100
PARTISAN REVIEW
order to show how good he is with the eerie, this impression is more than
compensated for by the preternatural solidity of the detail in the stories
of hunting and fishing and climbing.
This brings us to the more or less interesting failures. Mr. Anthony
West's third novel,
Heritage,
appears to be a very slightly disguised fic–
tional account of his own parents, and it takes on a special if adven–
titious interest as a description of them.
If
one can judge from
Experi–
ment in Autobiography
and from Mr. Vincent Brome's
H.
C.
Wells
(though Mr. Brome was, I understand, badly cramped by legal threats
from various quarters), the portrait of H. G. Wells here is remarkably
exact, especially in its reproduction of Wells' talk; about the rest of the
portraits it is impossible for an outsider even to guess, urgently as he is
invited to by the dust-jacket's "The story of a son torn between two
high-powered, world-famous and unmarried parents." As a novel in
its own right, Mr. West's book is a workmanlike job, which never suc–
ceeds in convincing the reader of the reality of the narrator's problems,
though the gradual disillusionment of the narrator and his consequent
achievement of freedom from these "high-powered" parents is the os–
tensible point.
Mr. Golding, the only one of these writers who has not, I believe,
been published in America, has not lived up to the promise of his
remarkable first novel,
Lord of the Flies,
in this second n0vel,
The
Inheritors. Lord of the Flies
describes a group of boys 'Who have
been marooned on a tropical island by a plane wreck during a war.
The boys are magnificently real, and yet the reader is made gradually
to feel that he is watching, not simply a group of boys in an unusual
situation, but the slow, embattled descent of humanity from a civilized,
even parliamentary society into a barbaric and murderous one. The novel
creates a terrifying sense of the tenuousness of civilized life. Nothing like
this, alas, is going on in
The I nheritors.
Here we watch the gradual wip–
ing out of a family group of Nea nderthal men by a group of primitive
men. Mr. Golding's ability to imagine his way into savage states of mind
makes
The Inh eritors
interesting, but this interest is generated for a
subject that has at best a remote historical point and, at worst, the high–
grade science fiction appeal of John Wyndham's
The Day of the Triffids.
In a different way, Mr. Kingsley Amis' second book is disappointing.
His wonderful comic sense is still evident in
That Unc ertain Feeling.
It
is at its best when it is working on the most ordinary dilemmas: "There
seemed to be four knobs under the dials and I pulled the right-hand
one. 'The end of civilization as we know it,' a voice said. 'Good-night.'
