The Spire: With an introduction by John Mullan

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Jocelin ceases to care. He neglects his religious duties and stops praying. All his waking hours are devoted to spurring the workmen on to build higher and higher, even climbing up the scaffolding himself to help their endeavours. stars out of 5. Perhaps it is not the most engaging story, but for me it marks my very first exposure to true literary art and the seed from which my pretentious reading habit grew. We can't be sure they are referring to Jocelin, except for the word "but" which begins this sentence: "But when the two deacons saw the dean looming over them, they fell to their knees." Golding could describe things. Incomparably. And he could describe anything, judging by the range of subjects in those quotations. So could James Joyce and John Updike. Vladimir Nabokov and Saul Bellow. And Elizabeth Bishop. The critic and novelist, DJ Taylor thinks that in the case of Bellow, the good writing is only there to show us all "how good a writer he is" – being, in a word, "literary". And Taylor piously hopes that "the first casualty of the next 10 years of novel-writing will be literariness". No more writing. Especially no more great writing. Because that is just showing off. Eccentrically enough, I daresay, I find myself out of sympathy with Taylor's position. I like great writing.

It’s a masterful piece of fiction even if at times it’s not always clear what is happening. Golding’s narrative uses a stream of consciousness technique, showing events through the eyes of Jocelin, a narrator who becomes increasingly unreliable as he feverishly pursues his vision. Second readings are dangerous enterprises. Anything can happen. When I first read this novel, I thought the Spire, that gives the name to the title, stood defiantly by the end of the book. My attention was focused on the descriptions of how architects and builders managed to pull up the complex architectural structures that miraculously were built during the Middle Ages. I did not pay too much attention to the writing. At the time, my English did not have strong foundations, and it was as much a guess-work as the art & craft of the medieval masons. The Spire was envisioned by Golding as a historical novel with a moral struggle at its core, which was originally intended to have two settings: both the Middle Ages and modern day. [4] Whilst teaching at Bishop Wordsworth's School, Golding regularly looked out of his classroom window at Salisbury Cathedral and wondered how he would possibly construct its spire [5] But the book's composition and eventual realisation of The Spire was not an easy process for Golding. According to his daughter, Judy Carver, Golding 'struggled like anything to write The Spire' and said that the novel 'went through many drafts'; this was perhaps owing to the fact that he had stopped teaching which, in turn, gave him more time to write. [6]

I read this book years ago with the Guardian Reading Group and had a chance to ask Golding’s daughter a question at the end of the month. Many participants did not like the book because the protagonist is not likeable, but I thought it was a very sad and tragic story in the end. Jocelin acquired his job through a family connection and was otherwise completely ill-equipped for the role. He had neither the intelligence or the faith—the spire he sees as his purpose. (He came to mind often during the Trump Presidency.) Because the narrative is a very narrow 3rd person, every event and conversation is filtered through the Dean’s increasingly distorted, self-centred mind. The reader has to read past that to try to understand what is happening.(“The Inheritors” uses a similar technique.) Everywhere, fine dust gave these rods and trunks of light the importance of a dimension. He blinked at them again, seeing, near at hand, how individual grains of dust turned over each other, or bounced all together, like mayfly in a breath of wind. He saw how further away they drifted cloudily, coiled, or hung in a moment of pause, becoming, in the most distant rods and trunks, nothing but colour, honey-colour slashed across the body of the cathedral … He shook his head in rueful wonder at the solid sunlight. However, the criticism of Jocelin is obliterated by Jocelin's subjectivity, his joy at having held in his hand the model of the spire that is to be built. "He looked down, loving them in his joy." And he refuses to accept explicitly that they are talking about him. He says: "Who is this poor fellow? You should pray for him rather …" He refuses to accept delivery of the insult he has overheard – and so we cannot be completely sure what he knows and what he doesn't know. The Spire confines us to Jocelin's consciousness – not absolutely, but for most of the novel's length.

