Backlisted - The Inheritors by William Golding

Episode Date: June 22, 2020

William Golding's second novel The Inheritors (1955) is the book featured in this episode of Backlisted. Joining John and Andy to explore this intense, visionary account of the fall of Neanderthal man, published just a year after Lord of the Flies, are two returning Backlisted guests, SF novelist Una McCormack and writer and critic Andrew Male. Also in this episode Andy has been reading Square Haunting by Francesca Wade, while John talks about Staying Human, a forthcoming poetry anthology from Bloodaxe Books.Timings: (may differ due to variable advert length)7'52 - Square Haunting - Francesca Wade12'36 - Staying Human (Poetry Anthology)17'56 - The Inheritors by William Golding* To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops.* For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm*If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Was that for work? No. That was just for pleasure. Where do you find such deep content? I find it on Netflix Children's. Oh, wow. That's great. But I'm not going to tell you, I did it on Netflix Children's. Oh, wow. That's great.

But I'm not going to tell you the treasures on Disney Plus are just unbelievably great. Absolutely amazing stuff. On Disney Plus, are you a Mandalorian fan? Oh, God, yes. Yeah. It's marvellous, isn't it? Absolutely incredible. The greatest Herzog performance ever, I think.

It's amazing. It's just proper good. Much better than it has any right to be. Proper good music as well. Yeah. I wonder, John, if you could give us some clue as to how it sounds. Well, he's just playing a baddie, you know. He's actually playing a character in the thing.

I think he's some kind of gangster, some kind of, you know, it's just Werner. It's clearly Werner. It makes no attempt to be anything other than Werner Herzog, really. It's proper brilliant. It's proper good. It's joyous, yeah. How did you feel about the big reveal when you saw what he looked like?

Did that feel, did you get to that point in the series? I haven't seen all of it. No, because the Mandalorian, he never takes his mask off, and then he does, and you're like, oh, that's not right. It's just some guy. It's just some bloke. We're now calling them, because of my inability to type, we're now calling those things spolliers in our house.

Spolliers. Listeners, that won't be the last time you hear about Star Wars in this podcast. Una, where are you? I'm in Cambridge, which is a city in the east of England, I believe, because I haven't seen anything of it in about two months. I haven't been beyond my garden in two months. It's a lovely garden, but beyond it is Cambridge,

which I currently know only through Pokemon Go stops Andrew where are you? I'm in South Norwood in South London I'm in my bedroom You're in one of the literary hubs aren't you there? South Norwood where Raymond Chandler lived and D.H. Lawrence

lived and Arthur Conan Doyle is about four houses away from this house as well, the house that Arthur Conan Doyle was born in as well. It's a bit of a dump. I might not have been while he was there. Sorry. I hope the person who lives in Arthur Conan Doyle's house isn't listening. So it's fine.

It's an absolutely fine house, yeah. What I thought if they all lived in the same road at the same time. Stella Street. Or Bloomsbury, yeah. What I thought if they all lived in the same road at the same time. Stella Street. Or Bloomsbury, yeah. Yes! Hello and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast that gives new life to old books. Today you find us in a forest,

skeins of light dapple our skin and the sound of the Silver River fills our heads. We're driven by hunger and see pictures of fat grubs crawling from logs and green bowls pushing through the dark soil. But on the wind, there is a new smell and an unfamiliar sound. I'm John Mitchinson, publisher of Unbound, the platform where readers crowdfund the books they really want to read. And I'm Andy Miller, author of The Year of Reading Dangerously.

And joining us today are multiple returnees, good eggs and official friends of Backlisted, Dr Una McCormack and Mr Andrew Mayle. Yay! Welcome back, guys. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Marvellous.

Marvellous. Dr Una McCormack is a New York Times and USA Today bestselling writer of science fiction. Her most recent novel, The Last Best Hope, is a spin-off from the TV series Star Trek Picard. She is particularly interested in women's science fiction and this

is her fifth appearance on Backlisted. Her previous episodes were Number 30, Venetia by Georgette Heyer, Number 49, Look at Me by Anita Bruckner. Number 71, The Return of the King by J.R.R. Tolkien. And number 98, Ridley Walker by Russell Hoban.

And so, Dr. McCormack, you joined us to discuss the author of Lord of the Rings. You're here today to discuss the author of Lord of the Rings. You're here today to discuss the author of Lord of the Flies. And so when we do an episode about the work of Michael Flatley, you'll be the first person we call. Well, I did Irish dancing as a little girl, so you better have called me, I think. I think that would be the most amazing episode of Batlisted we ever did.

The Riverdance episode, yes. Yeah. Interpretive dance for radio, yeah. Also joining us today is Andrew Mayle. Andrew is the Senior Associate Editor of Mojo magazine and writes on TV, books and film for The Guardian, Sight & Sound and The Sunday Times. This is Andrew's sixth appearance on Batlisted,

which we think is a record. Is that a record? I think it is a record. Oh. He joined us for episode 10, The High Window by Raymond Chandler, episode 24, Cold Hand in Mind by Robert Aikman, episode 52, We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson, episode 78, Ghosts by Edith Wharton,

and episode 104, The Breaking Point by Daphne du Maurier, these last four being Halloween specials. And he'll be back, back, back later in the year for another Halloween special. And in fact, we think Dr. McCormack, too, will be back later in the year to discuss an author. We can't reveal who that is yet, but you and I have discussed it. Don't look like you don't know what I'm talking about.

The penny has dropped. I've remembered yeah i've activated those brain cells yeah and as is traditional on andrew's appearances if you've been listening to this podcast for several years you'll know we always try to remember to ask him this andrew we're here to talk about the inheritors by william golding if the inheritors were a Gene Kelly film, which Gene Kelly film would it be? Brigadoon, of course. Brigadoon. It would be Brigadoon. I thought, okay, right.

Okay, what we'll do is we'll come back to your answer later on. Yes. Because I know you're worried that if we discuss Brigadoon too early. It might give away the ending of The Inheritors. I thought you were going to say Gene Kelly's film Inherit the Wind. Ooh. Because it's about a debate in a courtroom about whether man is or isn't descended from apes.

