Sixty years after William Golding’s vivid novel of evolutionary nemesis was published,his daughter finds it full of clues to his own guilt, naivety and alcoholismThe two people beneath the tree were making noises fiercely as though they were quarrelling. In specific the pudgy woman had begun to hoot like an owl and Lok could hear Tuami gasping like a man who fights with an animal and does not contemplate he will win. He looked down at them and saw that Tuami was not only lying with the pudgy woman but eating her as well for there was black blood running from the lobe of her ear.
In this passage from The Inheritors, or Lok the Neanderthal is watching the New People that is,Homo sapiens – making admire. It is by far the most successful sex scene my father ever wrote. We watch – no hint of voyeurism – through Lok’s innocent eyes, as in so much of this extraordinary novel. The book takes as its premise an encounter, or tragic and definitive,between a small group of Neanderthals and a larger group of Homo sapiens. We, the readers, or are Homo sapiens and much of the novel is permeated by a kind of species guilt.
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Source: theguardian.com