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. The construction of the spire continues, Jocelyn works with the builders, and suddenly it is revealed to him that they are all righteous, despite their sins. And he himself is torn between an angel and the devil, feeling that Goody bewitched him with his red hair. Live webchat with Judy Carver on The Spire by William Golding – post your questions here". the Guardian. 24 April 2013 . Retrieved 1 December 2022. 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.

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. Above it stood the seraphims: each one had six wings; with twain he covered his face, and with twain he covered his feet, and with twain he did fly.” Isaiah 6:2 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. How many completely inadequate people do we see promoted to positions beyond their ability in business, politics, the church? How much madness lies behind religious or creative vision? We have many great works of architecture, art or literature created by the efforts of individuals as driven and destructive as our poor dean. In that end what does this tell us about Golding's desire to make sense of his creative efforts in the context of his personal demons? Golding taught for years (1945-61) at Bishop Wordsworth’s School, in the shadow of Salisbury Cathedral, and the tale of the building of the spire, strange and dream-like though it is in the telling, has historical roots. I was surprised to learn that some of the most dramatic and alarming elements in the fictional cathedral’s physical geography, such as the shallowness and marshiness of its foundations—brilliantly exploited by Golding at a literal and metaphorical level—are factually true of Salisbury Cathedral. The lunatic venture of piling up the second-highest spire in Europe on such a precarious base was one that Salisbury’s anonymous masons did actually undertake, in the early fourteenth century. The swaying, creaking, leaning pillar-crushing monstrosity that Golding portrays as the result of his fictional Dean Jocelin’s madness is the serenely beautiful landmark we know from Constable’s paintings. Christopher Wren, brought in for restoration in the 1680s, found the spire leaning almost 30 inches from the vertical and slowly crushing the ancient pillars on which it stood.This might be the finest historical fiction that I have read to date - partly because it works through atmosphere rather than detail. 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." But he reached the top at last and squatted there among the ravens. While the sun sank in great stillness he sat there, and all the spire was in his head.

He was laughing, chin up, and shaking his head." It reads at first like third-person impersonal, authorial prose, but as the paragraph proceeds, we become aware that the narrative isn't impersonal: it is focalised for Jocelin. It emanates from his point of view. It isn't free indirect speech – a clearer indicator that we are privy to a character's thoughts. An example from Jane Austen: "The comfort of such a friend at that moment as Colonel Brandon – of such a companion for her mother – how gratefully was it felt!" You can hear Elinor Dashwood's voice, her emotion. Focalisation gives us not the character's voice, but the timbre of their thought. And this is crucial to The Spire because, for most of the narrative, the reader is trapped in Jocelin's subjectivity, in Jocelin's solipsism. We find it difficult to judge him – his motives, his purity, his corruption, his ambition, his vanity – because the view of him is restricted. As in a theatre, where the seats are cheaper because a pillar interferes with the view of the stage.Rachel Mason is Roger's wife. She reveals to Jocelin the reason why they cannot have children as attempts at sex result in fits of giggles. A most remarkable book, as unforeseeable as one foresaw, an entire original... remote from the mainstream, potent, severe, even forbidding." – Frank Kermode, New York Review of Books, 30 April 1964.

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.

Miller, Jeanne C. "ELUSIVE AND OBSCURE." The Virginia Quarterly Review, vol. 40, no. 4, 1964, pp. 668–671. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/26444912. Accessed 16 Apr. 2020. 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.