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A review by angrywombat
The Inheritors by William Golding
5.0
This was a real experience.
This is a story of a small tribe of pre-humans (neanderthals?) encountering a band of humans (home-sapiens?).
The basic events are simple - pre-humans coming home to "summer camp-site", get attacked by humans, panic, see humans leaving - but the way it is presented is just spectacular. Nearly the entire book is told from the point of view of the pre-humans, and they do not think at all like we do. They experience the world mainly through their senses, and do not really think, just directly react to the experience. Every now and again they "have pictures in their head" which are more like memories which give hints on how to act.
It was well written and very different from most things i've read. It was strange to not have things described, but to have to work out what was going on through the series of sensory descriptions. It was also a shock to have humans described from the outside - from a creature that totally couldn't understand what the humans were and couldn't understand the human's motivations.
There were two sections in the last chapter that broke this - a scene showing the pre-human reacting to the loss of his tribe from the point of view of a rodent - a pure third person view, and a final scene of the humans paddling upstream and describing their frightened opinion of the encounter.
I vaguely remember [b:Lord of the Flies|7624|Lord of the Flies|William Golding|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1327869409s/7624.jpg|2766512] from high school, but that was decades ago, but I do remember enjoying the story and analysing it in class - I could easily spend months digging into the language choices and analysing the characters in this book.
Read this if you get the chance.
This is a story of a small tribe of pre-humans (neanderthals?) encountering a band of humans (home-sapiens?).
The basic events are simple - pre-humans coming home to "summer camp-site", get attacked by humans, panic, see humans leaving - but the way it is presented is just spectacular. Nearly the entire book is told from the point of view of the pre-humans, and they do not think at all like we do. They experience the world mainly through their senses, and do not really think, just directly react to the experience. Every now and again they "have pictures in their head" which are more like memories which give hints on how to act.
It was well written and very different from most things i've read. It was strange to not have things described, but to have to work out what was going on through the series of sensory descriptions. It was also a shock to have humans described from the outside - from a creature that totally couldn't understand what the humans were and couldn't understand the human's motivations.
There were two sections in the last chapter that broke this - a scene showing the pre-human reacting to the loss of his tribe from the point of view of a rodent - a pure third person view, and a final scene of the humans paddling upstream and describing their frightened opinion of the encounter.
I vaguely remember [b:Lord of the Flies|7624|Lord of the Flies|William Golding|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1327869409s/7624.jpg|2766512] from high school, but that was decades ago, but I do remember enjoying the story and analysing it in class - I could easily spend months digging into the language choices and analysing the characters in this book.
Read this if you get the chance.