Monthly Archives: July 2025

Book review

The Inheritors by William Golding, 1955

The Inheritors is a fascinating, challenging novel by the author of Lord of the Flies, with which it shares some points of similarity. It is set in prehistoric times and follows a community of stone-age people moving from their winter quarters to their summer base. The novel is prefaced by a quote from H G Wells’s Outline of History explaining how little is known about Neandethal man. Although this is presented as a key to interpreting the text that follows, it is somewhat misleading, as the reader comes to learn.

The Inheritors is told largely from the perspective of Lok, one of ‘the people’, a term they use to describe their small group. It is not clear if the people have had contact with other communities before. It is quickly clear however that they are a very primitive tribe. One way Golding illustrates this is that they struggle with most kinds of abstract or conceptual thought. We see this early in the novel, when Lok finds that the log the group has habitually used to cross a river has been removed:

“He shut his eyes and frowned at the picture of the log. It had lain in the water from this side to that, grey and rotting. When you trod the centre you could feel the water that washed beneath you, horrible water, as deep in places as a man’s shoulder. The water was not awake like the river or the fall but asleep, spreading there to the river and waking up, stretching on the right into wilderness of impassable swamp and thicket and bog. So sure was he of this log the people always used that e opened his eyes again, beginning to smile as if he were waking out a a dream; but the log was gone. “

You will note that the author uses the phrase ‘as deep in places as a man’s shoulder’. Elsewhere the term ‘old woman’ is used. So we are subtlety led to understand that these people are men and women, or consider themselves as such. But they have virtually no tools, no clothing, a very limited understanding of the world around them, and are almost completely unable to use abstract ideas (although they are able to control fire). Which prompts the reader to ask – just how primitive are they? – and critically, are they homo-sapiens, the species that went on to inherit the earth (in the terms of the novel’s title), or are they another species entirely? We are initially encouraged – by the novel’s title, the focus on the group, the first person narration and the use of the terms man and woman – to think they are the inheritors, our ancestors, but we come to realise that assumption might not be right. That doubt accelerates or is confirmed when the group comes into contact with the Others. This new group wear clothes, use tools including weapons and boats, and kill the people casually immediately on contact. The people are quickly reduced to two adults – Lok, Fa, a female, and two children, Liku and an unnamed baby. The newcomers kidnap the children and shoot arrows across the river at Lok, who doesn’t understand what is happening:

Suddenly Lok understood that the man was holding the stick out to him but neither he nor Lok could reach across the river. He would have laughed if it were not for the echo of the screaming in his head. The stick began to grow shorter at both ends. Then it shot out to full length again. The dead tree by Lok’s ear acquired a voice. “Clop!” His ears twitched and he turned to the tree. By his face there had grown a twig: a twig that smelt of other, and of goose, and of the bitter berries that Lok’s stomach told him he must not eat. This twig had a white bone at the end. There were hooks in the bone and sticky brown stuff hung in the crooks. His nose examined this stuff and did not like it.

Despite his understanding that the sticky brown stuff at the end of the arrow is unpleasant, (he has a highly advanced sense of smell) Lok is simply unable to conceive of the fact that he is being attacked. Later he again has arrows fired at him and crucially he has learnt nothing from his original encounters with the Others and reacts in a bemused way. The people are so isolated that they are unable to comprehend the danger that the Others represent – without this instinct for self-preservation they are doomed. Although wary of the Others once they have killed four of his group, Lok is also fascinated by them – running away doesn’t occur to him. Fa, more perceptive than Lok, tries to persuade him to flee, but he is focussed on rescuing the children. When Liku, the older child, is apparently killed and possibly eaten by the Others, Fa sensitively protects Lok from this fact. As we see the events of the novel from Lok’s perspective it is some time before we (and he) realise what has happened to Liku. More generally, his limited vocabulary and understanding of the world at times makes the novel hard to follow. The reader has to decode everything – the example given above of the arrow being fired at Lok is straightforward enough, but much of the time things are confused and unclear. This means that The Inheritors is a novel that demands to be read carefully.  Ben Okri’s introduction to the Faber and Faber edition puts it this way:

“It is the kind of novel in which the real reading starts with the second reading. Then the work becomes clearer with every sentence and yet not so clear. In the second half, much has to be pieced together in the highly suggestive writing. Readers have to discover for themselves what is meticulously described. This makes us inhabit the restricted comprehension of ‘the people’, sometimes understanding and sometimes not.”

