Read ages ago, liked it, need to re-read.

Don't know if I was just in the wrong frame of mind for this book, but found it very uninspiring.

3.75/5 stars for this story of one man’s descent as his dream of a spire on his cathedral ascends further into the sky. I listened to the audiobook read by Benedict Cumberbatch and boy did he do an amazing job of narrating Dean Jocelin’s collapse. I could see myself re-listening to this and gaining more out of it in terms of the narrative and characters. Would definitely recommend listening to this one!

I really enjoyed deciphering the imagery and symbolism of which this dark tale has plenty.

Just gorgeous, constant metaphor. An enigmatic unravelling of story and psyche laced with faith, anguish, and church architecture.

3.5 stars. Typically of a Golding novel, 'The Spire' is a real uphill struggle to get through, but equally typically there is great reward to be found in and at the end of your labours. At times it shares a mad, hallucinatory quality with 'Pincher Martin', which a mind can only take so much of in one sitting. My reading of 'The Spire' had ground to almost a halt when I went to see Roger Spottiswoode's adapted play at Salisbury Playhouse, having originally intended to finish the book beforehand. The brilliant - if not entirely faithful - production fully reinvigorated my approach, and gave the rest of my reading a new facet of interest. It was so worthwhile to persevere to the end, and I'm thankful for having had the play to help me along. It still feels wrong to be giving such incredible books such mediocre ratings, but I feel they are all I can give from the person that I am right now, at this point in time. These are not works you read once, assess and never come back to; you are in for life, and I am glad to be.

“Now think, my son. The stones will go up bit by bit, and the wood…Then the spire will be done and our House more wonderful still.’
“I shan’t see it, Reverend Father”....he saw the words in Pangall’s head, as clearly as if they had been written there; because there are no foundation, and Jocelin’s Folly will fall before they fix the cross on the top. (p 15-16).

Dean Jocelin has had a vision from God to be the spiritual architect of a great spire to crown the house of worship. He is against the odds as everyone has said it cannot, should not, be done. But what is the lack of foundations, an enormous weight without the needed support and the unthinkable engineering to achieve something that has never been done before against the will of God?

Though Jocelin’s commitment to God and The Spire is ironstone, it seems that the gates of Hell have been unleashed to oppose him. In the forms of his fellow men as the crude army constructing his ultimate achievement, sins of the flesh, shrieking pillars, an unleashing of whatever this church sits upon, dancing demons, Mother Nature’s wrath and the maddening of his mind, Jocelin is tested at every moment of The Spire’s construction. But his faith in his mission and his guardian angel's presence at his back allow him to seek the achievement of this humanly impossible task.

The inspiration for The Spire came to Golding while he was teaching. From his classroom, he could see the spire of Salisbury Cathedral. When contemplating the incredible engineering achievement, he considered what it would take to construct the largest spire in England (rising a phenomenal 404 feet or 123 meters). When researching the actual building, you can see the impression of where certain events or scenes play out, including:

- The lack of foundations- only 4 feet or 1.2 meters deep with layers of gravel and water underneath, mirrored in the surreal imagery of the inky black layer of hell unleashed in the middle of the cathedral.

- The wooden scaffolding (some still present today) used during construction as the vertical mazes throughout the book were used to reinforce the Spire during a bad storm in 1360, similar to the natural disasters testing Jocelin in the novel.

- Architect Sir Christopher Wren advised using iron bands to reinforce the Spire, which was noted to have shifted similar to the novel and is continually monitored today.
The attention to detail establishes a factual backbone to support the slipping into surrealist imagery and descent into Jocelin’s ecclesiastical vision, giving the novel a layer of believability if the reader can maintain the thread of voice.

While I enjoyed the research into this book, the fantastical Joceline losing his wits as gripping desperately to this holy mission, the reading experience made it difficult to keep hold of the plot and understand the interactions. I went into this book with a commitment to reading this book, even if I didn’t understand anything going on. And, to be honest, I think this is the only way to read this book. I recognise this is the intention of the perspective of the book (although not from Joceline’s POV, the third person seems to be subjected to the madness of Joceline), and you can see where the plot is leading. Still, I’m not entirely convinced it pays off in the end.

While I’m not sure if this is the most accessible book– expect the uncomfortable reading experience– I do think Golding envisions the scenery and surrealist religious imagery beautifully:

“He blinked for a moment. There had been sun before, but not like this. The most seeming solid thing in the nave, was not the barricade of wood and canvas that cut the cathedral in two, at the choir steps, was not the two arcades of the nave, nor the chantries and painted tomb slabs between them. The most solid thing was the light. It smashed through the rows of windows in the south aisle, so that they exploded with color, it slanted before him from right to left in an exact formation, to hit the bottom yard of the pillars on the north side of the nave. 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 the 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 color, honey-color slashed across the body of the cathedral.” (page 4)

The romance of the atmosphere of the church, the shrieks of the weight of the Spire pushing down on the support, the unearthly uncovering of what lay beneath he foundations and the presence of the holy and demonic creatures on either side of Joceline is hypnotic through the novel. The routes of the men of god throughout the stone structure compared to the vertical mazes of ladders and supports of the working army constructing the holy vision is continued throughout the novel. In an acceptance, and commitment, to staying hold of the slipping reality of the unreliable third person narrator, The Spire is a vignette of the lengths one man goes– and what he sacrifices– for the commitment of his holy mission.