I thought that was too obvious. Yeah. I thought you'd have been disappointed with that choice. I think Brigadoon is much, much better. Yeah, it's a brilliant choice. Yeah, we're here to talk about, as Andy said, The Inheritors by William Golding, his second published novel after Lord of the Flies,

first released by Faber and Faber in 1955, and it's one of the titles on the list that Andy and I made when we had our very first backlisted meeting and we were talking about books that we might like to feature I know exactly what we said John we said I can remember saying to you like if we did William Golding we could do any of his books except Lord of the Flies that was and then we said but if we did it wouldn't it be amazing if we did The Inheritors and so here we are and here we we are, five years later. Anyway,

before we slip into the dappled prelapsarian woodland of that novel, Andy, what have you been reading this week? I've been reading a book called Square Haunting by Francesca Wade, which was published by Faber at the start of this year, subtitled Five Women, Freedom and London Between the Wars. Francesca Wade has set this book, it's non-fiction, in Mecklenburg Square in London on the fringe of Bloomsbury, physically and arguably symbolically. Mecklenburg Square was a place with a sort of a base of academics, feminist activists, artists, bohemians and among those were five women, the five women that she focuses on in this book and they were hd the modernist poet dorothy l sayers detective novelist translator of dante and much more besides jane ellen harrison classicist and translator eileen power historian broadcaster and pacif, and last but by no means least, some woman called Virginia

Wolfe. And there is no one scene in the book where all five of those women meet. But at various points, they either come close to sharing a flat, meet somewhere, pass in the street. come close to sharing a flat, meet somewhere, pass in the street. And what the book is really about, I think, is women in that era forging their way to find a space where they could work and live independently. So to make the obvious comparison, where they could find rooms of their own from which they could go out and thrive as people. So it's a group biography. It's clearly a literary biography if you are interested in H.D. or Dorothy L. Sayers or Virginia Woolf or Hope Murley's.

There's a woman called Hope Murley's who, Una, I assume you know a bit about Hope Murley's or a lot about Hope Murley's, partly because of her reputation as a fantasy novelist. Yeah, I think the novel of hers that stayed in print was Lud in the Mist, which is a very joyful and a bit like Rosetti's Goblin Market, actually. That stayed in print. It was sort of very well known amongst science fiction and fantasy readers.

And then at the same time, she's kind of being rediscovered as a modernist poet, particularly her 1919 poem Paris, which has just been reissued, hasn't it, by Faber? Yeah, I've just read it. One of the things I wanted to say about Square Haunting is apart from the fact that it's extremely enjoyable, well-written, informative, thoughtful book in its own right, like several other books I've talked about in the last few episodes of Backlisted, like Romantic Moderns, like John Piper's Bright and Aquatint, it's also a book that gives you loads of other things

that you want to read. I mean, I jotted down half a dozen things. Immediately I finished that. I thought, I really want to try and catch up with that. So Lud in the Mist, which was reissued about 18 months, two years ago, 18 months ago. I think it pretty much stays in print. I think Gollux have got it, haven't they,

in their fantasy range. But this edition of Paris is, and if you haven't read Paris, it's just incredible. No, it's amazing. I was just going to say, absolutely incredible. Just been republished by Faber. So that's widely available in print with a full commentary built into it as well.

It's hard to think that T.S. Eliot hadn't read it when he wrote The Wasteland. And it describes a walk by a flaneuse across Paris at a specific historical social moment. I found that really exciting to read. And I also read Between the Acts, which I talk about on the last lot list that we recorded by Virginia Woolf. So I'm not going to read anything from Square Haunting

because I don't think I nearly need to. I think, you know, this has come praised by Sarah Bakewell and Edmund Gordon and Sally Rooney and all sorts of people. It's just come out in the States. And it's one of those lovely books that kind of transcends genres, really. And it's one of those lovely books that kind of transcends genres, really. It kind of manages to do that thing about being deep and chatty. That's a good trick if you can pull it off.

And that's what Francesca Wade has done here. John, what have you been reading this week? So the book I'm going to talk about hasn't been published yet. It's called Staying Human. And it's the fourth in a series of now pretty legendary anthologies produced by the independent UK independent poetry publisher Blood Axe. Started in 2002 with a volume called Staying Alive, which went on to sell, I mean, more than any other anthology of that year, probably of any year. It's over 140,000 copies, I think, in the UK alone. And there have been two subsequent volumes,

Being Human, Being Alive, and now this volume, Staying Human. And the reason I'm talking about it before it's been published is that we've joined forces, Unbound have joined forces with Bloodaxe to offer a pre-order deal to people. Bloodaxe, like a lot of independent publishers, have suffered badly as a result of COVID. And this book is scheduled to be published on October the 1st, National Poetry Day. And they really need to get as many orders in as they can. And they're using Unbound, the Unbound website, to do that, to make sure they can get enough money in to make the publication date of the 1st of October viable.

So not only will you get the most brilliant collection of poetry, these are wonderful, wonderful, wonderful anthologies from poets taken from all over the world, 500 poems from all over the world, addressing the world as it stands at the moment. So they're inspiring. They are political. There are love poems. Really, the whole of human emotion is covered by them.

There are even some poems, and I'm going to read one in a moment, that get right up to date and talk about life under lockdown, post-COVID life. Yeah, long before I think people were talking about poetry as a sort of pharmacy, these books were the books that people gave one another as gifts for comfort and solace, but also for inspiration. They're so international, so rich. I discovered more poets, I think, through these anthologies than any other, because Neil Astley, the editor, the founder of Bloodaxe, is such a careful and sensitive editor. So some of the poets that you'll find have been featured on Backlister before, Fiona Benson, Jay Bernard, Raymond Antrobus. and Jay Bernard, Raymond Antrobus. But also, if you want to answer that question,

what is it I can do? How can I read more writers of colour? How can I read more interesting black writers? There's an amazing collection here from UK writers like Roger Robinson and Kwame Dawes and Jackie Kay and Malika Booker and Zvisa Benson to amazing American writers, famous ones like Audre Lorde and Claudia Rankine, Wanda Coleman, but also new generation, Danes Smith, Jericho Brown, Joshua Bennett, Terence Hayes.

It's a really, really rich, rich thing. So before you read the poem, how can people support Blood Axe and support this book happening? If you go onto Unbound and look for Staying Alive and play through it, you can get obviously a paperback and the e-book bundled together. But also for the first time ever, they're doing a beautiful hardback version of the book for £50,

which will have head and tail bands and be something to keep and treasure. So help Bloodaxe, educate yourself about poetry, discover an amazing collection of poets that you might otherwise not hear, and give it as gifts to friends. So I'm going to read one poem from the book by the British poet, Pakistani-born British poet, Imtiaz Dhaka, who happens to be published by Bloodaxe and famously was one of those poets who was considered for the laureateship. She didn't take it, but she continues to produce, I think, really beautiful and important work. And this

is called Crane's Lean In. And it was written on 22nd of March, 2020, the Barbican London, And it was written on 22nd of March, 2020, the Barbican London. That, I think you remember, is the day before full lockdown. So Cranes Lean In. Cranes lean in, waiting for an all clear that will not come. Forehead pressed to glass, phone at my ear. I learn to sail on your voice over a sadness of building sites, past King's Cross, St Pancras, to the place where you are. You say nothing is too far.

Mothers will find their daughters. Strangers will be neighbours. Even saviours will have names. You are all flame in a red dress. Petals brush my face. You say at last that cherry blossom has arrived. As if that is what we were really waiting for. Thanks. There you go.

