He was laughing, chin up, and shaking his head. God the Father was exploding in his face with a glory of sunlight through painted glass, a glory that moved with his movements to consume and exalt Abraham and Isaac and then God again." Live webchat with Judy Carver on The Spire by William Golding – post your questions here". the Guardian. 24 April 2013 . Retrieved 1 December 2022. 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.

The spire is also Goody Pangall, object of Jocelin's displaced sexual energy. But while the feared fertility sprouts in Goody, the spire remains pure and virginal." As noted, removed as I am from the internet, I have no idea how much of The Spire is based on real events, how much of Jocelin's erection was actually built and how much remains. I do know there's still a spire on Salibsury cathedral. But I don't know if this was the one Jocelin is supposed to have built. Whether the one Jocelin built fell down and the current one replaced it. Or whether there was no Jocelin, there were no worries about the depths of the foundations and no drama about the construction. The whole project is in fact tainted. The workmen are not God-fearing men engaged in act of devotion but coarse and bawdy men who mercilessly ridicule Goody’s husband. There’s a suggestion that the Cathedral itself rests not on hallowed ground but oozing mud from which the forces of hell escape and taint the structure above.The concept of a cathedral spire piercing the sky as a spiritual as well an architectural statement is a metaphor of longstanding. I thought of the line from Robert Browning's poem, "A man's reach should extend his grasp, or what is a heaven for?" With William Golding's The Spire, there seems irretrievable space between the reach & the grasp, an obsessive descent rather than an uplifted "prayer in stone". That said, the telling of this tale is at times magical but almost always frustratingly dark & cheerless. I grasp why a few reviewers found the novel disappointing & even confounding to read but there is also ample reward for the reader's perseverance with this & other Golding novels. I really can’t emphasise enough how visceral this experience is. Maybe it’s just me but I was completely swept up in Golding’s amazing writing. I don’t want to give the ending away, but those of you who only want to read books with happy endings should probably avoid this one. The Spire at Salisbury Playhouse". William Golding. 20 November 2012 . Retrieved 25 September 2020. Roger Mason, a medieval Master Mason is, in direct contrast to Jocelin, physically powerful and a rationalist. He is associated with the imagery of a bull and a stallion. Roger contends with Jocelin, arguing that the cathedral foundations are insufficient to support the spire. He is forced to continue with the project because Jocelin makes it impossible for him to work elsewhere. After the death of Goody, Roger becomes an alcoholic. In a moment of clarity, Jocelin visits Roger and we eventually learn of his suicide attempt. Obviously a crudely simplistic 'Freudian' reading might see the spire as a symbol of both his writing – he aspired to create something of greatness, against some hostility, but worried that it was built on shaky foundations; and it is also a phallic symbol of course – again on shaky foundations."

This is Golding describing dust. The cathedral of stone is being dismantled and added to – creating a cathedral of dust, a phantom, a twin. In Seeing Things, Seamus Heaney evokes "a pillar of radiant house-dust". Here is Golding's creation of not one pillar, but several: "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." So, as temporary as a mayfly and a serious rival and replacement. Solid sunlight. Dust definitively described by a master. Set in the twelfth century A.D. (or C.E. or whatever you want to call it), this fantastic novel tells the story of Dean Jocelin of a cathedral that I’m pretty sure is supposed to be Salisbury Cathedral and his single-minded obsession with adding a 400 foot spire to the building. The trouble with this is that this is physically impossible, as the master builder he has hired to do the work keeps trying to tell him, due to the foundations of the cathedral not being deep enough to support the extra load.All this affirms the views expressed above that The Spire is, among other things, about the creation of something from nothing: buildings from empty space, gods from human needs, and books from thoughts. It's a fascinating, invigorating and challenging read." Beyond Mantel: the historical novels everyone must read". The Guardian. 29 February 2020 . Retrieved 25 September 2020. I've tended to read Jocelin's folly as part of a profoundly human condition – the search for meaning, the construction of belief, even as exemplar of the novelist's ability to invent and elaborate. Nailing The Spire to Christianity works, but it limits or rather narrows our understanding of Art's capacity." Dean Jocelin is the character through whom the novel is presented. Golding uses the stream of consciousness technique to show his Lear-like descent into madness. The novel charts the destruction of his self-confidence and ambition. As the construction of the spire draws to an end, Jocelin is removed from his position as Dean and his abandonment of his religious duties is denounced by the church Council. Ultimately, he succumbs to his illness which he had personified as his guardian angel.

If there was a Jocelin, and his spire fell, it becomes something else. All that incredible effort was for something – but left nothing, Or in fact, less than nothing, given the financial, physical and mental toll it took on everyone connected to its construction. 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.) A priest builds a spire on a cathedral according to a spiritual vision, believing it to be the calling of God and dependant upon his will and faith to bring it to completion, destroying his congregation, vocation and sanity in the process. Thus the erection of The Spire commences… And, similar to Isaiah, he sees the guarding angel by his side… Carey, Professor John (2009). William Golding: The Man Who Wrote Lord of the Flies . London: Faber and Faber Limited. ISBN 978-0-571-23163-8.

The cathedral's priests vigorously oppose the project, a revolt led by Jocelin’s longtime "friend" Father Anselm; the staff—represented by the maintenance man Pangall and his wife Goody Pangall—are upset by the dust and noise of construction, and by the building materials lying about in their faces. To top it off, the Master Builder, Robert Mason (what a great name!), is more than skeptical about the spire’s feasibility—the foundation, he argues, cannot support the spire’s weight and its addition will lead to collapse. To add to Jocelin’s peevishness, his aunt—whose influence was essential to his appointment and to financing the spire—wonders why he still pays no attention to her. Will no one rid him of these meddlesome people? The more I think about this brilliant novel the more it opens up questions. The ambiguity that I am sure has frustrated many a reader is, for me, the core of its power and strength as a work of literature." Derken inşaat sırasında bir gün toprak kayması oluyor. 120m 'lik bir kule için kazılması gereken çoook derin temel kuyusuna birde çok yağmurlu bir kaç günün ardından su da dolunca toprak kayıveriyor. Kimseye birşey olmuyor. Tabi usta hemen rahibi getiriyor ve toprak kaymasının nedenlerini anlatıyor. Ama yok. (Sıkar gırtlağını gebertirsin yaaa) Manyak rahip gene ikna olmuyor. İnşaat devam edecek. He is like a tree planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in season and whose leaf does not wither. Whatever he does prospers.'