The novel is redolent with symbolism and particularly Biblical imagery. The group are described as the people of the Fall. In one sense this is literal, as their summer camp is next to a waterfall, but the analogy with the Adam and Eve story, with the people embodying an innocence that has no concept of sin or violence, and the Others representing the violence of Cain. It is relevant that the people have a cultural taboo against killing animals, although they will eat the abandoned or stolen prey of wild animals. The Others have developed an alcoholic drink and the scene where Lok and Fa accidentally get drunk and are completely disorientated by the experience is analogous to Adam and Eve being tempted to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. If this sounds a somewhat heavy-handed use of symbolism that is more down to my summary than Golding’s writing which is done with much more sensitivity and lightness of touch.

The novel ends, famously, with two sudden changes of perspective. From the moment Fa is swept away over the waterfall, the narrator steps back, and instead of showing us the world and its events from Lok’s perspective, looks at him dispassionately. He suddenly – mid-chapter – becomes “it” and “the red creature”. We have seen this description used once before, when in Chapter 11 we see Fa from Lok’s eyes and she is described as “red as a squirrel, running mostly on all fours“, but this is the first detailed description of the people’s appearance:

“It was a strange creature, smallish and bowed. The legs and thighs were bent and there was a whole thatch of curls on the outside of the legs and arms. The back was high and covered over the shoulders with curly hair. Its feet and hands were broad, and flat, the great toe projecting inwards to grip. The square hands swung down to the knee. “

The novel’s final chapter sees another switch in perspective, almost as shocking. It is written from the viewpoint of Tuami, one of the homo sapiens group that has brought such destruction into the simple lives of the people. This group are scared – terrified – of the people and are running away from them. Tuami is plotting to kill the group’s leader and replace him. But for now they are fleeing from the strange and dangerous people who they think of as devils. They have with them the Neanderthal baby, adopted as a pet. The Others have been scarred and damaged by their encounter with the people and will carry traces of this meeting for a long time, choosing to avoid the forest where they think they live. These are the real inheritors – and they are us. As he does in Lord of the Flies, Golding exposes man’s true nature. I wouldn’t want to reduce this complex narrative to a simple parable – ‘we are the real monsters’ – but there’s no doubt that is a significant part of the overall theme of the novel.

As Golding’s second novel this is a powerful follow up to Lord of the Flies and a novel that is perhaps not read as widely as it should be. That might in part be because of its perceived difficulty and partly because (slightly surprisingly) it has never been filmed. It is thoughtful and thought-provoking. Highly recommended.

The Inheritors by William Golding, 1955

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Book review

Dr Fischer of Geneva, or The Bomb Party, by Graham Greene, 1980

Graham Greene was arguably the senior British novelist of the post-war period. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature and probably would have won it if not for the objections of a couple of key Swedish judges. But since his death in April 1991 his reputation has faded and faded quite quickly. According to an essay in Prospect magazine this is because ” the world has moved on to another century and other fashions”. Adaptations of his work, such as Neil Jordan’s film of The End of the Affair (1999) and Phillip Noyce’s The Quiet American (2002) only served to emphasis the outdated nature and period settings of his novels rather than keep him in the public eye. I’d struggle to find any concrete evidence for this fading popularity, but my feeling is that his work is read very little nowadays. He certainly is conspicuously missing from many of the ‘100 best novels written in the 20th Century’ lists that pop up from time to time.

