The Spire: With an introduction by John Mullan

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So, even if the narration is somewhat difficult at times, ultimately it is a very addictive and immersive read. Jocelin may feel he is "comforted" by an angel – but we can't help but feel that the angel is a sign of his madness, or, in fact, a devil. Jocelin's act of faith is folly. The Spire (1995)". BFI. Archived from the original on 11 August 2023 . Retrieved 25 September 2020. Work - ambition, career, advancement, achievement - is the modern form of religion. Faith in work is what drives capitalist culture. Where would we be if we didn’t work? If no one worked? It’s what we were placed here to do. Work is our calling, our vocation. Work protects. Work justifies our inadequacies (despite the warnings of St. Paul), and the injustice of our position. A vision is what we work towards, our teleological spur. Without vision we are without purpose. We have no meaning.

The Spire is distinctly allegorical and there are many references to how the grand medieval cathedral resembles a human body both in structure & function. Workers curse & chant bawdy songs, oblivious to the building's continuing function as a place of worship What you can notice immediately about a novel like this is that it has nothing to do with today's shabby 'historical fiction' trend. Such books merely transpose today's sensationalism to a remote timeperiod; but deliver nothing more than the same tawdry potboiler intrigues we're familiar with from TV.

Alternatively, if the spire that Jocelin built is the actual and still extant pinnacle of Salibsury Cathedral that changes things, doesn't it? Let me return to the very beginning of The Spire and ask why Jocelin is laughing? The obvious reason is that he is laughing because he is happy. He has the model of the spire in his hands. But is that all? In the stained glass there are two images. God the father exploding in his face – a phrase that suggests a disaster brought on the self by the self. It blew up in his face. The other image in the stained glass is Abraham and Isaac. In Hebrew, the name "Isaac" means "she laughed". She is Sarah, the wife of Abraham. When Abraham was over 100 and Sarah well beyond child-bearing age, Sarah was promised a son – and she laughed. But the promise comes to pass. Miracles are possible. The spire might also come to pass – and does, at an extraordinary cost. After extraordinary sacrifices. Sacrifices: again we think of Abraham agreeing to sacrifice the boy Isaac and thus demonstrate obedience to a relentless deity. "Consumed and exalted." And those rainbows created by Jocelin's tears of laughter are brilliantly naturalistic, but they also nod to the rainbow of the covenant between God and man after the flood, giving man dominion over the earth and its animals. Power. Like the imperfect power Jocelin wields.

Paul, Leslie. "The Spire That Stayed out in the Cold." The Kenyon Review, vol. 26, no. 3, 1964, pp. 568–571. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/4334473. Accessed 16 Apr. 2020. As he gazed out of his classroom window towards Salisbury Cathedral , the author William Golding considered the technical challenges of constructing its 404 foot spire. The result was his 1964 novel The Spire, an intense narrative about a man who believes he has a God given mission to build a magnificent spire on top of a cathedral, bringing glory to the town and its people closer to God. 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.

Harford, Tim (8 December 2017). "The Brexit monomania built on blind faith". Financial Times . Retrieved 25 September 2020.