then Phar came and leaned her body against smile so that three of them shut him in against the fire. He spoke to them between coughs. I have a picture of what is to be done. He bowed his head and looked into the ashes. The people waited. They could see how his life had stripped him. The long hairs on the brow were scanty and the curls that should have swept down of the slope of his skull had receded till there was a finger's breadth of naked and wrinkled skin above his brows. Under them the great eye hollows were deep and dark and the eyes in them dull and full of pain. Now he held up a hand and inspected the fingers closely. People must find food. People must find wood. He held his left fingers with the other hand. He gripped them tightly as though the pressure would keep the ideas inside and under control. A finger for wood. A finger for food. He jerked his head and started again. A finger for Ha, for Fa, for Nil, for Liku. He came to the end of his fingers and looked at the other hand, coughing softly. Ha stirred where he sat, but said nothing. Then Mal relaxed his brow and gave up. He bowed down his head and clasped his hands in the grey hair at the back of his neck. They heard in his voice how tired he was. Ha shall get wood from the forest. Nil will go with him and the new one. Ha stood again and Fa moved her arm from the old man's shoulders, but Mal went on speaking. Locke will get food with Fa and Likku. Ha spoke. Likku is too little to go on the mountain and out on the plain. Likku cried out, I will go with Locke. Ma, Mal muttered under his knees, I have spoken. Now the thing was settled, the people became restless. They knew in their bodies that something was wrong, yet the word had been said. When the word had been said, it was though the action was already alive in performance, and they worried. Ha clicked a stone aimlessly against the rock of the overhang, and Neil was moaning softly again. Only Locke, who had the fewest pictures, remembered the blinding pictures of Orr and her bounty that had set him dancing on the terrace. He jumped up and faced the people and the nighter shook his curls. I shall bring that food in my arms, he gestured hugely. So much food that I stagger, so. Far grinned at him. There is not as much food as that in the world. what struck me listening to that is a brilliant reading again dr mcormack that's the other reason i ask you back the vocabulary is so plain listening to that it's it's such such a sophisticated thing to be doing conceptually, but furthermore, with a really limited vocabulary. The language is very simple, and yet you're being asked to take on board very sophisticated concepts. And I think also that he doesn't trap himself into saying, oh, well, I've set these rules on my book. I'm going to stick with them. there's that whole passage of description where we pull back from the perspective and he just lets that omniscient narrator come in words like scanty inspecting the fingers they're not going to have this in their mind but golding doesn't say well i've got to stay in uh there's a very cruel review on goodreads that goes doug pick up book doug get bored and the book isn't like that at all it's incredibly sophisticated it would be like that if it were no good yeah but it's a mark of how good is that it isn't like that exactly that i think what people struggle with and maybe what people struggled with at the time what people still struggle with is the idea that it's a book without what we take as common in literature which is kind of intellectual contemplation you know you've basically got this confused being who does not think as we do so going back to what una was saying about the familiar made strange it's the familiar made strange on two levels you're experiencing experiencing it through lock but also you're experiencing it through gold ink and he he basically says you know as you were saying andy with incredibly simple language he does something incredibly complicated and it conveys that their experience of the world is predominantly external the book relies heavily on description you know and there's none of this there's hardly any contemplation or internal reflection things that we're used to in the novel and i think that's a real problem for people when they're reading it initially but it is the key to the novel so he so golding has you know before lord of the flies he writes three novels that don't get published and he says they're right to not get published because they're not they're not books that are really about they're not books that are coming out of me in lord of the flies which started as a sort of a kind of out of reading books to his kids about islands he was reading lots and lots of books that were set on islands it came out of that immediate imaginative kind of uh what would it be like and you feel this with the inheritors as well uh golding didn't read contemporary fiction he read greek literature in greek that was what that was what sort of fed his imagination there's a wonderful line he says about greek greek language he says it's transparency he says the words seem to lie right against the face of real things and you feel with the language that he uses for the for the for the neanderthals the people in the inheritors as you say it's not fancy language and it's not crucially they they imagine but they don't think they don't reflect And in fact, his whole kind of idea of the fall, which is the thing that he goes back to, that, you know, original sin, in a way that it is a prelapsarian world. The Neanderthal, unlike Homo sapiens, unlike the people who destroy them, don't have that. And to try