Staying Alive, edited by Neil Astley, published by Bloodaxe, out on the 1st of October. But you can pre-order a copy on Unbound now. We'll pick this up again after some marvellously witty and interesting adverts. I think we should now, as Andrew and Una have been, good enough to answer the blast on the backlisted cunt shell and arrived here

to be ritually killed by us later. No, to discuss The Inheritors by William Golding. But I'd like to ask them both first. The Inheritors was William Golding, but I'd like to ask them both first. The Inheritors was William Golding's second novel, published in 1955, only a year after, more or less, after the publication of Lord of the Flies. Written, first draft written in less than a month, first draft written in less than a month,

finished in four months, and the same four months in which Golding also wrote Pinch and Martin. Dr. McCormack, even by your standards, that's prolific. That's sickening, actually. That's absolutely sickening. I mean, I can write a book in four months, but I can't write The Inherited. Una, can you remember when you... Well, it's almost an impossible question, because it's so ingrained in all our lives and in the culture we've grown up in. But can you remember when you first might have read Golding or Lord of the Flies?

Well, the only Golding I had read before reading for this was Lord of the Flies. And, oh, I guess along with everyone else, I must have been, it must have been a book that was set at school or a book that was being passed around school or a book that you felt you had to tick off in some way. But that was all that I had read. And my perception of Golding was, oh no, I had read The Pyramid. I'd read The Pyramid for a reading group. I'd bounced off it slightly. But my perception was sort of sea books. I think I sort of had a kind of hierarchy with Horatio Hornblower or Master and Commander Patrick O'Brien, something like that, but a bit more pitch literary.

And then when I opened this, I kind of went, oh, okay. Hand me the rest of them immediately. I'll read those. So, and I think the reason I did was because I opened them within three pages. I went, oh, he's a science fiction writer. Oh, okay. All right.

So I, all right. I know where I am now. We're going to explore that. But did you not feel that when you opened Lord of the Flies? Well, I was a much younger reader, for one thing. So I was probably about, what, 14 or 15 or 16. So I wouldn't have been reading it as intelligently, I think, and possibly an obligation to read. And you never like books that are set for you, do you? But no, I hadn't sort of twigged it. Because whenever you get asked, oh, is a science fiction writer ever won the Nobel?

And you go, well, Doris Lessing. And they go, OK, all right, Golding as well. I just hadn't realised. Really interesting response. I want to come back to this. But Andrew, let me ask you can you remember when you might first have read anything by William Golding absolutely it was for my O level so I remember reading numerous mock O level questions about Lord of the Flies and I did my

English one of my English literature questions was on Lord of the Flies. And the weird thing about that is, because it's kind of related to how the Inheritance is similar but different to Lord of the Flies. One of the questions that always came up in the mock O-level

and all the O-level papers was how would you describe the island in Lord of the Flies in terms of its geography? And the reason why I think that's important was two reasons really. One, it was the question I always avoided because I was terrible at geography and scared of that question. But the point is it's basically saying how brilliant Golding maps the island and it gives you a sense of space so you know where you are

at every point in the book and I think when we move on to what's different about the inheritors and maybe why the inheritors is not so much of an easy in I think that's an important point it's it's about his ability to manage space and geography and what he holds back in the inheritors in terms of what he gives you in lord of the flies and you told me a thing about which i wonder if you would pass on to the listeners about when you read the inheritors um you had a kind of like a double take with it didn't you it's an important thing is to do with the perspective shift at the end of the inheritors and we all we've already had a perspective shift at the end of lord Inheritors. And we've already had a perspective shift at the end of Lord of the Flies

when you move from the children's world to the naval officer arriving and how the naval officer suddenly sees the children and you realise it's a completely different world. But you mentioned to me something about the ending. So I was prepared for there to be an ending. I was waiting for this change about the ending. So I was prepared for there to be an ending. I was waiting for this change at the ending. And I read it and I go, oh, it's exactly like the ending of Lord of the Flies.

There's a perspective shift. You move from one world into another world. And I thought, it's a nice trick, but that's all it is. And I finished the book about half 11 at night. I just ploughed through those final pages. And so I went to sleep. about half 11 at night. I'd just ploughed through those final pages. And so I went to sleep and then I woke up and it was literally like that, you know, the gif of the guy's mind exploding.

It was literally like that. I suddenly, that perspective shift picked up meaning and it had ripples and it grew and it grew. And I was just thinking, how the hell did he do that? That is astonishing. And I couldn't think about anything else other than the numerous different levels upon how and the way the ending works. Before I go to John, Nicky, I think it's right.

I'm right in saying, aren't I, that you've owned a copy of The Inheritors for many years. Yes, it's been with me for some time. It's been on my shelf since I was 20. Only I don't... Ten years. Only ten years ago, yeah. Thanks, thanks, Andrew.

No, yeah, but I didn't... The problem is I thought that meant I'd read it. It turned out that I hadn't read it. I just had it with me from house to house to house for 25 years. And has the experience of reading it changed how you feel about it as opposed to it just being on the shelf? Yes, I'm quite proud of the fact that I've read it. Now I'm going to look at it and think, I've read that little baby,

that little spine. I know what it's about. It's actually got a sticker inside with my mum's name on it, which is how I can date it because she hasn't lived in that house for a very long time. And now I'm going to cross out that sticker. Now it's finally, you finally own it. You've inherited it properly.

Inherited? Let's see what you did there. John. Okay. But I'm coming to you because when did you first read The Inheritors? So I first read The Inheritors, I guess I would have been 17. And it would be fair to say that at the time it blew me away because I was fascinated as a kid, always been fascinated as a kid.

I got a Lady Bird book, Stone Age Man in Britain, and I used to spend my weekends loved looking for arrowheads. And I think very early on I got this idea that there was this strange tension between Homo sapiens and Neanderthal. I became quite interested in the Neanderthal, like everybody else I had to read, Lord of the Flies at school. We all remember it. But I picked up that he'd written a novel about Neanderthals,

so I read the book, and as I say, I can't say I understood all of it. I can't say it didn't take me quite some time. But the language and the story, it's one of my holy books. It's a bit like we might probably talk about Ridley Walker later. It was one of those books that I feel somehow was written out of something already inside me and the reason I that it became even more famous for me is I fairly obviously when you read this book you think what happened why did they die out and what happened was it was and I am afraid in one biology lesson, I was being told that by my biology teacher, there was no evidence that there had been interbreeding.

And I got up and I said, I said, imaginatively on every other level, I think that's absolute nonsense. It must be nonsense. I discovered one brilliant fact is that a female Neanderthal, apparently they were stronger. They had twice as much upper body strength as a Homo sapien male. And I thought, well, if there's a group of Neanderthal women, as it were, in the next valley, you're going to want to go and check them out. It's just, it is, as Golding would say, it's human nature.

