Review: No room in our world for any others

Review of: The Inheritors

Author: William Golding

Publisher: Harcourt Brace & Company

Source: Library

Grade: B

Early one spring, a family of Neanderthals has its first encounter with strange new people in William Golding’s 1955 novel, The Inheritors. Who are these newcomers who appear on the river running past the Neanderthals’ summer camp in hollow trees, trilling a strange birdlike language, and armed with odd twigs tipped with stone points? They are both fascinating and deadly, and, seeing them through unaccustomed eyes, it is with a start of foreboding that we recognize them.

William Golding, 1983

We’ve learned a lot more both about the reality of early modern humans and Neanderthals since The Inheritors was written. Neanderthals didn’t – couldn’t have – run on all fours, they probably weren’t as gentle and naïve as the people Golding depicts, and they were all too familiar with weapons, having fashioned plenty of their own. But the novel isn’t intended to be a historical account. Instead, Golding uses it to explore further a theme he introduced in his first novel, Lord of the Flies – destruction of the innocent by inherent human evil.

Golding never specifically refers to the innocents of The Inheritors as Neanderthals. It was, after all, a name that would not exist until the first fossils of these early humans were discovered and recognized in the mid-19^th century. However, a quotation from H.G. Wells’ Outline of History at the book’s beginning references the term, “gorilla-like monsters, with cunning brains, shambling gait, hairy bodies, strong teeth . . . the germ of the ogre in folklore. . . ”

The newcomers to the Neanderthals’ world simply call them devils.

The story opens with one of the adult Neanderthals, Lok, running through the spring forest as his band makes it way from their winter quarters in a cave by the sea to their summer home on a river island. He carries a delighted little girl, Liku, on his back. The rest of their band – an old man and woman, another younger man, two women, and a baby – follow. Are the old people Lok’s parents? Is Liku his daughter? No family relationships are ever mentioned. There’s simply no word for them in the limited language of the Neanderthals, just as there are no words to name most of what they will observe in their dealings with the newcomers.

Finding the fallen log on which they normally cross the river to their summer island rotted away, the people are at first baffled. Such a thing has never happened in the lifetimes of the younger members of the band.

Neanderthal reconstruction

The old man, Mal, ponders and at last says, “‘I have a picture.’ He freed a hand (from his walking stick) and put it flat on his head as if confining the images that flickered there. ‘Mal is not old but clinging to his mother’s back. There is more water not only here but along the trail where we came. A man is wise. He makes men take a tree that has fallen. . .’”

And so, relying on the laboriously recalled memory, the people find another tree, make another bridge to their island. But this way of dealing with the world will not suffice once the quicker thinking newcomers arrive, terrorizing the Neanderthals in response to their own fears.

Golding’s ability to enter the minds of people with such limited language requires guesswork on the part of readers that is often fascinating but just as often annoying. How much of the newcomers’ activities that Lok and his people observe only in pantomimes mystifying to them do we need to read about before we realize that the group of newcomers are facing internal power struggles, are fearful, greedy, violent and deceitful? In short, that they are us?

Adventure classics -- In the heart of the beast

The Island of Dr. Moreau

by H.G. Wells

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In deciding to devote the month of July to a discussion of classic science fiction I find myself searching, not for the first time, how to describe this genre. Two modern practitionerst, Margaret Atwood and Ursula K. Le Guin, famously disagree on every criteria except one -- the ability of all not-quite-real fictions to tackle subjects too sweeping for mere realism to address.

I’m going to say I know science fiction when I read it, so I can shoehorn the social commentary of H.G. Wells’ 1896 work, The Island of Dr. Moreau, as well as dystopian near-futurism, humor, and a bit of space opera into a single category for this month’s discussions.

Wells opens The Island of Dr. Moreau with the hyperrealism beloved by writers tempting us to believe their outrageous stories -- an introduction by a supposed relative of the narrator, Edward Prendick, supplying dates, latitude and longitude, and name of the ships whose wreck opens Prendick’s adventure.