So, as always, the question has to be asked, why did I read Dr Fischer of Geneva? The BBC made a television movie of the book in 1984, with Alan Bates, James Mason (in his final screen performance) and Greta Scacchi in the leading roles and with Barry Humphries rather hilariously miscast as the alcoholic womanising film star Richard Deane. The edition I read had a still from this adaptation on the front cover and the impression was inescapably that I was looking at a late version of one of Roald Dahl’s corny ‘Tales of the Unexpected’. (For people of my generation that reference will immediately summon up a lot of memories and meaning – for others please refer to the internet!) Perhaps it was that association, combined with the promising brevity of the novella, that encouraged me to read this text to while away the time on a short journey.

The novella is narrated by Alfred Jones, a translator for a Swiss chocolate company. A note of inauthenticity is immediately introduced – did even the largest chocolate companies have their own in-house translators? It does seem something of a luxury. Jones lost his left hand while working as a fireman during the Blitz and is a widower in his fifties. In Geneva Jones meets the much younger Anna-Luise Fischer, the estranged daughter of the eponymous Dr Fischer and quickly experiences a mutual if unlikely attraction. Her father, Dr Fischer, has become rich after inventing a perfumed toothpaste. He is now known for his notorious dinner parties which attract the rich and famous. Alfred and Anna-Luise are married after a very short courtship and the problem of how to tell her father is one they eventually have to confront.

Jones finally plucks up the courage to go and see Fischer to tell him about the marriage, but Fischer is indifferent to the news. However, he later invites Jones to one of his slightly sinister and infamous dinner parties. Anna-Luise begs him not to go – the suggestion is that the parties will in some way corrupt him – but she relents, and out of curiosity Jones goes to one of the parties. At the party, Fischer sets out the ‘rules’: if a dinner guest does as she or he is instructed they will receives a valuable present at the end of the meal. This is simply a way for Fischer to humiliate his guests. Desperate for their reward they go only with the rules, pretending to find the experience amusing. Jones of course refuses to take part.

This would have been the last of their relationship with Dr Fischer and his ludicrous parties, but Anna-Luise is tragically killed in a skiing accident. Jones is devastated and considers suicide. He tells Fischer about his daughter’s death, but he needs unconcerned. When unexpectedly another party invitation arrives from Dr Fischer he decides to attend to vent his anger at his father-in-law’s indifference to his wife’s death by attending the dinner party and telling him precisely what he thinks of him and his ‘friends’.

This is of course the “Bomb Party” of the novel’s alternative title. Dr. Fischer explains the rules – he has hidden cheques for two million francs apiece within five crackers. Inside the sixth is a small bomb likely to kill whoever opens it. The guests are expected to chose a cracker and open it. A form of Russian roulette in other words. Most of the guests accept the challenge, partly suspecting that Dr Fischer would not really kill one of his guests. Jones, still feeling suicidally reckless, opens several of the crackers. I won’t spoil the ending for you but it was neither surprising nor satisfying.

Greene is quite clumsily discoursing on wealth and morality, but I am not convinced he had anything particularly interesting to say. Fischer is a monster who uses his wealth to abuse his ‘friends’, and they are sufficiently avaricious to allow him to treat them like that. Rich people aren’t very kind to one another. Who would have known? By contrast the romance at the heart of the novel is sweet albeit brief. Jones’s first person narration warns the reader early on that it is not going to last, so Anna-Luise’s death does not come as a shock. But we lose the more interesting character – Jones never really emerges as a convincing persona: having lost his hand in the war he has no expectation of a romance in later life, let alone with someone as exuberant as Anna-Luise. After her death he reverts to existing rather than living.

This was a late Greene novella, not much more than an extended short story. It passed away a short journey, but I doubt it will linger long in the memory, nor encourage me to continue trying with Greene.

Dr Fischer of Geneva, or The Bomb Party, by Graham Greene, 1980

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Book review

Jack Maggs, by Peter Carey, 1997

I can’t tell you precisely how long Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs has sat on my bookshelves waiting to be read, but it is a long time – I was seriously considering abandoning any intent of reading it and regifting it to the charity shop from whence it came. I am so glad that I did not and instead on a whim started this original and entertaining novel.

