But its achievement is wholly Golding’s own. The language owes something to the liberating achievement of Joyce, Virginia Woolf and stream-of-consciousness. Golding not only invents a world but invests it with a high degree of linguistic intensity. There is a special quality to the writing. One of the great achievements of the novel is the language in which it is rendered. For long stretches you are learning to see the world from that rudimentary, but poeticised, consciousness. It squeezes you into a different state of being. To read it is to feel as if a dimension of consciousness were missing. The novel itself is like a strange dream. The Inheritors is perhaps an unconscious response to Bergen-Belsen, to Buchenwald, to Auschwitz, but it is also perhaps an unconscious response to a changing imperial world, to dislocations and earth shocks in our understanding of ourselves. Significant novels, like significant dreams, come from events that have shattered the psyche’s tranquillity. Unusual fictions come from unusual circumstances. The Inheritors, like Lord of the Flies, is the product of a great cultural trauma.

The urge to reach that far back in history is itself a sign of how deep the crisis was that provoked it. But to understand how we got here, it is important to understand the thinking that has led us here, the deep roots of our nature.Ī profound crisis provokes a deep examination. To know who we are, it is important to ask where we have come from. The questions here are folded into the universe of the novel, dissolved in its cadences. But the question takes the form of a literary thought experiment. Sometimes a work of art comes out of a great question. His more famous first novel, Lord of the Flies, had just been published. Like Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le Noir, written in 52 days, The Inheritors sprang out with the force of nature, as if its birth were preordained. Its first draft was written in 29 days in a white heat of imaginative urgency. It is the novel in which he discovered an uncanny gift for entering the ancient imagination through the magic of true details. It is in this essay, written before he published The Inheritors in 1955, that the remote impulse of the novel first emerges. When he holds an object from an archaeological dig, he can almost hear voices. In an essay called Digging for Pictures, he reveals that he encounters the past best through the imagination. His fascination for primal things might have to do with the hold that archaeology had on his childhood imagination. He wanted to be a scientist before he became a writer. He searches beneath the veneer, to what lies below, and exposes it, that it may be subjected to mature scrutiny. William Golding was fascinated by primal things.

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