and do that in language and not, as you say, to make it kind of, to make it sort of sub-stick of the dump. It's incredible. If it were failed seriousness, you know, the definition of kitsch, you couldn't, the whole thing would collapse incredibly quickly. There's such a pathos to it, such a hopelessness almost to it, such a tragedy. The word I thought all the time as I was reading it was desolation. Yeah. And there's something, I think what's so lovely about it, and another reason why it works is it's very self-deprecating. and then they're not they're not they're not talking around there's something extremely um contemporary about lock who sort of a a clueless man bumbling around in a situation that just beyond his comprehension uh you know i sympathize with that but he he i think one of the reasons for that is because he also gold yeah yeah i think you know i think i think golding part of golding is is lock but also i think the the tragedy of it is golding also recognizes something of himself in in the new people as well brilliant yeah in john kerry's biography of golding which is an excellent uh biography there's a very moving bit very really near the end of the book where he describes ted hughes reading from the inheritors at golding's memorial service in salisbury cathedral salisbury cathedral of course adjacent to the school where golding taught for many years also the the the building that with its now infamous spire had inspired oh god my this is terrible inspired the spire terrible um anyway he talks about ted hughes uh reading from the inheritors and then um i discovered that hughes had written an essay about the inheritors which was published in a book called William Golding, a tribute on his 75th birthday. And Hughes's essay is called Baboons and Neanderthals, a re-reading of the Inheritors. And it's very Teddish, but it has this little passage in it. And I wanted to share this with people because it ties in with what both Una and Andrew were saying a moment ago. Ted Hughes writes, Our final impression when we read The Inheritors is of a comfortless judgment for the Cro-Magnon, but for the Neanderthals, authentic tragedy. The total effect is beautiful, powerful and objective, but its real impact derives from the story's vitality as a symbol. A visionary dream projected from a calamity which is happening at this moment in the inner life of the reader before, during and after his reading. One can hardly imagine how this private trauma could be touched more directly. And he goes on to say, reality by comparison the rejoicing of the cro-magnons of the humans seems debased ugly meaningless artificial desperate pitiable i thought that was very powerful amazing i thought that was very powerful and and ties into so many of the things you were talking about that terrible line uh where they say you know what else could we have done when they're sailing away the humans what else could we have done it's it's god it's a brilliant novel so so um the success of lord of the flies allowed william golding eventually to give up his day job but in fact he didn't do so for many years because the sales of Lord of the Flies didn't come through straight away. To add to the extent to which our jewels drop when we consider the inheritors, he wrote it in a month at school while he should have been teaching kids. In his dinner hour. So here's a clip from the South Bank show in 1980 with Melvin Bragg asking William Golding about giving up the day job. Lord of the Flies was a as I remember a almost instantaneous and a tremendous success critically and commercially did that commercial success enable you to quit school teaching? Yes it did and I'm still astonished at the situation really, really am astonished at it, I never thought it would happen to me, I always thought I would be a writer but I never thought I'd make money at it, in fact to hark back to my father, he impressed on me I think almost one of the last things I remember about him is his impressing on me that no member of our family would ever make any money except by hard and honest work. I've made it by light, delightful and maybe dishonest work. Light, delightful and maybe dishonest work. Andrew, one of the things about Golding Andrew is that he had lived a full life before. He's in his early 40s when Lord of the Flies is published, and he's had a fairly tempestuous life really up to that point. He fought in the Second World War. He was part of the D-Day landings. He'd been a teacher for many years. He seems to have been, depending on which pupil you listen to, either a beguiling teacher or a distant and ineffectual one, but he kept plugging away, plugging away. Do you think that sense of the life lived exists in the fiction, certainly in those first few books? There's a spectre in all of his early books. There's a sense of, I mean, right from the start in The Inheritors, there is a sense of foreboding. There is a sense that there is something up ahead that will foul everything up. And you get that in the spire as well. And I always I kind of look at it and think this is, you know, this is the depressive. This is the alcoholic in Golding writing, the sense that kind of all will not go well. And he creates it beautifully in The Inheritors, this feeling right from the start, right from when the rotting log has moved, that, you know, the world is something bad is coming. And I feel that kind of Golding felt that in his own life. And you can sense it in the early fiction as well. There's certainly the sense that Golding is channeling a lot of rage. There's a story in the biography. we thought listeners over who was going to