When I first started it I wasn’t aware that Jacks Maggs was based on Dickens’ Great Expectations and was feeling rather smug when I identified the character Tobias Oates as being a portrait of the young Dickens. Oates is 24 and has had one successful novel published (Captain Crumley, a version of the Pickwick Papers). Oates is married but is already getting bored with his wife and is having a passionate affair with his eighteen-year old sister-in-law. There are close parallels with Dickens’ life here and he doesn’t come out of the novel well at all. Dickens did eventually separate from his wife after she had borne his many children and his relationships with his sisters-in-law don’t stand up to too much scrutiny. This speculative portrait of the early years of his marriage suggest that his affections for his wife were waning even at this stage.

The novel opens with the titular character returning from a life-sentence of transportation to Australia. Whilst imprisoned as a convict his life in Australia was brutally hard, but eventually he was freed and went on to earn a comfortable living and a place in respectable society by becoming a brickmaker. He uses some of this money to trace his young son, abandoned back in England, and provide him with a good education. This of course is essentially the storyline of Great Expectations, but seen from Magwitch/Maggs’s point of view. On returning to England to find his son, leaving a young family back in Australia, Maggs risks the death penalty which faced all those who left Australia after a life sentence. He finds his son’s house empty – he has fled to his club after being forewarned of his father’s intention to come calling – and takes a job as a footman in the household of Mr Percy Buckle, the next door neighbour. His predecessor in the role has recently died by suicide and one of the novel’s mysteries and sub-plots is the background to this death. Maggs is a brutal man, vividly realised by the author, and quite unsuited to the subservient role of footman. In this role he encounters Oates, a dinner guest in the Buckle household, who is intrigued by the rough character who is attending table. Oates offers to hypnotise Maggs to help him with a painful tic that has developed in his face, a result of his being brutally whipped. Oates real intention is to discover Maggs’ backstory, which he quickly does, much to Maggs’s anger when he finds out his identity has been revealed. Maggs only agrees to be hypnotised if Oates will tell him how to find a notorious thief-taker who he believes will help him track down his son.

The novel slightly stalls at this point. The Great Expectations storyline has been left some way behind, and the characters and events repeat themselves while waiting for the deadline by which Oates has agreed to reveal the identity of the thief taker to come around. Maggs discovers his identity has been revealed, and reacts with anger, effectively taking Buckle’s household and Oates along with it hostage. Maggs doesn’t follow a plan or behave in any way strategically – he just uses cunning and the threat of violence to get his way. A trip to Gloucester to find the thief-taker is a wild-goose-chase which doesn’t seem to serve any particular purpose in the narrative (unless it was following a story-line in GE that I have managed to forget!) and puts off the climax in which all the characters come together in a dangerous and potentially violent end to the novel. Dickens was always careful to give his villains an ending that Victorian civic society would approve of, however charismatic they might be, but Carey is less anxious to comply with Victorian morality and (spoiler alert) allows Maggs a happy ending that for much of the novel appears deeply unlikely. Oates on the other hand suffers a painful loss that runs parallel with a similar loss in Dickens’ life, showing that not all immoral behaviour escapes judgment, even if the judgment is delivered on a young woman rather than Dickens/Oates himself.

I thought it would be an interesting to compare this novel with a more recent reimagining of Dickens, Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead. Google’s AI tells me that the latter novel is the more radical reinterpretation of the two, set as it is in the Appalachians in modern times, and focussing on the opoid epidemic. But it was also in other ways a traditional and fairly close retelling of the Dickens novel, albeit updated, whereas I thought Carey’s novel, while retaining the original setting, was a more imaginative narrative. It uses the Dickens text as a jumping off point but also blends the events of Great Expectations with episodes from Dickens’ life itself. It also uses what I think of as the ‘Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’ technique of showing the events of the novel from an entirely new perspective, revealing depths to the original that were previously unexplored. I think on balance I found the Carey text the more impressive of the two (compared that is with the Kingsolver novel, not the Dickens!) although in terms of critical and popular reaction Demon Copperhead has been far more successful. It is interesting that two very well established authors chose to turn to Dickens for inspiration (of course there are many others doing the same thing) rather than crafting entirely new narratives.