So this idea that we lived side by side and didn't interbreed in Europe for 30,000, 40,000 years, it seemed totally implausible. Anyway, he publicly humiliated me in front of the class. And then years later, obviously, of course, science has now proven that other than in sub-Saharan Africa, almost everybody on the planet, except in sub-Saharan Africa, has somewhere between 2% and 4% Neanderthal DNA, which is very likely to have been through inbreeding. So I was right.

And Golding was right. What was that teacher's name? Your Alan Partridge moment is here. What was that teacher's name? He was called Mr. Watson. Ha, Watson. He was on many levels. He was a biology teacher on many levels.

He was very good. And he was just spouting the party line. But it taught me actually sometimes, because, of course, famously, we'll probably talk about this again, this book is not based on deep research into Neanderthals. And, in fact, Charles Monteith, who we'll talk about, the editor at Faber, said, you know, had there been, had he sent it out to paleoarchaeologists, it probably would have inhibited Golding's ability to tell the story. But there is a truth about it, the truth that

he captures and the genius of the novel is sort of more true than, in some ways, more true that it took the science 30 years to catch up with it so that's one of the reasons it's important to me okay so i've got the blurb here from the original first edition dust jacket so this was written by golding and charles monteith in 1955 and bear in mind what everything that we've just been saying uh about what a challenging book this can be the first time you read it um and we should also add that lord of the flies had been published to a sort of it did okay right it did okay and they were sufficiently keen on it to to to get another book out of that author quickly.

But you're still trying to place the author and you're trying to place the book in 1955, where people don't really know what Lord of the Flies is. So here we go. When the spring came, the people, what was left of them, moved back by the old paths from the sea, across the river to the steep places and the waterfall and the island where they had never been, and to the cave. But this year strange things were happening, things that had never happened before, terrifying things. There were inexplicable sounds and smells, unimaginable creatures half-glimpsed through the close curtain of spring leaves, new creatures, men. Though they did not know it yet, though they were never really to know it, the day of the people was over.

It had ended a long time ago. ended a long time ago. This novel is a vivid evocation of the world before history, of man's predecessors and of man's entry into his inheritance. Its characters are almost unbelievably real and alive and their story is as deeply moving as it is compellingly exciting. William Golding is the author of Lord of the Flies, which when it was published in 1954, had one of the most remarkable and enthusiastic receptions given to a first novel in recent years. The Inheritors is a worthy successor. Like Lord of the Flies, it is distinguished by superbly good writing, great narrative skill, and above all, vivid and profound imagination.

Drawing on Jacket by Anthony Gross. I think that's worthy of acclaim, that blurb. It's a very, very good blurb, isn't it? Do you know what's interesting? They've basically, for the most recent version of The Inheritors, they've basically kept an edited version of that original blurb on the back. Yeah. The Inheritors didn't receive many contemporary reviews,

but it was reviewed in The Times in a roundup, and here's the review of it in the roundup. Mr William Golding goes further back in time, back to the period when Neanderthal man was giving way to man. It is hard to make characters called Locke, Oar and Farr of any passionate interest, although Mr Golding has a keen eye for creatures and landscapes that no longer exist. Perhaps it is wiser to keep Neanderthal man behind the bars of an outline of history, rather than to encourage him to run wild through luxurious forests of imaginative prose.

rather than to encourage him to run wild through luxurious forests of imaginative prose. Wow. That's one of those reviews that if I had written this book, which I should not have done, I would not have written it like this. But isn't that almost exactly what the American publishers say when they turn the book down? Because, you know, they say, oh, God, first schoolchildren are now cavemen.

Well, Monteith, actually, when he first got the manuscript, he says, that evening I started to read it, and after two pages put it down, filled with intense and utter dismay. Oh, God, I said to myself, first it was schoolboys, now it's cavemen. Bloody cavemen. But I took it up again, and apart from a hurried supper, didn't put it down until I'd finished it. It was another masterpiece.

And actually, it does begin to... So Arthur Kersler famously says that it gave him the impression of an earthquake in the petrified forests of the English novel in the Sunday Times. And John Davenport also says, you know, he's the most purely original English novel of the last decade. So he gets a kind of... he does get literary acclaim. But it doesn't get published in the US.

No, and in the US, Faber do a terrible thing. They allow, I think it's Harcourt Brace, to not publish it. They don't, and then won't give it to anybody else. Well, we're talking about Charles Monteith. Charles Monteith is the editor, later one of the directors of Faber and Faber, who famously, after Lord of the Flies had been rejected two dozen times by other publishers, picked it up off the slush pile in his third or fourth week working at Faber and Faber, recognised something in it, worked with Golding on it. That story is very well told, but I thought you'd just like to hear a little clip of Charles Monteith himself describing it. Every Tuesday morning, a professional

reading lady came in, and we'll call her Miss Parkinson. That's not her real name. And Miss Parkinson was a terrifying figure to us, because she was said to have an eagle eye, have incredible shrewdness. And she had also a great gift for summing up a book with a telling phrase. And it was a great guide to us for amateurish creatures when we, and that's about four editors, came in the afternoon. Now, I picked up this very unappetizing-looking manuscript. And Miss Parkinson had looked through it, and she read a test comment at the top, which said, rubbish about boys on a desert island, reject.

She actually said considerably worse than that, but we won't dwell on it. I wanted to just make the point about two reasons why Charles Monteith was such an extraordinary editor. The first is he discovered Golding and he discovered lord of the flies and the first point i wanted to make was you have to remember that he was own that golding's great piece of luck was not merely that he found it but that monteith had only been doing that job a few weeks because if monteith had been working at faber for even a couple of years he wouldn't have been

digging into the slush pile looking for books. So there's every possibility that it would have stayed in the slush pile with the other rejections. It had been rejected so widely. And the second thing to say about Monteith, brilliant editor, collaborator with Golding throughout his whole career, when Golding needed help and with the inheritors monteith's genius is he reads the inheritors as you were just saying john and he recognizes that it doesn't really need anything doing to it it just so whereas lord of the flies had needed all this extra work on the other hand golding writes the inheritors pretty much in less than a month hands it in and

monteith has got the the the eye to be able to go, we can publish this. This is a masterpiece. Also, I think the point that John makes as well, if it had gone for changes and if it had gone to experts, then probably Golding would have crumbled. He already saw that aspect in Golding's character as well. I mean, it's really a good point, Andy, you say about the newness

in the job. I mean, I always use, as I'm sure it's such a famous story, Lord of the Flies, that he noticed that the first 20 pages of the manuscript were kind of thumbed and yellowed and the rest of it didn't look like it had been. And actually what there is at the beginning of the book, of the original manuscript, is this kind of rather lurid kind of a description of a nuclear war and the aftermath

of a nuclear war, which is the preamble before they get to the island. And Monteith did that thing that it's very easy not to do. He read beyond that and read into the story and could see that by actually taking the beginning out and moving things around, there was actually a brilliant story to tell. So it's one of those things when you're kind of talking to junior editors, don't just read the first 40 pages of anything.