As the spire of the cathedral rises, the state of Jocelin, its Dean, declines - a sort of inverse Dorian Grey. Jocelin is the spire, absorbed by it into its stone and timber. As the spire is supported by four pillars of stone, so Jocelin is supported by the Master Builder, the Verger and their wives. Jocelin finds more of himself in each higher level, as the pillars and his supports deteriorate below him. He is insane. And his insanity is contagious. Services, Tribune Media. "PRYCE SAYS PRESS MADE UP TIFF WITH DIRECTOR". Sun-Sentinel.com . Retrieved 25 September 2020.Or, in his perhaps more realistic moments, it is the realisation of Jocelin's extraordinary "will". It is what he has been able to force on the world through the power of his mind. It is a testament – as Jocelin himself frequently urges those around him to see it – to the power of faith. Goody, who acts as an important object of love and lust, ultimately dies while giving birth. Jocelin initially sees her as the perfect woman. Nu știu exact care e miza autorului, nici nu prea mă interesează. Lectura a fost iar potrivită, având în vedere ultimele "bârfe". Nu condamn construcția de biserici și edificii:)). Poate că pe parcursul istoriei unii capi de biserică au fost mai preocupați de ziduri decât de oameni, fie și așa. Nu sunt oare atât de frumoase?! Bine că le-au făcut! Să nu ne plângem, se preocupă Hristos de noi și noi unii de alții. On the basis of that reality – and although it contradicts my scant knowledge of Salibsury Cathedral (which is to say, that it still exists and it has a spire), I'd be tempted to guess that the tower did not survive. There was calamity foretold in the way those supporting pillars bent and sang, and in the way Roger and Rachel Mason, Pangall and Goody (who represented the pillars in Jocelin's mind) all broke. Then there was actual catastrophe in the great climactic storm that plunged such large sections of masonry down to earth – and Jocelin along with them. Given what happens in the bulk of the novel, it would be almost miraculous if the spire survived. Oddly perhaps, there is little sense of ongoing religious services within the church amidst scaffolding, dust & building materials during the endeavor to raise the spire; in fact the cathedral seems spiritually bereft as construction proceeds. Jocelin continues to see the cathedral as "a diagram in prayer & our spire will be a diagram of the highest prayer of all." Meanwhile, Roger Mason, the master builder has become a kind of prisoner of Jocelin, proceeding against his better judgment & envisions the 4 columns opening apart & "everything--wood, stone, iron, glass & men on the scaffolds sliding down into the church, like the fall of a mountain." With it all, he views the spire as a "dunces cap." The master builder pointedly asks Jocelin: "Are you the devil?"

Golding apparently struggled to write this novel and went through several versions before publication in 1964. It was originally intended to have two settings but the modern day elements were dropped so the finished novel is entirely set in the Middle Ages in an unnamed town. I’d be interested to see Golding’s handwritten manuscript notes which are at the University of Exeter‘s Special Collections archive along with the typescripts.Jocelin may have been named after Josceline de Bohon, Bishop of Salisbury from 1142 to 1184, who is buried in Salisbury Cathedral. Religious imagery is used towards the end of the novel, where Jocelin lies dying. Jocelin declares "it's like the apple-tree!", making a reference to the Garden of Eden and Humanity's first sin of temptation but also perhaps the pagan ideas that have been constantly threaded into Jocelin's mind as he spends more and more time up in the Spire, raised above the ground (and further away from his church and his role as God's voice on earth). In other words, it was kind of a mixed bag for me. If I read it like a classic novel in its own right, I'd still be trying to compare it to the better Pillars of Earth or even a bit of Thornbirds, but in the end, it just felt like a criticism of the *many* people who rationalize their way into making everyone's lives a living hell.

The Spire is told in third person, but focalized strictly, stream of consciousness-style, through the remarkable, unhinged mind of Jocelin: a psychological twin for the murky, marshy depths uncovered beneath the cathedral floor. (Golding likes his Freud; not for nothing is this a novel about a spire.) A spare selection of characters are ranged around Jocelin’s wounded, flailing, ecstatic consciousness, and they complement him well, especially the brilliant, tormented architect Roger Mason and his shrewish wife Rachel (shrewish in Jocelin’s perspective, at least; Golding is too adept at maintaining his focalizing character’s point of view for us to have any confidence that Jocelin’s vision of these characters would bear any resemblance to how we might see them ourselves.) I first read The Spire in my sophomore year of college. The course was ENGL 200 - "The Literary Experience" - in which we were to read a sampling of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama. The Spire was our example of a novel. The professor told us up front what the major metaphor/motif was: the church spire Dean Jocelin struggles to raise is a phallic symbol. It's a penis. We all giggled. A most remarkable book, as unforeseeable as one foresaw, an entire original... remote from the mainstream, potent, severe, even forbidding." – Frank Kermode, New York Review of Books, 30 April 1964. Thus the erection of The Spire commences… And, similar to Isaiah, he sees the guarding angel by his side…Father Adam is dubbed by Jocelin as " Father Anonymous", indicating Jocelin's feelings of superiority. Until the end of the novel, when Father Adam becomes Jocelin's caretaker, he is largely a minor character who is surprised by how Jocelin was never taught to pray, doing his best to help him to heaven.