Dean Jocelin brooks no argument in his determination to fulfill his mission. Despite warnings from the master builder Roger Mason, that the foundations are not strong enough to support the spire’s weight, he presses on relentlessly. He will not stop even when the supporting columns protest, “singing” as they bend under the strain. Nor when his fellow members of the Cathedral chapter complain that celebrants can no longer hear the services amid the banging and clattering way above their heads. 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." Courage. Glory be. It is a final beginning. It was one thing to let him dig a pit there at the crossways like a grave for some notable. This is different. Now I lay a hand on the very body of my church. Like a surgeon, I take my knife to the stomach drugged with poppy. Anselm is largely critical of the developments concerning the spire, arguing that it is destruction of the church. Jocelin had been prepared to lose his friendship with Anselm as part of the cost of the spire, but we learn by the end of the novel that they appeared not to have had a friendship in the first place. The Spire was envisioned by Golding as a historical novel with a moral struggle at its core, which was originally intended to have two settings: both the Middle Ages and modern day. [4] Whilst teaching at Bishop Wordsworth's School, Golding regularly looked out of his classroom window at Salisbury Cathedral and wondered how he would possibly construct its spire [5] But the book's composition and eventual realisation of The Spire was not an easy process for Golding. According to his daughter, Judy Carver, Golding 'struggled like anything to write The Spire' and said that the novel 'went through many drafts'; this was perhaps owing to the fact that he had stopped teaching which, in turn, gave him more time to write. [6]

On the surface, the plot looks very simple. Nepotism plays a main role in placing a less qualified person as a Dean of a Cathedral. The Dean considers it as his Call. Later as a Dean he has a vision and wants to transform the vision into a reality by building a spire to the cathedral. This is an impossible undertaking for the Cathedral is on a marshy land and does not have the foundation necessary to hold a spire of 400 feet. Everyone is against. The Deans considers it his Call and goes ahead. This foolish attempt is always referred to as Dean's Folly.

urn:lcp:spire0000gold_n6f6:epub:fc2d5db0-824c-48a2-b99e-a4062f6bd9c2 Foldoutcount 0 Identifier spire0000gold_n6f6 Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t37186j2s Invoice 1652 Isbn 0571064922 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.

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. 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. The spire seems to me an enterprise equal in braggadocio and confusion to the construction of the Tower of Babel in the book of Genesis." 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.

Indeed, this is quite a novel of our age. First, build a barely adequate church with a minimal foundation and then try to make it rise to the heavens like a ghetto retelling of the Tower of Babel. I read this book years ago with the Guardian Reading Group and had a chance to ask Golding’s daughter a question at the end of the month. Many participants did not like the book because the protagonist is not likeable, but I thought it was a very sad and tragic story in the end. Jocelin acquired his job through a family connection and was otherwise completely ill-equipped for the role. He had neither the intelligence or the faith—the spire he sees as his purpose. (He came to mind often during the Trump Presidency.) Because the narrative is a very narrow 3rd person, every event and conversation is filtered through the Dean’s increasingly distorted, self-centred mind. The reader has to read past that to try to understand what is happening.(“The Inheritors” uses a similar technique.) 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. Jocelin ceases to care. He neglects his religious duties and stops praying. All his waking hours are devoted to spurring the workmen on to build higher and higher, even climbing up the scaffolding himself to help their endeavours. 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