Shelter-In-Place Reading Roundup: The Heirs of Hemingway

HMS Indefatigable (Horatio Hornblower’s ship) doing battle with the Droits de l’Homme, 1797. Painting by Léopold Le Guen.

You wouldn’t necessarily think that a series of short stories about derring-do in the British Navy would have much in common with a somber novel about the downfall of the Neanderthals, but both Mr. Midshipman Hornblower and The Inheritors were written in the 1950s by white British men and therefore, maybe it’s not surprising that they both display a distinct Hemingway influence. (Consider this post a tie-in with the new Ken Burns documentary on Hemingway that is airing on PBS this week?)

Both of these books were selections for my book club, still going strong even after a year of Zoom meetings. Funnily enough, the first book I ever read as part of this club, back in Fall 2016, was Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls. At the time, Hemingway struck me as an unorthodox, even a contrarian choice for a San Francisco book club (the era of “no one should read Hemingway because he is an avatar of toxic masculinity” had already started). But that’s exactly why it piqued my interest when a Twitter mutual whom I had never met in person DM’d me to ask if I could read For Whom the Bell Tolls within the next 3 or 4 weeks. And the rest is history.

Mr. Midshipman Hornblower by C.S. Forester
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I can see why there’s an Ernest Hemingway blurb on the cover of my copy of Mr. Midshipman Hornblower. Hemingway wrote about sensitive men who, in wartime, force themselves to become stoic men, and that is C.S. Forester’s theme here, too.

I went into this book expecting the nautical adventures of a stalwart hero, and at first, I was pleasantly surprised by Horatio Hornblower’s depth of character. Though Hornblower puts on a brave face, Forester makes clear that it’s always an effort for him to do so. Deep down, he is moody, over-thinky, and way too hard on himself. (Confession time: I felt very called out by these aspects of Hornblower’s personality.) I also appreciated the interesting details about the mechanics of operating sailing ships during the Napoleonic Wars. Did you know that if a cargo of rice got wet, it could swell so much that the ship would explode? I didn’t!

But as the book went on, I felt less and less compelled. It’s very episodic—more a collection of short adventure stories than a novel—and each episode seems to have the same pattern:

1. Hornblower gets into a tough spot
2. Hornblower does something incredibly brave
3. Hornblower feels incredibly guilty about it

So, while I started off impressed by Hornblower’s multi-dimensionality, I eventually wished that his story and character had not become so predictable.

There is also some really uncomfortable exoticism and denigration of the Spanish, French, and North African people that Hornblower encounters. While I don’t doubt that Hornblower and his fellow British naval officers would think this way about Mediterranean foreigners, Forester writes in a way that suggests that he shares their attitudes and believes wholeheartedly in British stiff-upper-lip superiority.

The Inheritors by William Golding
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

William Golding’s The Inheritors might be the first piece of fiction I’ve ever encountered that treats cavemen as something other than a comedy trope. Instead, it is an ambitious and deadly-serious novel about a band of Neanderthals encountering and falling prey to a tribe of much more advanced humans—the “inheritors” of the title.

A lot of reviews claim that this is a challenging book that puts you into the mind of a Neanderthal, but that somewhat overstates the case: I didn’t find the language of The Inheritors as difficult as something like the “Zachry” section of Cloud Atlas . On a sentence-by-sentence level, Golding is writing standard midcentury-novelist prose, and he frequently uses metaphors and descriptions that his protagonist Lok would not be capable of (e.g. comparing water to onyx). Still, the book demands that you read between the lines to figure out the discrepancy between Lok’s perceptions and what is “really” going on. 5/6 of the members of my book club missed a very important plot point that is implied but never explicitly stated.

One reason you have to work so hard to surpass Lok’s limited understanding is that, even by Neanderthal standards, he is a little dim. His female companion, Fa, seems to have much more practical and emotional intelligence than he does. Sometimes I wished that Golding had chosen to tell the story from Fa’s perspective. But then, that would change it from a tragedy about an innocent fool, to a tragedy about a Cassandra figure.

Ultimately, I found it rewarding to puzzle through Golding’s societal worldbuilding: how the Neanderthals think, how they observe and try to make sense of the humans’ more complex rituals and technologies. What really frustrated me, though, was his physical worldbuilding. The book takes place in a limited but topographically varied area: we hear about cliffs and caves and forests and a river and a waterfall and an island. Understanding where the Neanderthals are in relation to the human invaders is key to following the story. But every time Golding provided a new piece of information about the landscape, it only confused the map that I was trying to draw in my head. Further complicating matters, I read that Golding envisioned this novel as taking place in Savernake Forest in southwest England. Which seems like a lovely place, but not the dramatic landscape of towering cliffs and mighty waterfalls that the text suggests.

Surprisingly, the novel that I kept wanting to compare The Inheritors to is For Whom the Bell Tolls : another story about a small band of people living in a cave, making a desperate last stand against a better-equipped enemy. Plus, Golding’s prose style seems to owe a lot to Hemingway’s. But Golding’s novel involves additional moral complexity: no matter how much we empathize with Lok, we are always aware that he is an “Other,” and that his human enemies will eventually become us. There’s also probably something to be said about a white British author writing a “noble savage” story in 1955, just as Britain was losing its colonial empire, but I haven’t quite teased that out yet.