False Dawn

THE INHERITORS (233 pp.)--William Golding--Harcourt, Brace & World ($4.50).

Imagination is a word that scarcely occurs in modern criticism, perhaps because it has an amateurish, imprecise sound, and perhaps also because there is not often an occasion to use it. Not many of today's authors are good imaginers. One of the few is Britain's William Golding, 51. Lord of the Flies, his horrifying novel about castaway children, is a parable of man's instinctive hostility to man whose growing popularity in undergraduate circles (TIME, June 22) now rivals that of Catcher in the Rye. Golding's new book is less savage, and it is no parable, but a subdued, haunting tale told for the satisfaction of telling. Its subject is the last days, millennia ago, of Europe's last band of Neanderthal men.

The Encyclopaedia Britannica deals cursorily with the Neanderthals, merely giving their physical characteristics (thickset physiques, sloping foreheads, receding chins) and observing that they were an aberrant strain, extinct 50,000 years ago. With the skill of an artist (and not, as is often the case in attempts of this kind, a taxidermist), Golding re-creates the Neanderthals and the dawn mist in which they lived. To the eye they are stubby, smallish, powerful near apes, covered with reddish fur. But they are dimly intelligent, although their minds do not work like those of Homo sapiens. In addition to the simple tools and religion that archaeology dictates, Golding gives them a rude telepathic sense--although he deals with this so restrainedly that it never seems a science-fiction gimmick.

Bleak Ending. The author's dawn men are a tiny, dejected band--six adults, one of them a moron (his mind makes few telepathic pictures), a small girl and an infant. Hungrily they trudge to their upland hunting grounds at the end of winter. They know that their numbers a're fewer than in past years, but they do not know why. Neither does the reader, who is left to speculate on plagues and warfare. Golding gives no more information than is available through the eyes of the Neanderthals--a difficult technique, but well suited to evoking the bleak terror of a race's ending.

The band finds food, but things begin to go strangely wrong. Their best hunter does not return from a foray. The two children are stolen. Finally, the Neanderthals discover their enemies. They are a tall, erect race of Homo sapiens, equipped with log boats, bows and arrows. In the blind struggle of mutual fear waged in the dark forests, the new men kill the last Neanderthal woman. The last dawn man crawls back to his cave and docilely assumes the burial posture, knees drawn to chest. At the edge of the cave can be seen the shapes of hyenas.

So much is fine storytelling; the remainder is an ironist's art. The viewpoint abruptly shifts to that of the new men. In their log boats, they are fleeing in panic from the terrors of the dark forests and the strange, hairy creatures whom they had, all unwittingly, already exterminated for all history. One of them works on a piece of ivory, grinding it to a point with a stone, and wonders why he bothers: "Who would sharpen a point against the darkness of the world?" he thinks.

Line of Darkness. With the subtlety of a point not stated, Golding is suggesting that the long ordeal of man's blind drive toward the light has often seemed, at best, the meaningless product of circumstance. It is the same point Matthew Arnold made in his lines:

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept by confused alarms of struggle and of flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

In fact, Golding provides almost a conscious echo of Arnold's theme in the book's last words, as the helmsman strains ahead looking for a clear space beyond the fearful darkness of the tree-bordered shore: "He peered forward past the sail to see what lay at the other end of the lake, but it was so long, and there was such a flashing from the water that he could not see if the line of darkness had an ending."

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