The Spire by William Golding

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The Spire by William Golding

The Spire by William Golding

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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."

Of course, seeing the building through Jocelin's eyes is dangerous. Not least because, as becomes increasingly apparent as the book goes on, Jocelin is a fool. Early on we may be prepared to accept his vision of "the bible in stone" as something extraordinary and profound – but as we come to understand that he can barely read and has hardly a clue about church law, we have to question that vision. There's also Jocelin's extraordinary vanity. In his abstract thoughts, he sees himself as a kind of saint, a man who thinks only of the work and the glory it brings to his religion. Yet the stone cold reality is that he has demanded that statues of himself be built into the tower. 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.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. Services, Tribune Media. "PRYCE SAYS PRESS MADE UP TIFF WITH DIRECTOR". Sun-Sentinel.com . Retrieved 25 September 2020. Harford, Tim (8 December 2017). "The Brexit monomania built on blind faith". Financial Times . Retrieved 25 September 2020.

This is a marvelous book, beautifully written and filled with mystery. I regret having waited fifty years to read it. I understand (I think) why some readers pan it, but that might reflect disappointed expectations rather than the novel itself. This is far far away from the genre of historical fiction in general, and from Pillars of the Earth in particular. Spring is coming, and Jocelyn is again perked up. Once, when he entered the cathedral to take a look at the model of the spire, he witnesses the meeting of Pengall Goody's wife and Roger Mason. As if the abbot sees the invisible tent surrounding them, he understands the whole depth of their relationship. Disgust covers him, he sees dirt in everything ... In this case, not a pillar, exactly, but a nose: "He stood, smiling round his nose, head up …", "so Jocelin felt a smile bend the seams of his own face as he looked round his nose at him." The nose stands for the obstacle of the self.

Benedict Cumberbatch records audiobook of William Golding novel". The Guardian. 6 August 2014 . Retrieved 25 September 2020. Golding respects the way medieval individuals actually might have thought, felt, or spoken in their world --not in ours. He 'keeps faith' with them; even though this renders them awkward and unfamiliar to our eyes and ears. It is difficult material; but Golding conquered it in the writing and you must conquer it in the reading. That is the arrangement here. You keep up with him, rather than him pandering to you. It's refreshing in that respect.

T he Spire was published in 1964. The Dean of a cathedral, Jocelin, wants to add a spire to the building, which has no foundations and is therefore a kind of miracle already. The novel is about the second, highly imperfect miracle, the erection of the spire – and the cost, which is financial, physical and spiritual. And it is about creative realisation, bringing the impossible into being. William Golding wrote the first draft of The Spire in 14 days – itself a kind of miracle. 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. Thus the erection of The Spire commences… And, similar to Isaiah, he sees the guarding angel by his side…

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.

People note British writer Sir William Gerald Golding for his dark novels, especially The Lord of the Flies (1954); he won the Nobel Prize of 1983 for literature.As Golding lived in Salisbury for several years, the reader easily thinks of Salisbury Spire being in the author’s mind when he worked on the scaffolding of his book. But any Spire would do. One can also forget about spires since any other building, or enterprise, could play the role. For what this novel does is edify the process through which a fixation can absorb one’s mind. Firm obsessions can dissolve uneasily as perceptions shift and flounder. And Golding’s equivocal language captures splendidly the way a fleeting chimera can take over one’s life and one’s will until it can either triumph or destroy. The workmen are referred to as " an army" and Jocelin is confronted numerous times by those who disagree with the disruption they cause. Pangall is their eventual sacrifice, buried "beneath the crossways" with mistletoe between his ribs. The mistletoe can be viewed as a metaphor in terms of horror and the word "obscene" occurs several times (the Druids' idea that the berries were the semen of the Gods may well contribute to Jocelin's revulsion). "The riotous confusion of its branches" is alarming as well as is Jocelin's disgust at the berry on his shoe. Golding weaves the mistletoe as a pagan symbol into the naturalistic treatment of it as a sign of a physical threat to the spire. Mistletoe grows on living oak trees – if the wood used in the building is unseasoned, the mistletoe will continue to grow on it, revealing a scientifically explicable danger. Don Crompton, in A View from the Spire: William Golding's Later Novels, analyses the novel and relates it to its pagan and mythical elements. More recently, Mark Kinkead-Weekes and Ian Gregor cover all of William Golding's novels in William Golding: A Critical Study of the Novels. William Golding's excellent but challenging novel, The Spire is not so much a tale of the building of a spire to further accentuate an existing cathedral, modeled after the one at Salisbury in Wiltshire but rather a kind of personal referendum on the human condition. It represents a commentary that is both perplexing & dispiriting at ti But, 'The Spire' is much less savory. It really has no appealing characters at all. Every character in the story is rather slimy and vile. There's just no one to really admire in this tale. It's a struggle to 'care deeply about' these figures. And Golding's unforgiving style doesn't help any.



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