Una, I want to pick up what you were saying when we started about this being a science fiction novel, The Inheritors being a science fiction novel, or Lord of the Flies, for that matter, being a science fiction novel. The Inheritors was also reviewed in the TLS, although some months after it was published, and it was reviewed in a joint review with, do you know what? Go on. The Chrysalids by John Wyndham. Yeah, straight there, isn't it?

And Golding gets a good review and Wyndham gets a less good review in that instance. We know that Golding was a big science fiction reader, right? Yeah, complete addict. So why don't we think of these books as science fiction? Well, I think there's obviously questions of kind of snobbery around genre, which is unfortunate. That's just a shame. I think science fiction as a genre changes significantly in the 60s and it starts to diverge from literary fiction. a straight line for me from Wells, who is the epigram in this book. He quotes Wells and, you know, he's responding to a sort of fictionalised essay by Wells called The Grizzly

Ones about the Neanderthals. There's a line for me straight from Wells through Golding to people like J.G. Ballard and Nigel Neill. And then if you opened a book by Christopher Priest or Chris Beckett, you've just got an absolute straight line there, I think, of literary British science fiction. And somewhere along the lines, I think people lose their courage over science fiction. They stop reading it. They stop thinking of it as literary. And some people carry on. literary, and some people carry on. But the minute I opened this, I read a few pages and I went, oh, now I know why Andy's asked me. Okay. All right. He's not the ship guy. Because it does those two things that science fiction does. It does estrangements. You're immediately immersed in this completely alien perspective. And science fiction does that straight away. Now, this is one reason people don't like it, actually, is that they don't want to have to decode a book.

They don't want to sit down with a book and go, oh, today I need to be an anthropologist. And you do need to do that. You have to slow down and read at the pace of these people and start to unpick their otherness, their difference. So he does that. And then the other thing he does, and it's a classic science fiction, it's a first contact story.

It's an encounter of one civilisation with another. But also it posits the Homo sapiens are the aliens. Yeah, absolutely. It's an alien invasion story and man is the alien. Man is the invader. He is seen through the eyes of the neanderthals as an invader yeah and you're being asked to pull entirely into their perspective and to to live with them and be with them to empathize to find a a common humanity or a common homininity i don't know uh and then the shock ofising who you are in the book at the end.

On the sci-fi thing, I think that continues into the next book as well with Pincher Martin, because although it's ostensibly, you know, another shipwreck story, the visions that he has, and then, of course, the brilliant twist at the end, which I won't give away if you haven't read Pinch of Martin, but it's a big one. I even think, you know, I was thinking this morning that the Spire, it's like a spaceship. It's kind of like 2000. I read the Spire as science fiction. I completely read it as science fiction. They're on a generation ship.

It's a tight crew of people in a hermetically sealed area. It's a bunker story. And they're trying to get they're trying to get the navigational system to work with a promise of a sort of goal that they'll eventually get to it's incredible that the trappings that he takes and then reformulates them through i don't know paradise lost or uh you know uh lucidities and una una we you can you can prove this can't you you can prove this theorem because you discovered an excerpt from, I applaud your deep dive to bring back this pearl. You found a Star Wars anecdote about William Golding. I did. This is great. Well, the website, Golding's website is incredibly well maintained. I think it's maintained by his daughter.

Her memoir of him actually is superbly good. Wonderful. Really, really good. But bless them, on May the 4th, so may the 4th be with you on Star Wars Day, they posted this year, they posted this snippet. In his unpublished journals, William Golding writes that on Saturday 18th September 1982, he watched Star Wars six times with his grandchildren.

Star Wars is entrancing the grown-ups. However, by half past one in the afternoon, it has already been on three times, four times, perhaps five times, I'm not sure. Six times, which equals about 700 minutes. Hard to believe, but a fact. Judy Golding notes that he was particularly fond of the film's music and the Mos Eisley scene. Well, particularly fond of the film's music and the Mos Eisley scene. Well, we're all fond of the Mos Eisley scene. In 1983, he tried to hire The Empire Strikes Back,

but the film was not yet released on video. His response to that movie is not recorded. I like to think he particularly liked, as we all do, the blue elephant who plays the keyboards, whose name is Max something, isn't it? I'm not so good on Star Wars, but to your knowledge, though, I was thinking more of the appearance of Harrison Ford, of course. All right, well, let's go back to the book. Here's a clip from the early 90s of the novelist Penelope Lively talking about The Inheritors, a book that she's read and re-read. I suppose I first read it maybe 20 years or so ago,

and it's a book I read every five years or so. And I've often seen it as simply about the nature of evil. The last and most recent reading, I saw it as in fact being a novel about contingency, about the direction in which human nature has gone, whereas it might have gone in a completely different direction, being as it is about the encounter between the Neanderthalers and a group who sound like Stone Age men and are obviously Homo sapiens who wipe the lot of them out. And the suggestion seems to be that, but for the evolutionary twist, a whole other direction might have been taken. Whereas, in fact, because Homo sapiens has this awful propensity for evil, as well as this capacity for creativity, it's gone in our direction for better and for worse. It was a very risky thing to do. And of course, the huge risk he took was in giving them language.

As soon as he made them speak, he had to then use our assumptions and our way of seeing things. So this was the huge test that he put to himself. And he had to then think of a way to give them the sort of capacities that would have been theirs rather than ours. So I think that's very interesting what she says at the end there about the imaginative leap that Golding has to make. He sets himself a challenge and one of the things I found really exhilarating about reading this book is seeing somebody set themselves a seemingly impossible task and then pulling it off.

I think there are sustained passages of imaginative description in this as good as anything I've ever read. It's really astonishingly well done and consistent on its own rules. Anthropologically correct, we don't know. own rules anthropologically correct we we don't know but in terms of setting world building and in all senses it's extraordinarily good una do you have a a bit you could um read us so we can get a sense of that yes i do and i've chosen a bit which is sort of a uh almost a creation myth it's the old man um marle, is talking to them. What I think is really clever, not just the world building and the language and the immersion, is Golding's technique is so good

that when he chooses to come out of the tight vocalisation and give a kind of authorial gloss, a kind of nudge to you, it's seamless. You could go, oh, well, they wouldn't know that word or they wouldn't have that. But it's so carefully crafted and carefully done. And those are almost the bits, those are the extra bits worth listening out for, I think.

But this is a moment where the old man is talking about their creation myth. Now, Mal spoke. There was the great oar. She brought forth the earth from her belly. She gave suck. The earth brought forth woman, and the woman brought forth the first man out of her belly.

