A last tribe of Neanderthals (the people) arrive in their Summer home – a rocky outcrop near the top of a large waterfall. Peaceful hunter gatherers with an earth-mother religion, they do not understand tools, nor can they formulate complex thoughts, they speak simply and also they communicate telepathically through pictures. One day they smell strangers nearby and gradually the become aware of a tribe of Homo Sapiens (the new people) who have come up the river in dug out canoes and are camping on a river island. The new people steal the Neanderthal children and kill the tribe elders, only Lok and Fa, a man and woman, are left, and they set out to rescue the children.

Despite being written in simple language this is quite a difficult book to read. This is because WIlliam Golding has chosen to tell the story in style that suggest a Neanderthal mindset. Though it's written in the third person the narration is skewed to suggest the protagonist - Lok's - view. As he spies on the homosapiens a lot of their behaviour is alien to him. He also has a strange way of describing everything — from the geography of places to interactions between characters — there is sometimes no distinction in his observations between the real and unreal and this gives the story a dream like quality that is often hard to follow.

The Neanderthals in the book are verging on that cliche of the simple, peaceful tribal peoples who, once again, represent humans before the fall, before consciousness. Where as the homosapiens are more badly behaved, drinking, killing, beating etc. Stylistically it is an interesting device to use the writing to suggest the Neanderthal mind, I think it works really well but throws up lots of issues. At two points the narration jarred for me, when Lok used the words: 'make love', which sounded too twentieth century and also at another point when Golding stepped away from Lok's view to give an authorial comment, and I can't remember why, otherwise the style works really well. One of the other strange side effect though was that at the end when the narration switches to a Homo Sapien man's view, he is suddenly starling sophisticated by comparison in the way he formulates ideas. The distinction works well but also makes the Homo Sapiens feel very advanced.

The books introduction suggests that Neanderthals didn't have language, which makes sense, language is what separates us from other animals, it is the start of abstract thought and duality - separating and portioning everything out and printed words suggest that so strongly too, so maybe it would be impossible to use written language to create a neanderthal view of the world, but Golding has given it a damn good try!