tell this and I drew the long or short straw of Golding in the 70s being invited to dinner with his friend the writer Andrew Sinclair other guests included Harold Pinter and his wife Vivian Merchant and Gregory Peck Andrew Sinclair had a puppet modelled on Bob Dylan which was in the Golding's room when they came to a dinner in 1971. As usual, Golding got very drunk, and the next morning Anne broke the news to Sinclair that her husband had destroyed the Bob Dylan puppet. He had woken in the middle of the night, attacked it under the impression that it was Satan, and buried it in the back of garden. Sinclair subsequently retrieved it, and it still bears the marks of Golding's diabolic encounter. and that echoes apparently William Golding William Golding loved music he was a very talented musician albeit a self-persecusing one but he hated two forms of music Nicky do you know what they were hmm pop music and show tunes ah that's why there's no musical of the inheritors he was 50% right but what's but what's the line that Golding uses about booze in the inheritors, it drew toward and it repelled. That sums him up, doesn't it? Absolutely. That is such a tragic scene when they get drunk on the mead as well because these two lovely Neanderthals are suddenly fighting and it's heartbreaking. They become human for that brief period. They become human. Going back to the prelapsarian thing that John was saying, it's the fall, that is their apple, is the mead. You know, when they drink of the mead, that is the eating of the fruit of knowledge, isn't it? You know, it's heartbreaking. Did you not find it hard to read? Nikki gets down. Nikki's been saying that. I've been looking at her. She's been drumming her fingers on the desk. She's been going, yeah, yeah, yeah. But come on. Answer the main question. I think I could read about 30 pages a day. Yeah, absolutely. I think you have to read it. But I do think, I mean, I know this sounds ridiculous for a book that you have to read slowly, but it is a page turner. I mean, it is absolutely. You are so involved, I think, in the story. I think Andrew is going to read us a bit, which is. I had to read this bit twice. Yeah. And so this is perfect timing for what Nicky was saying. But I mean, but it also backs up the point that it's so rewarding once it clicks. We must, before you read it, Andrew. Nikki did you did you find it hard yeah no I did I did quite a lot of the time I thought I quite like to work out what is what he's meant to infer here and I felt like you know going back a few times as you said I know something meaningful has happened but I'm not quite sure what it is you know what no person left behind Nikki that's how I felt reading it right that I think Golding doesn't want you to understand everything. I think that's true in Pinch and Martin and I think it's true in The Spire. And particularly here, it's replicating Locke's experience that your disorientation is Locke's bafflement with the world. Absolutely. That's part of the experience of the book. It's bewildering. You know, anyone who listens to Batlisted, you are like you are you are five you're a five-star reader we know that that's why you're here right you've got skills right and we know that and so top skills top skills you're really good at reading otherwise you wouldn't be listening to this right so here is one of the most um how How can something simultaneously be so gripping and mystifying? Andrew is going to read it to us. I should probably say that at this point, Locke is hunting for, it's his child. I know it's not explicit, but it's his child, isn't it, Liku? And who has been taken by the new people. We know this so far. The bushes twitched again. Locke steadied by the tree and gazed. A head and a chest faced him, half hidden. There were white bone things behind the leaves and hair. The man had white bone things above his eyes and under the mouth, so that his face was longer than a face should be. The man turned sideways in the bushes and looked at Locke along his shoulder. A stick rose upright and there was a lump of bone in the middle. Locke peered at the stick and the lump of bone and the small eyes in the bone things over the face. Suddenly Locke understood that the man was holding the stick out to him, but neither he nor Locke could reach across the river. He would have laughed if it were not for the echo of the screaming in his head. The stick began to grow shorter at both ends, then it shot out to full length again. The dead tree by Locke's ear acquired a voice. Clop! His ears twitched and he turned to the tree. By his face there had grown a twig, a twig that smelt of other and of goose and of the bitter berries that Locke's stomach told him he must not eat. This twig had a white bone at the end. There were hooks in the bone and sticky brown stuff hung in the crooks. his nose examined this stuff and did not like it he smelled along the shaft of the twig the leaves on the twig were red feathers and reminded him of goose he was lost in a generalized astonishment and excitement he was lost in a generalized astonishment in excitement that's exactly what una was talking about isn't it it's like that that sudden intrusion except it isn't intrusive of Golding as as reporter allowing himself yeah um um at the appropriate word right I thought interpreter but even then he's it's just a nudge isn't it just pay attention here you want to go back and and and see this again and are we going to say what just happened there or should we or should we leave it mysterious that's really that's really your call we've got top skills listeners so uh yeah exactly they're gonna