They listened to him in silence. They waited for more, for all that Mal knew. There was the picture of the time when there had been many people, the story that they all liked so much of the time when it was summer all year round and the flowers and fruit hung on the same branch. There was also a long list of names that began at Mal and went back, choosing always the oldest man of the people at that time. But now he said nothing more. Locke sat between him and the wind. You are hungry, Mal. A man who is hungry is a cold man. He lifted up his mouth. When the sun comes back, we will get food. Stay by the fire, Mal.

We will bring you food and you will be strong and warm. Then Far came and leaned her body against Mal so that three of them shut him in against the fire. He spoke to them between coughs. I have a picture of what is to be done. He bowed his head and looked into the ashes. The people waited. They could see how his life had stripped him. The long hairs on the brow were scanty

and the curls that should have swept down of the slope of his skull had receded till there was a finger's breadth of naked and wrinkled skin above his brows. Under them the great eye hollows were deep and dark, and the eyes in them dull and full of pain. Now he held up a hand and inspected the fingers closely. People must find food. People must find wood. He held his left fingers with the other hand. He gripped them tightly, as though the pressure would keep the ideas inside and under control. A finger for wood. A finger for food. He jerked his head and started again.

A finger for Ha. For Fa. For Nil. For Liku. He came to the end of his fingers and looked at the other hand, coughing softly. Ha stirred where he sat, but said nothing. Then Mal relaxed his brow and gave up. He bowed down his head and clasped his hands in the grey hair at the back of his neck.

They heard in his voice how tired he was. Ha shall get wood from the forest. Nil will go with him and the new one. Ha stood again and Far moved her arm from the old man's shoulders, but Mal went on speaking. Locke will get food with Far and Liku. Ha spoke. Liku is too little to go on the mountain and out on the plain. Liku cried out, I will go with Locke. Ma, Mal muttered under his knees. I have spoken. Now the thing was settled, the people became restless. They knew in their bodies that something was wrong, yet the word had been said. When the word had been said, it was as though the action was already alive in performance, and they worried. Haar clicked a stone aimlessly against the rock of the overhang, and Neil was moaning softly again.

Only Locke, who had the fewest pictures, remembered the blinding pictures of Aura and her bounty that had set him dancing on the terrace. He jumped up and faced the people, and the night air shook his curls. I shall bring that food in my arms. He gestured hugely. So much food that I stagger. So far grinned at him. There is not as much food as that in the world. What struck me listening to that is a brilliant reading. Again, Dr. McCormack, that's the other reason I ask you back. The vocabulary is so plain. Listening to that, it's such a sophisticated thing to be doing conceptually, but furthermore with a really limited vocabulary. The language is very simple, and yet you're being asked to take on board very sophisticated concepts.

And I think also that he doesn't trap himself into saying, oh, well, I've set these rules on my book. I'm going to stick with them. There's that whole passage of description where we pull back from the perspective and he just lets that omniscient narrator come in, words like scanty, inspecting the fingers. They're not going to have this in their mind. But Golding doesn't say, well, I've got to stay in.

There's a very cruel review on Goodreads that goes, Doug, pick up book, Doug, get bored. And the book isn't like that at all. It's incredibly sophisticated. It would be like that if it were no good. Yeah. But it's a mark of how good it is that it isn't like that. Exactly that.

I think what people struggle with, and maybe what people struggled with at the time and what people still struggle with, is the idea that it's a book without what we take as common in literature which is kind of intellectual contemplation you know you've basically got this confused being who does not think as we do so going back to what una was saying about the familiar made strange it's the familiar made strange on two levels. You're experiencing it through Locke,

but also you're experiencing it through Golding. And he basically says, you know, as you were saying, Andy, with incredibly simple language, he does something incredibly complicated and it conveys that their experience of the world is predominantly external. The book relies heavily on description, you know, and there's none of this. There's hardly any contemplation or internal reflection, things that we're used to in the novel. And I think that's a real problem for people when they're reading it initially. But it is the key to the novel.

So he so Golding has, you know, before Lord of lord of the flies he writes three novels that don't get published and he says they're right to not get published because they're not they're not books that are really about they're not books that are coming out of me in lord of the flies which started as a sort of a kind of out of reading books to his kids about islands he was reading lots and lots of books that were set on islands. It came out of that immediate imaginative kind of, what would it be like? And you feel this with The Inheritors as well. Golding didn't read contemporary fiction. He read Greek literature in Greek.

That was what sort of fed his imagination. There's a wonderful line he says about Greek language. He says it's transparency. He says the words seem to lie right against the face of real things. And you feel with the language that he uses for the Neanderthals, the people in the Inheritors, as you say, Andy, it's not fancy language. And it's not crucially. They imagine, but they don't think.

They don't reflect. And, fact the whole his whole kind of idea of the fall which is the thing that he goes back to that that you know original sin what we're in a way that it is a prelapsarian world the neanderthal unlike homo sapiens unlike the the the people who uh who destroy them uh don't have that And to try and do that in language and not, as you say, to make it kind of, to make it sort of sub-stick of the dump. It's incredible. If it were failed seriousness, you know, the definition of kitsch, you couldn't, the whole thing would collapse incredibly quickly.

There's such a pathos to it, such a hopelessness almost to it, such a tragedy. The word I thought all the time as I was reading it was desolation. Yeah. And there's something, I think what's so lovely, and another reason why it works, is it's very self-deprecating and they're not talking grunt. There's something extremely contemporary about Locke,

who's sort of a clueless man bumbling around in a situation that's just beyond his comprehension. I sympathise with that. But I think one of the reasons for that is because he's also golden yeah yeah you know i think i think golding part of golding is is lock but also i think the the tragedy of it is golding also recognizes something of himself in in the new people as well brilliant yeah in john carey's biography of golding which is an excellent uh biography there's a very moving bit really near the end of the book where he describes ted hughes reading from the inheritors

at golding's memorial service in salisbury cathedral salisbury cathedral of course adjacent to the school where golding taught for many years. There's also the building that, with its now infamous spire, had inspired, oh God, this is terrible, inspired the spire, terrible. Anyway, he talks about Ted Hughes reading from The Inheritors. And then I discovered that Hughes had written an essay about The Inheritors, which was published in a book called William Golding,

a tribute on his 75th birthday. And Hughes's essay is called Baboons and Neanderthals, a rereading of the inheritors and it it's very teddish but it has this little passage in it and i wanted to share this with people because it ties in with um what both una and andrew were were saying a moment ago ted Ted Hughes writes, our final impression when we read The Inheritors is of a comfortless judgment for the Cro-Magnon, but for the Neanderthals, authentic tragedy. The total effect is beautiful, powerful, and objective, but its real impact derives from the story's vitality as a symbol, a visionary dream projected from a calamity which is happening at this moment in the inner life of the reader before, during and after his reading one can hardly imagine how this private trauma could be touched

