Joseph Conrad

Ford Madox Ford

The Inheritors is a quasi-science fiction novel about the transition of British society from the old, aristocratic mould to a land of industry and advancement. A young writer comes into contact with the inheritors, people from the "fourth dimension" who plan to take over the world. He experiences the same shift as society within himself, only to be left feeling that he has lost everything.

An Extravagant Story

The Inheritors

Bryan Alexander

What a strange novel!
The Inheritors is an obscure book by two major British novelists. It's rarely discussed, and I can see why.

The plot concerns a political scheme to undermine the British empire, based on a Congo-like colonial venture and manipulated journalists. The lead schemer claims she's from the Fourth Dimension and is working to replace the human race (hence the title: her people are our inheritors). So we get a weird hybrid of late Victorian/early Edwardian society tale, science fiction, and political allegory.

But the weighting is not what you might expect from that account. The opening chapter is science fiction, or at least slipstream, as our feckless hero walks across the English countryside looking for a job, only to run into the world-conquering heroine who simply tells him her plans. She has the power of an alien language which controls people's minds, and can even alter our hero's perceptions to show him... an alternate reality? his world from a 4-dimensional view? an antecedent to Lovecraft's "From Beyond"? We never learn, in part because Arthur gets outplayed.

After that dizzying first chapter the novel falls back into a more normal world of the year 1900. We get sketches of British literary and journalistic life, impressions of London, a visit to Paris. And, strangely, Winston Churchill, who becomes Arthur's friend and co-author (!), playing a tragic role as a good man politically outflanked. 

The main scheme concerns a European aristocrat's colonization of Greenland, and feels like an allegory of the Belgian Congo: a seemingly humanitarian enterprise which is really horrific exploitation. We don't give into the Greenland project deeply, as it's there mostly as a tool for British political advantage. I don't know how parodic it might have read when the book appeared.

The middle of the book sagged for me, as Arthur moped a lot about the mysterious (never truly named) woman. Her pretending to be his sister was entertaining. Also saggy was the immersion the lives of those being manipulated, as their connections to the plots are understated, and they never emerge fully enough to be careworthy on their own.

By the book's end... (view spoiler)[our heroine triumphs, bringing down poor Churchill (15 years before Gallipoli!) and marrying the impending prime minister. It's not clear how she's going to replace the human race.  (hide spoiler)]

I wish we'd seen more of the Fourth Dimension and its inhabitants. The heroine is fascinating, a kind of super-science character, almost a mad scientist, a bit like Bazarov from Turgenev's Fathers and Children.

Recommended if you are interested in this weirdness, and can power through the saggy sections.

Here's my favorite passage from that great first chapter:

"If you expect me to believe that you inhabit a mathematical monstrosity, you are mistaken. You are, really."

She turned round and pointed at the city.

"Look!" she said.

We had climbed the western hill. Below our feet, beneath a sky that the wind had swept clean of clouds, was the valley; a broad bowl, shallow, filled with the purple of smoke-wreaths. And above the mass of red roofs there soared the golden stonework of the cathedral tower. It was a vision, the last word of a great art. I looked at her. I was moved, and I knew that the glory of it must have moved her.

She was smiling. "Look!" she repeated. I looked.

There was the purple and the red, and the golden tower, the vision, the last word. She said something—uttered some sound.

What had happened? I don't know. It all looked contemptible. One seemed to see something beyond, something vaster—vaster than cathedrals, vaster than the conception of the gods to whom cathedrals were raised. The tower reeled out of the perpendicular. One saw beyond it, not roofs, or smoke, or hills, but an unrealised, an unrealisable infinity of space.

It was merely momentary. The tower filled its place again and I looked at her.

"What the devil," I said, hysterically—"what the devil do you play these tricks upon me for?"

The Inheritors An Extravagant Story

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