Prendick is then rescued by a sinister vessel carrying a cargo of exotic animals and two passengers -- failed medical student Montgomery and his strange companion. Once arrived at its destination, Prendick is forced to disembark also, landing on a remote island governed by the notorious Dr. Moreau.

Moreau’s specialty of vivisection -- surgery conducted for experimental purposes -- has made him persona non grata in Europe. Although Prendick professes to have studied biology with Darwin’s advocate, T.H. Huxley, at first he shows no interest in the happenings of Dr. Moreau’s laboratory, simply trying to ignore the sounds of agony from the experiments and completely failing to connect them with the island’s odd-looking inhabitants.
But when the nature of the screams changes from animal to human, Prendick believes Moreau is trying to transform human beings into beasts. Fearing he is intended as one of Moreau’s victims, Prendick flees -- and at last learns the true nature of the experiments. Dr. Moreau, like Dr. Frankenstein before him, is trying to create not beasts, but human beings, this time from surgically-modified animals. And yes, he cuts and stitches creatures who never existed, such as a mock-satyr, just because he can.

“An adventure story that would once have featured battles with fantastic monsters,“ Atwood writes in Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination, “keeps the exotic scenery, but the monsters have been produced by the very agency that was seen by many in late Victorian England as the bright, new, shiny salvation of humankind: science.”

“We do not recommend The Island of Dr. Moreau to readers of sensitive nerves,” a contemporary reviewer in April 11, 1896, edition of The Spectator magazine stated, with no apparent understanding that Wells’ book was anything more than a protest against vivisectionism. This, however, doesn't unexplain the story's power to transcend its time.
 
Atwood attempts an explanation, comparing the story to the tale of another shipwreck survivor, The Ancient Mariner, “which revolves around man’s proper relation to Nature and concludes that this proper relation is one of love.” The Island of Dr. Moreau also contemplates this relationship, but with a twist.

Prendick first saw the beast people of Dr. Moreau as degraded humans. At the end, he finds himself unable to see his fellow human beings as anything other than degraded beasts. The curse he lives under is more terrible than the Ancient Mariner’s wanderings -- the inability to love either humanity or Nature.

For a discussion of science fiction between master practitioners Atwood and Ursula K. Le Guin, see “Margaret Atwood and Ursula K. Le Guin debate science fiction” at http://io9.com/.

(Next Wednesday, Adventure classics continues a July of science fiction and hubris with Daniel Keyes’ Flowers for Algernon.)

Adventure classics -- Far green hills of Mars?

The Martian Chronicles

by Ray Bradbury

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“I would go out to (my grandparents’) lawn on summer nights and reach up to the red light of Mars and say, ‘Take me home!’” Ray Bradbury wrote, explaining his debt to Edgar Rice Burroughs’ stories in an essay The New Yorker prophetically titled “Take Me Home,” published the day before his death.

“I yearned to fly away and land there in the strange dusts that blew over dead-sea bottoms toward the ancient cities. . . I know that ‘The Martian Chronicles’ would never have happened if Burroughs hadn’t had an impact on my life. . . .”

Like the Mars of Burroughs’ hero John Carter, Bradbury’s Mars was a land still unknown enough to harbor adventures. There‘s more than a touch of fear for the future and nostalgia for a simpler time somewhere in the past lurking in the pages of both writers. A nostalgia, in the case of The Martian Chronicles that Bradbury pinpoints in the remembered green American Midwest of his childhood in the 1920’s.

He was born in Waukegan, Illinois, in 1920 and spent much of his childhood there. In The Martian Chronicles, the Waukegan of Bradbury’s childhood would resurface under the name “Green Bluff,” reconstructed by telepathic Martians for a rocket crew from Earth, in the chapter “The Third Expedition.”

“This town out here looks very peaceful and cool, and so much like Green Bluff, Illinois, that it frightens me,” Captain John Black of the ill-fated expedition explains to his men (Bradbury taking for granted in his 1950 story, that space crews would be all-male). Black, like Bradbury, knew you can’t really go back home again.

