The Spire (1964)

It seemed to me that Golding was aiming to make this an intense book partly through considerable repetition of Jocelin’s tumultuous emotions. So many times Golding refers to Jocelin’s angel warming his back and the great weight of the angel on him wearying him. For me, though, this was tedious. I also disliked the way it’s told more or less in the third person but entirely from Jocelin’ point of view. This again is, I think, to add intensity but I found it limiting. I’d have liked some of Roger Mason’s thoughts or Goody Pangell’s in order to get more perspective. The effect of this being in the third person instead of the first is perhaps also to distance Jocelin from the reader but he’s already someone for whom I have no empathy. Perhaps this is because we’re largely in a post-Christian era and someone believing passionately in visions and miracles speaks to me more of the delusion of that person than of some great faith. Going against the advice of a master builder to erect a tower on a building with no foundations sitting on boggy soil seems the height of folly to me. Then there’s his clear physical attraction to Goody Pangell despite his deriding thoughts about the obscenities of sex. Given the Catholic Church’s appalling record of paedophilia alongside their discrimination against women, Jocelin’s thoughts here are convincing enough but again do nothing to draw the reader in – in fact, the opposite effect is achieved.

That the spire stands at the end of the book, albeit precariously, is perhaps meant to suggest something about the need for a belief in success against the odds. Again, though, I feel my hackles rise. So often today you hear young people being told that if they want to achieve something enough, they will succeed in this. Dangerous advice, I think. Perhaps too Jocelin is meant to show the better side of man as well as his weaknesses as exposed in his pride, such as thinking the dumb mason is carving the stone to make Jocelin seem spiritual and as if he would fly – like an angel, even though the dumb man’s response to Jocelin raising this concept is ambiguous. So, the better side is perhaps suggested in his achievement even if at the end even Jocelin recognises at what a cost this temporary edifice has come. And of course at the end we also find firstly that Jocelin’s angel is in fact his tubercular back so all his talk of an angels came from a malfunctioning body and, more damningly, it seems that Pangell was murdered by the army of builders and yet Jocelin neither prevented this nor did anything about it. Is the reader really left with any choice but to condemn this self-deluding man?

Is this also a book about religion? In ‘Lord of the Flies’ he categorically makes flawed every one of those boys, apart from Simon who with his knowledge of the future and what is in others’ minds is more like Christ than a boy. Every one of them, Ralph an Piggy included, want to destroy, but at the same time he does attract sympathy at least for Ralph and shows him as a well-intentioned and to some extent altruistic person. As discussed, Jocelin doesn’t have this concern for others. His kindness to others is just a reflection of when he’s feeling happy about his tower. I can see I haven’t answered my question which is one about how much his theme encompasses.

There are passages within the book, though, which show how evocative and skilful Golding can be. Although I found the repetition heavy going, if not soporific, individual parts stay in my mind, such as the opening which invites the reader to get involved in the novel and work out what is going on and the description of the dust in the building giving ‘rods and trunks of light the importance of a dimension’ as ‘individual grains of dust turned over each other, or bounced all together’. To me this not only captures so accurately the way, to use an inadequate cliché, motes dance in the sunlight, but also reflects the joy that Jocelin is feeling.

In the end, then, I was able to enjoy and admire aspects of this novel but without any sense of being held by it. Of course it’s highly complex with lots of symbols, such as that Eden-like apple tree, and I need to read it again although this is already a second reading of the novel for me (having read it first a long time ago). Somehow, though, I doubt if I’ll be reading it again. ( )

Written in 1964 by the Nobel Prize winning author William Golding, Dean Jocelin has a divine vision that he must make a spire on his cathedral four hundred feet high. The base of the church is on four pillars that can barely support what is already there. In building the tower, the stone pillars sing and bend, stones fall, fumes that can only be from the ancient graves under the church are released. I can't imagine.. it'd be like a forty story building... and not anywhere close to the time frame of the present day (I'm not sure when the book is supposed to take place, but it seems like many centuries ago.) Jocelin has to decide what to sacrifice in order to make the spire happen. Jocelin doesn't seem like an intentionally terrible person, he is just full of pride, ignorance, arrogance and naivety. At some point, his confessor says no one ever taught him how to pray, but as the "master of novices" that kind of seemed like his job. Jocelin likes staying in the tower. I like the idea that he was building this tower to be further from the earth and reality, but he probably just wanted to be godlike. There was plenty happening in that cathedral that Jocelin had good reason to want to avoid. I think Golding wrote the book in a way for each reader to take their own meaning from it. I assumed I knew what the book was about allegorically, but I don't think it was the point of the book exactly... or not all of it. I thought I knew exactly how the book would play out, but I was wrong. I really liked the way the book is written: it's a bit of a puzzle to figure out. Maybe I'm a bit dull, but as soon as Jocelin is in the tower looking at the fires all around for Midsummer Night, realizing that most of the workers for the tower were missing, and then realizing they weren't exactly religious people, Jocelin loses his sanity a bit and the book kind of goes off the rails. I was confused after that. Someone Jocelin is talking to says "What are you talking about?" and I had just thought the same thing. Jocelin says "I need three tongues to say three things at once" and I'm thinking, No, you need to make any sense with the tongue you have. I know I'm probably lacking many of the biblical references.. obviously such a religious book will have a few. If only the last quarter of the book didn't get so irritatingly confusing, I would have liked it better. Also, I liked the ending that I imagined better but was happy it didn't end up being so obvious. ( )

The novel has been described as "A dark and powerful portrait of one man's will", as it deals with the construction of the 404-foot high spire of Salisbury Cathedral; the vision of the fictional Dean Jocelin. Throughout there exists a mix of pagan and religious imagery. For example, near the end of the novel 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). Dean Jocelin has a vision that God has chosen him to erect a great spire on his cathedral. The masons anxiously advise against it, and things have happened around the cathedral which it is better not to question men too closely about. Its shadow falls darkly on the world below, and most darkly on the Dean himself. The Spire is an impressively powerful portrait of one man's possessed will, and of the towering folly he creates, yet I found it to be a thoroughly depressing read. Golding's world view leads him to create fictional characters who are without a doubt unworthy or our pity much less our sympathy. As such I found them completely unrealistic. ( )

After Lord of the Flies my favourite Golding book - complex and rich with that medieval sense of place and stone that is so appealing, combined with human failing. ( )

This is probably heresy (so to speak), but I like this novel even more than Lord of the Flies. ( )