![]() ![]() I believe this guilt is in some ways an expression of the complex remorse my father felt for the war. It is hunger that produces the darkest event in the book, and the deepest sense of guilt. ![]() Providing food is the main concern both of the Neanderthals (“the people”) and the group of Homo sapiens (“the New People”). ![]() Small wonder then that hunger is one of the dominant themes of The Inheritors – an aching hunger that slows you down and makes you less able to move but also to think. Food was not plentiful, and even scarcity could not make it interesting. Postwar austerity and rationing had restricted life to a degree hard to convey now. It was barely nine years since the end of the second world war. Some of the book’s preoccupations are understandable. Faber published it 60 years ago, on 16 September 1955, and it remained my father’s favourite among his novels for the rest of his life. It was also fast: the first draft took him little more than a month, astonishing when you consider that he had a fulltime teaching job as well. But at the same time his writing was vivid, original and – you would have said – fearless. My father was always full of self-doubt and very dependent on these two trusted critics. Between him and my mother (always my father’s first reader), confidence was sustained, and the new book completed in draft. Charles Monteith, his editor at Faber & Faber, was aware of the problem. ![]()
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