more directly and he goes on to say in spite of their brutish fate Locke and Farr live like saintly defectives in that other kingdom of our duality, even their suffering is a kind of awful joy, as Golding takes pains to show, as if this joy were merely the feeling tone of the fully operational body of instinct and the senses, of a perfect fittedness to the rejoicing of the Cro-Magnons of the humans seems debased, ugly, meaningless, artificial, desperate, pitiable. I thought that was very powerful. I thought that was very powerful and ties into so many of the things you were talking about. So right. That terrible line where they say, you know,

what else could we have done when they're sailing away, the humans? What else could we have done? God, it's a brilliant novel. So the success of Lord of the Flies allowed William Golding eventually to give up his day job, but in fact he didn't do so for many years because the sales of Lord of the Flies didn't come through straight away. And to add to the extent to which our jaws drop

when we consider the inheritors, he wrote it in a month at school while he should have been teaching kids. In his dinner hour. In his dinner hour, right. So here's a clip from the South Bank show in 1980 with Melvin Bragg asking William Golding about giving up the day job. Lord of the Flies was, as I remember, an almost instantaneous and a tremendous success,

critically and commercially. Did that commercial success enable you to quit school teaching? Yes, it did. And I'm still astonished at the situation. I really, really am astonished at it. I never thought it would happen to me. I always thought I would be a writer, but I never thought I'd make money at it.

In fact, to hark back to my father, he impressed on me. I think almost one of the last things I remember about him is his impressing on me that no member of our family would ever make any money except by hard and honest work. I've made it by light, delightful and maybe dishonest work. I don't know. By light, delightful and maybe dishonest work. I don't know.

Light, delightful and maybe dishonest work. Andrew, one of the things about Golding, Andrew, is that he had lived a full life before. He's in his early 40s when Lord of the Flies is published and he's had a fairly tempestuous life, really, up to that point. He fought in the Second World War. He was part of the D-Day landings. He'd been a teacher for many years. He seems to have been, depending on which pupil you listen to,

either a beguiling teacher or a distant and ineffectual one, but he kept plugging away, plugging away. Do you think that sense of the life lived exists in the fiction, certainly in those first few books? There's a spectre in all of his early books. There's a sense of, I mean, right from the start in The Inheritors, there is a sense of foreboding. There is a sense that there is something up ahead

that will foul everything up. And you get that in The Spire as well. And I always, I kind of look at it and think this is, you know, this is the depressive, this is the alcoholic and golden writing, the sense that kind of all will not go well. And he creates it beautifully in The Inheritors, this feeling right from the start, right from when the rotting log has moved, that, you know, the world is, something bad is coming.

And I feel that kind of Golding felt that in his own life, and you can sense it in the early fiction as well There's certainly the sense that Golding is channeling a lot of rage. There's a story in the biography we thought, listeners, over who was

going to tell this and I drew the long or short straw of Golding in the 70s being invited to dinner with his friend, the writer Andrew Sinclair. Other guests included Harold Pinter and his wife, Vivian Merchant and Gregory Peck. Andrew Sinclair had a puppet modelled on Bob Dylan, which was in the Golding's room when they came to a dinner in 1971. As usual, Golding got very drunk,

and the next morning Anne broke the news to Sinclair that her husband had destroyed the Bob Dylan puppet. He had woken in the middle of the night, attacked it under the impression that it was Satan, and buried it in the back of a garden. Sinclair subsequently retrieved it, and it still bears the marks of Golding's diabolic encounter. And that echoes, apparently William Golding loved music.

He was a very talented musician, albeit a self-persecuting one, but he hated two forms of music, Nicky. Do you know what they were? Pop music and Nicky. Do you know what they were? Pop music and show tunes. That's why there's no musical of the Inheritors. He was 50% right, I'd say. But what's the line that Golding uses about booze in the

Inheritors? It drew toward and it repelled. That sums him up up doesn't it absolutely you know and it's that is such a tragic scene when they get drunk on the mead as well because they're these two lovely neanderthals are suddenly fighting and it's heartbreaking they become human for that for that brief period they become human well Well, going back to the prelapsarian thing that John was saying, it's the fall. That is their apple, is the mead.

You know, when they drink of the mead, that is the eating of the fruit of knowledge, isn't it? You know, it's heartbreaking. Did you not find it hard to read? Nikki gets down to the question. I've been looking at her. She's been drumming her fingers to the question. I've been looking at her. She's been drumming her fingers on the desk. She's been going, yeah, yeah, yeah, but come on,

answer the main question. I could read about 30 pages a day. I think you have to read it slowly. But I do think, I mean, I know this sounds ridiculous for a book that you have to read slowly, but it is a page turner. It is absolutely. You are so involved, I think, in the story.

I think Andrew is going to read us a bit, which is. I had to read this bit twice. Yeah. And so this is perfect timing for what Nikki was saying. But, I mean, but it also backs up the point that it's so rewarding once it clicks. We must, before you read it, Andrew, Nicky, did you find it hard? Yeah, no, I did. I did.

Quite a lot of the time, I thought, I quite like to work out what he's meant to infer here. And I felt like, you know, going back a few times, as you said, I know something meaningful has happened, but I'm not quite sure what it is you know what no person left behind nikki that's how i felt reading it right that i think golding doesn't want you to understand everything i think that's true in pincher martin and i think it's true in the spire you know yeah and particularly think it's true in The Spire. You know. Yeah. And particularly here, it's replicating Locke's experience that your disorientation is Locke's bafflement with the world. Absolutely. That's part of the experience of the book. It's bewildering.

You know, anyone who listens to Backlisted, you are like, you are, you are five, you're a a five star reader we know that that's why you're here right you've got skills right and we know that and so top skills top skills you're really good at reading otherwise you wouldn't be listening to this right so here is one of the most, how can something simultaneously be so gripping and mystifying? Andrew is going to read it to us. I should probably say that at this point, Locke is hunting for, it's his child. I know it's not explicit, but it's his child, isn't it, Liku? And who has been taken by the new people.

We know this so far. The bushes twitched again. Locke steadied by the tree and gazed. A head and a chest faced him, half hidden. There were white bone things behind the leaves and hair. The man had white bone things above his eyes and under the mouth, so that his face was longer than a face should be. The man turned sideways in the bushes and looked at Locke along his shoulder. A stick rose upright and there was a lump of bone in the middle. Locke peered at the stick and the lump of bone and the small eyes in the bone things over the face.

Suddenly, Locke understood that the man was holding the stick out to him, but neither he nor Locke 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 Locke'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 Lock'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. He smelled along the shaft of the twig. The leaves on the twig were red feathers and reminded him of goose. He was lost in a generalised astonishment and excitement. He was lost in a generalised astonishment and excitement. That's exactly what Una was talking about, isn't it? It's like that sudden intrusion, except it isn't intrusive, of Golding as reporter, allowing himself the appropriate word. Yeah, reporter's right.