Ultimately, the defeat of the Martians occurred not through armaments or atomics, but with the scourge of a childhood disease as lethal as terrestrial bacteria had been to the Martians of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds. And finally, the invaders from Earth would live to see their own civilization destroyed by the atomic weapons the world had learned to fear by the date of Bradbury’s writing.

That the Mars of Bradbury bore little resemblance to the planet, pictures of whose dusty pink skies and barren landscapes he saw transmitted from robotic rovers long before his death, bothered him not at all. He even resisted being labeled a science fiction writer. “Martian Chronicles is not science fiction -- it’s fantasy,” he insisted. “That’s the reason it’s going to be around a long time -- because it’s a Greek myth, and myths have staying power.”

Even a scientist could agree with that assessment. “Mars,” astronomer Carl Sagan wrote, “has become a kind of mythic arena onto which we have projected our Earthly hopes and fears.”

For more about Bradbury, who died June 5 at the age of 91, see his official site,
www.raybradbury.com/.

(Next Wednesday -- an all-Martian month at Adventure classics concludes with one of Phillip K. Dick’s greatest works, Martian Time-Slip.)

Adventure classics -- A Mars for every era

The War of the Worlds

by H.G. Wells

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In honor of the proximity of the landing of the latest Martian rover, Curiosity, to the Independence Day celebrations in the United States, NASA’s website displays a picture labeled “Fireworks over Mars.” The red planet has carried the burden of Earthlings’ dreams for millennia. For Americans in 2012, it’s a setting for space age pyrotechnics. For Great Britain in 1898, fearful of its neighbors’ military expansionism, it was an invading force whose armament all the queen’s artillery couldn’t subdue.

And to the young H.G. Wells, chronically ill and desperate to escape from his family’s working class poverty, Mars was his ticket to financial security and social acceptance.

After leaving school at fourteen and failing at a variety of jobs, he became an under-master at seventeen in small grammar school. As Lovat Dickson describes in “H.G. Wells: His Turbulent Life and Times,” the school’s headmaster hoped to take advantage of a Education Department scheme to pay bonuses for training teachers “to specialize in the teaching of the new subject of science.”

The master turned his assistant Wells loose with every textbook he could get his hands on, and the resulting examinations showered him with certificates, and better still, a scholarship with the possibility of a bachelor of science degree. “Science held out to nearly everyone at that the time promise of a new dawn,” Dickson wrote. “(Wells) was never to lose the rapture of that first vision.”

He tried his hand at writing first with a couple of textbooks and journalism work. But in the last decade of the nineteenth century, in a burst of creativity, he wrote the handful of science fiction novels that still keep his memory alive. He would go on to write dozens more novels and works of nonfiction. More serious works, he thought, that would make his reputation. Few have stood the test of time.

Near the book’s opening, a strange cylindrical object falls from the sky into a sand pit near the London suburb (and Wells’ home at the time) of Woking. Amazing though it
seems to modern readers, neither the news media nor local authorities take much interest in the phenomenon until the emergence of the Martians themselves from their vehicle.

“I think everyone expected to see a man emerge -- possibly something a little unlike us terrestrial men, but in all essentials a man,” Wells’ unnamed narrator reports. The creatures who emerge, however, have little in common with human beings, and only one small weakness, a fatal flaw that will finally destroy them without any help from the greatest weaponry humanity of the time could muster.

The last dying Martian is left to walk the streets of a London nearly deserted by human beings, sobbing in vain for its kind. The story raises the idea of a united government for the planet -- a concern that greatly occupied Wells’ last few decades. But it had also prefigured the possibility of the world’s total destruction. An event that by the time of Wells’ death the year after the bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, began to seem all too possible.

(Wells’ science fiction is readily available at www.amazon.com/, among other sources. To keep up with the doings of Curiosity -- more properly, the Martian Science Laboratory -- see www.nasa.gov/missions_pages/msl/index.html/. )

(Disney dissed him. But without a John Carter of Mars, could there have been a Tarzan of the Apes? I seek answers next week from Edgar Rice Burroughs’ “A Princess of Mars.”)