Summary of The Inheritors?

As I remember the book, all but the last chapter focuses on a group of people with whom the reader is made to sympathize. This is a group Neanderthals, people whose name now conjures up primitive stupidity and dumbness. As Golding presents these people, however, they are anything but dumb or stupid. They are decent and kind. Lok, their leader, is sympathetic, in the ways that the Neanderthals themselves are: empathetic toward others, more human than most societies, and helplessly attentive to the needs of others in their community.

Comes the last chapter. A new group, from whose point of view the story is now told, is presented. They are competitive, rapacious, intelligently malign and ruthlessly self interested. They easily subdue the Neanderthals. This cruel, rapacious, and predatory group supplants the older, kinder Neanderthals. They are we, modern humans. We have inherited the old civilization and changed it for the bad. Golding just lets this happen; the novel never deserts is cool, reportorial tone, and the impassivity makes the condemnation more powerful.

The conclusion is different in kind, though the form is the same, as the end of _Lord of the Flies,_ where the adult world of war takes over the children's game of war. Golding owes a lot to George Orwell.

The Inheritors Summary