I thought interpreter, but even then, it's just a nudge, isn't it? Just pay attention here. You want to go back and see this again. And are we going to say what just happened there? Or should we leave it mysterious? That's really your call, Andy. We've got top skills listeners.

Exactly. They're going to figure out. Some of them are going to be going easy. Actually, listening to that, I think I spotted an extra nuance. Should I say what's happened? Yeah, go on. An arrow has been fired across the river and he's no idea what's just happened to him.

The little nuance. Technology man. Technology man, yeah. Yeah. The little bit about the berries on it, which the berries say, have they poisoned the arrow? Yeah, they've poisoned the arrow. They've poisoned the arrow and there's goose feather, obviously.

Yeah, yeah. So that I hadn feather, obviously. Yeah, yeah. So that I hadn't noticed before. That's just brilliant. It's the berries I don't eat. Can I read a very short passage? The very short passage on which I based my confident teenage assertion that they had been interbreeding. This is just like, this is just you working through your issues.

Yes, please do. The group will all hug you afterwards. working through your issues yes please please do the group will the group will all hug you afterwards so this is there's a brilliant scene where uh lock and far are watching the humans and they watch them they watch them eat and they watch them get drunk and then uh it being a gathering of humans a couple stumble out and uh you can you can see you can guess pretty clearly i think from this what they're doing um the two people beneath the tree were making noises fiercely as though they were quarreling in particular the fat woman had begun to hoot like an owl a lot could hear tuami gasping like a man who fights with an animal and does not think he will win. He looked down at them and saw

that Tuami was not only lying with the fat woman, but eating her as well, for there was black blood running from the lobe of her ear. Locke was excited. He reached out and laid a hand on Far, but she had only to turn her eyes of stone upon him, and she was immediately surrounded by that same incomprehensible feeling that worse than or feeling which he recognized but could not understand excitement again that's the key he's turned on by but turned on but in a different way previous use of excitement that we just heard yeah Yes, exactly. Andrew, you said at the start of this podcast that if The Inheritors were a Gene Kelly film,

it would be Brigadoon. But you were reluctant to reveal why for fear of spoiling the ending. But we're now in the safe zone where we can talk about the ending. Why is this like Brigadoon? Well, I've got two things. Can I also then talk about

why the ending's so brilliant as well? I think so, yes. OK, yeah. But first, what Gene Kelly film is the inheritance? It's Brigadoon because it's about the new people from New York, the interlopers, arriving and destroying the lives of the magical land-dwelling innocents. And they bring something of hell with them.

That makes Brigadoon science fiction then, doesn't it? Yes, Brigadoon is science fiction. Absolutely. That is brilliant, Andrew. Well done. Come back. Come back again. Every time.

If you leap through that hoop, thank you. But seriously, the ending. The ending. There are not one, but in fact two changes of perspective at the end of this book. The first change of perspective is that we no longer see Locke as Locke, but we see him as the red creature, don't we? And he's dying.

And the amazing thing I found about that is I suddenly realized, well, what a brilliant way to convey a sense of a life force leaving a body. Suddenly we are outside of Locke. But also Locke's life force, you realize, is Golding's writing. And once Golding leaves Locke to join the new people, which he clearly does with a sense of guilt and shame, as is his one, Locke dies. But then Golding incriminates himself in all this. He basically says, I'm traveling with the new people now. I am with the murderers. And it's just,

it's astonishingly powerful. And it really, I mean, in terms of what we were saying about how heartbreaking this book is, that where you just see Locke as the tiny little red creature and running on all fours, he just suddenly looks so pathetic and insignificant now that Golding has left him, now that Golding's writing has left him. Astonishing. Golding has left him now that Golding's writing has left him. Astonishing. What I love about the multiple point of view shifts, and Andy, this will please you, is that it violates a rule that you're taught in creative writing. Never change point of view.

Forget it. Change it for exactly those reasons. I love that reading. I think that's fantastic that Golding is leaving his creation behind. It is the life force, yeah. And at the same time, though, the red imagery, obviously it's suggesting Lascaux and the caves and that there'll be some afterlife in that. The other point-of-view switch novel that it reminded me of

was the point-of-view switch at the end of Cormac McCarthy's The Road, but that's nowhere near as successful, and I think the book almost fails on it, but the book succeeds on this. It's that total immersion and then that mirroring that's done. It's just completely brilliant. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think we have to wind up now. We do.

Sadly. Yeah, I think we've run out of pictures to share so thank you to una and to andrew for leading us through the tangled undergrowth to nicky birch as ever for reconstructing these fragmented sounds and turning them into a euphonic hole and to unbound for originally planting out the forest. You can download all 113 previous episodes plus follow links, clips and suggestions for further reading by visiting our website at backlisted.fm and we're always pleased if you contact us on Twitter and Facebook. You can also show your love directly by supporting our Patreon at www.patreon.com forward slash backlisted. We started this to keep Backlisted afloat in uncertain times.

We no longer get any money from anyone else, and we prefer not to have to have intrusive paid-for adverts, so even a small gesture of financial support helps. All patrons get to hear Backlisted episodes early, and for the price of a brace of sourdough loaves, Lock Listeners get two extra Lock Listeds a month. That's the place where we talk, cry and swear in an unbuttoned way about music, film, television, books and the stuff we love.

Join us. Join us. You also get to hear your name read out on the show with our heartfelt thanks so this week's batch of lock listeners are uh big thanks to lock to har to yeah to neil no unfortunately they're no longer with us one by one yeah sadly yeah uh however the homo sapiens we would like to thank include John Bruin, Matthew Crowder, Caroline Lodge, Douglas Schatz, Elizabeth Card, Lee Farley, long-term listener Lee Farley, thanks, Lee. John Simmons, thanks, John.

Gary Rigglesworth. Ian Archie Beck, the great illustrator, supports us. Thank you, Ian. Thomas Carlson. I'm stopping so you can talk now. All right. Eddie Moore, Erskine, Anthony Waller, Richard Hewitt, Sarah, Maria Gilioyva, Harry Prance, Mikey,

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Thank you ever so much for listening. Thank you, Una McCormack and Andrew Mayle, for joining us under these particular circumstances and giving us so much of your time and energy. We really appreciate it. Can you also thank Nico, my dog, for remaining quiet throughout this whole podcast? Beautiful dog.

Thank you, Nico. You're a beautiful dog. Thank you, Nika, you're a beautiful dog. If you prefer to listen to Backlisted without adverts, you can sign up to our Patreon. It's www.patreon.com forward slash backlisted. As well as getting the show early, you get a whole two extra episodes of what we call Locklisted, which is Andy, me and Nicky talking about the books, music and films we've enjoyed in the previous fortnight.