Scan barcode
A review by the_crafty_chapter
The Spire by William Golding
3.0
“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/
“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/