Jack Maggs, by Peter Carey, 1997

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Book review

Aiding and Abetting, by Muriel Spark, 2000

Aiding and Abetting was Muriel Spark’s penultimate novel. It is a retelling of the notorious case of ‘Lucky’ Lucan, a British aristocrat who in the 1970’s murdered his children’s nanny, battered his wife almost to death (she having been his original target) and then went on the run, never to face justice. He is the recurring subject of tabloid stories, being ‘discovered’ living in the Australian outback or South Africa every few years.

Spark tells this story through the unusual lens of Dr Hildegard Wolf, a fake-psychiatrist ‘practising’ in Paris, who is consulted by two men, both of whom claim to be Lucan. They have discovered that she, like them, has a secret – in a previous incarnation she was Beate Pappenheim, a ‘fake stigmatic’ – someone who claimed to experience the wounds Christ suffered on the cross, wounds which mysteriously heal and reappear periodically. Using this story Beate/Hildegard took charitable donations from the faithful and the gullible, and when her fraud (she used period blood to simulate her wounds) was uncovered, fled the country. assuming a new identity.

It’s never clear whether the Lucan claimants are intending to blackmail Wolf – they need the money, their supporters who have kept them secure from the law for decades finally beginning to run out – or whether they enjoy the experience of being able to tell their story free from any risk of exposure. Wolf quickly works out that the men are working together, one being the real Lucan and the other a decoy, helping collect donations of support while leading the police and others astray. But this is all largely a framework within to tell or retell the notorious story of Lucan’s murder of Sandra Rivett, the Lucans’ nanny, and attempted murder of his wife. Lucan sees this as a Shakespearean tragedy instigated by his wife’s legal battle for custody of their children (they were divorcing), made worse by his constant gambling losses. He is the victim in his version of the story. The protection he is offered by friends in escaping justice is his god-given right.

When reading Aiding and Abetting I was left with the impression that it was poorly written, with a lot of repetition and sub-plots that peter out. Poorly written by Spark’s standards that is – she is normally a very intelligent writer with intricate plots, well developed characters and deft control of her material, none of which could be found here. I went back to the text several times to try and find evidence for this impression, but came up empty-handed. Perhaps I was looking for something that wasn’t there? As a reader you have to both trust and challenge your instincts – trust them as first impressions, but nevertheless check them just in case they are prejudices bobbing to the surface. Always give the author the benefit of the doubt (OK- not always; there are some authors who just don’t deserve the benefit of the doubt. E L James comes to mind, as do Jeffrey Archer and Dan Brown. But that’s just about it). If you are left with an impression, try and work out why. Well, for a start in Aiding and Abetting Spark doesn’t really have anything new or interesting to say about the Lucan case. She uses it as the structure for her story, but ends up leaning against it lazily. Spark claimed the novel’s theme was ‘blood’ and while there is plenty of blood in the novel, multiple references don’t add up to a theme. None of the novel’s characters are engaging – some are pretty forgettable – and the story doesn’t do justice to the real victim, the children’s nanny, who remains a largely one-dimensional and voiceless figure. (As part of my background reading for this review I was pleased to note that more recently, in 2019, Jill Dawson wrote The Language of Birds which tells the events of the Lucan murder from the point of view of the victim). If I felt ambivalent about the novel, the appallingly predictable and unfunny ending, a tribute of sorts to Evelyn Waugh but with none of the wit and about seventy years too late, left me in no doubt that this was a bit of a dud.

I really hesitate to suggest that Spark, in her early 80’s when this was written, was running out of steam, but I can’t find any other reason why an author usually so careful in her construction and characterisation would not live up to those standards. Perhaps I should read her final novel, The Finishing School, to see if that hypothesis stands up?