Sources
https://youtu.be/aNBI3QGr7I8?si=NABqXc-I3jdNDrln
https://www.salisburycathedral.org.uk/discover/history/the-cathedral-that-moved/
https://www.salisburycathedral.org.uk/discover/history/the-cathedral-through-the-years/

Day and night, acts of worship went on in the stink and half dark, where the candles illuminated nothing but close haloes of vapour; and the voices rose, in fear of age and death, in fear of weight and dimension, in fear of darkness and a universe without hope. (50)

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.

This was my first dedicated close read, and the class inspired me to change my major—out of Math, realm of predictable symmetry and the elegant proof, and into English, with all its accompanying mess of human life and emotion. For the first time I understood symbolism more deeply than "Piggy's glasses = civilization" and "the spire = a penis." In all my classes before, I had been taught that symbolism in literature followed a simple this-for-that substitution and could be boiled down nicely for multiple choice exams. But The Spire was different. Felt different. In this story of misguided ambition and sublimated desire, poetically written and shot through with evocative imagery, I felt moved, powerfully, by Golding's prose. For the first time, I really connected with a passionate expression of the human condition. As I grow older, I appreciate more and more Golding and his hoary old cynical persona. I've read Lord of the Flies a half-dozen times, and marked up the margins with notes and connections and asterisks and exclamation points. Golding has a way, for me, of moving beyond plot and into the murky depths of theme. And though I've revisited The Spire far less often, it only gains meaning as I grow older and experience for myself the passing of time, the loss of youthful virility, the frustration of childhood goals not attained.

5 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.

Spoiler

Just some further quotes that resonate and illustrate the book's theme and potent language.

I have so much will, it puts all other business by. I am like a flower that is bearing fruit. There is a preoccupation about the flower as the fruit swells and the petals wither; a preoccupation about the whole plant, leaves dropping, everything dying but the swelling fruit. That's how it must be. My will is in the pillars and the high wall. I offered myself; and I am learning. (92)

I thought it would be simple. I thought the spire would complete a stone bible, be the apocalypse in stone. I never guessed in my folly that there would be a new lesson at every level, and a new power. Nor could I have been told. I had to build in faith, against advice. That's the only way. (103)

'I tell you, we guess. We judge that this or that is strong enough; but we can never tell until the full strain comes on it whether we were right or wrong.' (111)

'...D'you think you can escape? You're not in my net—oh yes, Roger, I understand a number of things, how you are drawn, and twisted, and tormented—but it isn't my net. It's His. We can neither of us avoid this work. And there's another thing. I've begun to see how we can't understand it either, since each new foot reveals a new effect, a new purpose. It's senseless, you think. It frightens us, and it's unreasonable. But then—since when did God ask the chosen ones to be reasonable? They call this Jocelin's Folly, don't they?'

'I've heard it called so.'

'The net isn't mine, Roger, and the folly isn't mine. It's God's Folly. Even in the old days He never asked men to do what was reasonable. Men can do that for themselves. They can buy and sell, heal and govern. But then out of some deep place comes the command to do what makes no sense at all—to build a ship on dry land; to sit among the dunghills; to marry a whore; to set their son on the altar of sacrifice. Then, if men have faith, a new thing comes.' (116)

Saplantı Mı Kutsala Dönüşür, Kutsal Olan Mı Saplantıya
William Golding ile meşhur kitabı Sineklerin Tanrısı ile tanıştım. Daha sonra okuduğum bu kitabında önceki kitap kadar keyif alamadım. Bunun nedenlerinden bir tanesi çok fazla kilise ile ilgili terim içermesiydi. Eğer bu terimleri bilmiyorsanız kafanızda kurgulayamıyor ve canlandıramıyorsunuz. Bir diğer neden ise çok fazla açıklayıcı anlatım ve sıkıcı diyaloglar içermesi. Olayda herhangi bir akıcılık bulunmuyor kitap boyunca.

Kitap, kilisede rahip, kilise hizmetlisi ve karısı, usta başı ve işçileri arasında geçen olayları anlatıyor. Rahip kiliseye uzun bir kule inşaa etmeye karar veriyor ve işte bütün olay böyle başlıyor. Rahip tarafından verilen bu kararla birlikte, bu kişilerin ilişkileri anlatılıyor.

Kitap sakin bir kafayla ve rahat bir zaman diliminde okunmalı. Aksi taktirde sıkılabilir ve yarım bırakılabilir.

Kitabı bitirdikten sonra "Saplantı mı kutsala dönüşür, yoksa kutsal olan mı saplantıya dönüşür" düşüncesi oluştu. Hatta kitabı özetleyecek olsam bu düşünceyi söylerdim.