figure out some of them are gonna be going easy give us another actually listening to that i i think i spotted an extra nuance should i should i say what's happened yeah yeah an arrow has been fired across the river and he's no idea what's just happened to um the little nuance technology man technology man yeah um yeah the little bit about the berries on it which the berries it has has have they poisoned the arrow yeah and there's goose feather obviously yeah yeah so that i haven't noticed before that's just uh brilliant it's the berries i don't eat can i read a very short passage the very short passage on which i based my uh confident teenage assertion that there had been interbreeding this is this is just like this is just you working through your issues yes please please do the group will the group will all hug you afterwards so this is there's a brilliant scene where uh lock and far are watching the humans and they watch them they watch them eat and they watch them get drunk and then uh it being a gathering of humans a couple stumble out and uh you can you can see you can guess pretty clearly i think from this what they're doing um the two people beneath the tree were making noises fiercely as though they were quarrelling. In particular, the fat woman had begun to hoot like an owl, and Locke could hear Tuami gasping like a man who fights with an animal and does not think he will win. He looked down at them and saw that Tuami was not only lying with the fat woman, but eating her as well, for there was black blood running from the lobe of her ear. Locke was excited. He reached out and laid her hand on fire but she had only to turn her eyes of stone upon him and she was immediately surrounded by that same incomprehensible feeling that worse than or feeling which he recognized but could not understand excitement again that's the key he's turned on by but turned on but in a different previous use excitement that we just heard. Exactly. Andre, you said at the start of this podcast that if The Inheritors were a Gene Kelly film, it would be Brigadoon. But you were reluctant to reveal why for fear of spoiling the ending. But we're now in the safe zone where we can talk about the ending. Why is this like Brigadoon? Well, I've got two things. Can I also then talk about why the ending's so brilliant as well? I think so, yes. Okay, yeah. But first, what Gene Kelly film is The Inheritors? It's Brigadoon. because it's about the new people from New York, the interlopers arriving and destroying the lives of the magical land-dwelling innocents. And they bring something of hell with them. That makes Brigadoon science fiction then, doesn't it? Yes, and Brigadoon is science fiction. That is brilliant, Andrew. Well done. Come back. Come back again. Every time. You leap through that hoop. Thank you. But seriously, the ending, the end. There are not one, but in fact, two changes of perspective at the end. The first change of perspective is that we no longer see Locke as Locke, but we see him as the red creature, don't we? And he's dying. And the amazing thing I found about that is I suddenly realized. Well, what a brilliant way to convey a sense of a life force leaving a body. Suddenly we are outside of Locke, but also Locke's life force, you realize, is Golding's writing. And once Golding leaves Locke to join the new people, which he clearly does with a sense of guilt and shame, as is his one, Locke dies. And then Golding incriminates himself in all this. He basically says, I'm traveling with the new people now. I am with the murderers. You know, and it's just it's astonishingly powerful. And it really I mean, in terms of what we were saying about how heartbreaking this book is that where you just see Locke as the tiny little red creature and running on all fours. He just suddenly looks so pathetic and insignificant now that Golding has left him now that Golding's writing has left him. astonishing what I love about the multiple point of view shifts and Andy this will please you is that it violates a rule that you're taught in creative writing never change point of view forget it, change it for exactly those reasons, I love that reading, I think that's fantastic that Golding is leaving his creation behind he is the life force and at the same time though the red imagery obviously it's suggesting Lascaux in the caves and that there'll be some afterlife in that the the other point of view switch novel that it reminded me of was um the point of view switch at the end of Cormac McCarthy's The Road but that's nowhere near as successful and I think the book almost fails on it but the book succeeds on this it it's it's that total immersion and then that mirroring that's done it's just completely brilliant yeah yeah yeah yeah i think we have to wind up now we do sadly yeah um i think we've we've run out of pictures to share so thank you to una and to andrew for leading us through the tangled undergrowth to nicky birch as ever for reconstructing these fragmented sounds and turning them into a euphonic hole cheers bye bye Now, the other thing that would be happening, which would actually increase that quality, is a very heavy skull that seems to pull down into the throat there. Now, add to that the fact that they had a fantastic chest, which is a support system of breath, which can produce enormous chest resonance and tremendous power. So I imagine that they wouldn't have subtle sounds. It would be loud, very loud, or very, very loud. Push into me. This is actually getting him right into his body. Now speak. One, two, three! Now let's make a sound. Just let's make a huge R. And again. Thank you.