Aiding and Abetting, by Muriel Spark, 2000

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Book review

Orwell’s Roses, by Rebecca Solnit, 2021

There is a scene is Stella Gibbons’s near-perfect Cold Comfort Farm where the heroine, Flora, meets the appalling Mr Mybug in a tea shop. She tries to avoid him but he is unshakeable and tries to impress her by talking about his latest project. He is convinced Branwell Bronte wrote Wuthering Heights and in his research has found three letters from him to an aunt in Ireland. These letters are “little masterpieces of repressed passion.  They are full of tender little questions… he asks her how is her rheumatism…has her cat, Toby, ‘recovered from the fever?’ … what is the weather like at Derrydownderry…?’” This portrait, of a pseudo-intellectual taking an obscure fact from the life of an author and blowing it up into a profound insight into their life and work, cannot be bettered, but in Orwell’s Roses, Rebecca Solnit gives it a good go.

In the mid-1930’s Orwell rented a small cottage in Wallington, Hertfordshire. He ran the local shop from the front room of the cottage and tended the small garden, planting fruit trees, vegetables, and roses. Those roses may or may not be still flowering in the cottage garden, although this seems both improbable and unimportant. In the course of the many thousands of articles, reviews, essays and letters he wrote he inevitably also referenced roses from time to time. But the idea that this scant piece of information can tell us anything significant about Orwell, either as a man or as a writer, is ludicrous. Although sceptical I was genuinely prepared to be persuaded I was wrong. I expected Solnit to have dug up some long-forgotten essay or letter in which Orwell wrote about the significance of roses to his world view, perhaps using their connection to England’s heritage as a metaphor for, well, anything. But of course he didn’t write any such thing and this left the author struggling mightily to make any kind of case. Chapters are devoted to the commercial rose growing industry in Columbia for example, in which unsurprisingly workers rights are undermined and working conditions are tough (although it is hardly a dark satanic mill situation). The author draws clumsy parallels between these hot greenhouses full of roses with Orwell’s exploration of the British mining industry in the 1930’s, but almost any third-world factory or sweatshop would have delivered the same set of comparisons.

A few years ago, shortly after lockdown, I was browsing in my local bookshop with one of my sons. Knowing my admiration for all things Orwell, he pointed this book out. My initial reaction probably seemed a little churlish (I do hope not, but fear it might have been) – that this felt like the scraping of a barrel. All of Orwell’s primary influences – Empire, class, the BBC, literature, politics etc – have been documented and investigated at length, so here was someone writing about his love of gardening. Gardening might have made it into the top ten of a list of Orwell’s interests, perhaps, but did it tell us anything we didn’t already know about the author, his works and his politics? I hazarded that the answer was no, and decided not to invest the £20 or so that the hardback would have cost me. A second-hand bookshop bargain made the decision a lot easier more recently, but my initial judgment – that this was a really tenuous thesis that it would be hard to sustain – was vindicated. There’s no questioning that the author makes a strong effort in arguing that there was some significant connection between Orwell and floristry, but effort doesn’t equal success in this case. See here for example:

“He (Orwell) went on to classify flowers among hobbies, and hobbies among the characteristics of people who valued liberty and private life, but he had opened a door for a room he hadn’t gone into, or perhaps a door onto something much larger than a room. If you do go through this door marked aesthetics and Orwell, you wander toward the very center of his life’s pursuits. (188).

No you don’t. And even if you do, roses are entirely peripheral to that room/area of interest.

Solnit writes at length about the significance of flowers to our lives. There are times where she seems to forget that the book is supposed to be about Orwell, only dragging him back into the text unconvincingly in chapter-ending summaries. But when she does write about Orwell, particularly in the book’s final chapters looking at the extraordinary productivity at the end of his life, she writes well. It is rewarding to spend time revisiting this period of his life, when he took the bizarre decision to move to Jura with his very young son, shortly after his wife Eileen had died, but carried on writing ferociously. The text ends with a chapter on Orwell’s significance today and she rightly points out that the word Orwellian has a resonance in these times that even words like Shakespearean or Dickensian do not. I was expecting the text’s final peroration to see roses drawn back into the discussion, but I was really pleased to see that in the end this didn’t (and probably couldn’t) happen. Solnit writes so much more interestingly about Orwell when she isn’t struggling to tie his work to her poorly-conceived theme.

Orwell’s Roses, by Rebecca Solnit, 2021

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