The first of three novels on which Conrad and Ford collaborated at the beginning of this century, and the only one with an SF premiss (a visitor from the future), this should not be confused with William Golding's Neanderthal novel of the same title. Although both men were friends of H.G. Wells, and Wells's work had already established scientific speculation as acceptable material for literary fiction, the role of the "fourth dimension" is small here. "Let no one imagine that this is a story of the 'time and space' or pseudo-scientific variety", as a 1901 review in The Athenaeum noted (this and other contemporary reviews are given in the Appendices). Written in an impressionistic style, in which the narrator's comments often die away with a dash (and would have died more often if Conrad had not tightened Ford's original script), THE INHERITORS falls within the age of modernism. What we tend to forget is that the modernists played with time without ever taking an SF position. In Ford's later novel THE GOOD SOLDIER (published March 1915), for instance, his narrator Dowell is telling his story in 1916, a year after the novel's publication date*2. So that time-play does not make Ford's work inherently Science Fictional.
Granger, a failed novelist still struggling to write, finds that he is a success when he turns his hand to journalism and pen-portraits of the political and business leaders of his day. The two main political figures are loosely based on A. J. Balfour and Joseph Chamberlain, rivals for the Conservative leadership, needing his "spin" because they are each advancing their own positions, and need support in the country. In turn, the Duc de Mersch is building a company to industrialise Greenland (based on King Leopold's exploitation of the Congo), and needs to raise more and more capital. Significantly, Granger is not working on the cheap papers, but on the broadsheet newspapers and the journals read in West End clubs and drawing rooms, so he is not a manipulator of the masses, but of the capital-holding classes.
In the first chapter Granger met and became entranced by the girl from the fourth dimension and now becomes more and more involved as the girl manages to pass herself off as Miss Etchingham Granger, his sister, using her own magnetism to achieve the ends of herself and the future. Successful in his new career and now moving into newspaper editorship, Granger, unaware of her motives as she intrigues with these men, tries to warn them off, but cannot. She is engaged to Gunard (the Chamberlain figure) when the true situation in Greenland is revealed, leading to the collapse of a supporting bill in the House of Commons. Prime Minister Churchill (Balfour) falls with it, and with the collapse of the Greenland company a run on the stock exchange - Black Monday.
Conrad was writing HEART OF DARKNESS at the same time as he was working with Ford on this novel, but he obviously held back some of his knowledge. Granger publishes the revelations about Greenland (though only because he cannot bother to read his reporter's account before sending it to be typeset - he is thus the agent of his own side's doom) but we never read that account. The impressionist style means that everything of significance happens out of sight. It has been only in 1999 that the publication of Adam Hochschild's KING LEOPOLD'S GHOST has revealed the full horrors of the Belgian Congo one hundred years ago - even using the cover of a ROMAN A CLEF and swapping Greenland for Africa, Conrad and Ford avoided detail *3. Africa was never far from British concerns, though. It was a nightmare to which British business was bound, from which it could not escape, and which offered no escape. The Ponderevo uncle and nephew, who try to rescue their firm by a mad dash to Africa in Wells's TONO-BUNGAY (1909), proved the point, when they found there was no cure-all to be found there.
George Hay in his Foreword, points out the continued co-existence of politics, literature and cheap philosophy (he cites the influence of Ayn Rand within the American government), re-inforcing the notion of SF as warning literature. What is also worth pointing out is that Conrad and Ford concentrated very closely on Conservative politics, even though the Liberals would come to power in 1905, and a Liberal Prime Minister govern until 1922. In this they resemble A. G. MacDonnell's ENGLAND, THEIR ENGLAND (1933), which also features a visitor from another world (Scotland, as MacDonnell treats it) who is able to mingle with the great and the good through his journalism, and again never meets Liberals - corrupt Conservative and Labour members, but no Liberals. We all know the title of George Dangerfield's STRANGE DEATH OF LIBERAL ENGLAND, but did party politics go so far into the social body?
MacDonnell also introduces an engineer, William Rhodes, who appears
and saves his narrator at least twice, even while the narrator (and author)
show little sympathy for the character. MacDonnell could see that contempt
for science, trade and industry within the English upper classes threatened
everything, even if he felt it himself. Conrad and Ford have no such character.
Granger is able to find a career in the world of changing media, but only
at a moral cost, while the up-and-coming men in politics are no more than
shells. With the "fourth dimension" mentioned but playing little role,
David Seed in his Introduction emphasises Conrad and Ford's metaphorical
use of time, "(THE INHERITORS) introduces elements of what would now be
considered science fiction to comment on the present from a symbolic position
of historical hindsight", while passing over these huge gaps that other
authors would soon cover.
Notes
1. quoted in The Independent 6 Aug 1999
2. Vincent J Cheng "A Chronology of THE GOOD SOLDIER" re-printed in F. M. Ford THE GOOD SOLDIER ed. Martin Stannard (Norton Critical Editions)
3. THE CATASTROPHIST (1999) is set in the Congo in the devastating civil
war of the 1960s. Its author, Ronan Bennett, has said he was influenced
by Ford's THE GOOD SOLDIER (Mail on Sunday You Magazine 1 Aug 1999), as
if the distant Ford still retains some ethereal association with Africa.