The function of the gargoyle is over-ridden. By Jocelin, primarily, though he is conscious of his hubris. A hubris he attributes to the sculptor. "Don't you think you might strain my humility, by making an angel of me?"

During World War II, he served as part of the royal Navy, which he left five years later. This experience strongly influenced his future novels. Later, he taught and focused on writing. Classical Greek literature, such as that of Euripides, and The Battle of Maldon, an Anglo-Saxon oeuvre of unknown author influenced him. But the steeple is not built with holy spirit - it is created by workers, simple, rude people, many of whom are not faith in faith. They get drunk, fight; they poison Pengall, the hereditary watchman of the cathedral, who asks the abbot to intercede for him. He does not see the point in building a spire, if for this he has to destroy the usual way of life. In response to his complaints, Jocelyn urges him to be patient and promises to speak with the master.Yahu zemin müsait değil" dese de usta, "Sen merak etme ben biliyorum, tanrı böyle buyurdu, o kule yapılacak" After going to see Salisbury Cathedral and learning that Golding lived just down the street from it, near St. Anne's Gate, I was compelled to read this book in which Golding imagines the creation of the enormous spire atop the cathedral. In it, he has created is a brilliant, densely woven, intensely introspective study of obsession and faith, which pushes everyone around him to the very edge of endurance. 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.

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 have so much will, it puts all other business by. I am like a flower that is bearing fruit. There is a preoccupation about the flower as the fruit swells and the petals wither; a preoccupation about the whole plant, leaves dropping, everything dying but the swelling fruit. That's how it must be. My will is in the pillars and the high wall. I offered myself; and I am learning. (92) I thought it would be simple. I thought the spire would complete a stone bible, be the apocalypse in stone. I never guessed in my folly that there would be a new lesson at every level, and a new power. Nor could I have been told. I had to build in faith, against advice. That's the only way. (103) 'I tell you, we guess. We judge that this or that is strong enough; but we can never tell until the full strain comes on it whether we were right or wrong.' (111) '...D'you think you can escape? You're not in my net—oh yes, Roger, I understand a number of things, how you are drawn, and twisted, and tormented—but it isn't my net. It's His. We can neither of us avoid this work. And there's another thing. I've begun to see how we can't understand it either, since each new foot reveals a new effect, a new purpose. It's senseless, you think. It frightens us, and it's unreasonable. But then—since when did God ask the chosen ones to be reasonable? They call this Jocelin's Folly, don't they?' A Visitor with a nail arrives at the cathedral, which should be walled up at the base of the spire. Among other things, the Visitor must deal with the denunciations that came to Jocelyn during all two years of construction. Their author was Anselm, who accused the abbot of neglecting his duties. In fact, as a result of the construction, Anselm simply lost part of its income. Jocelyn responds out of place. The visitor sees that he has set off his mind, and sends him under house arrest.This is a very demanding novel due to its narration style (it is written in the style of stream of conscience, but solely from Jocelyn's perspective) as well as its heavy symbolism and imagery. However, it is immensely rewarding due to the immersive prose. The apocalyptic, maddening and at times horrific imagery is conveyed perfectly through Golding's excellent narration skills, the dialogue between Jocelyn and his contenders riveting and the symbolism comes across crystal clear.

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. If it is all a figment of Golding's imagination, and there was no Jocelin, or anyone like him, The Spire becomes a tremendous mental exercise. A great abstract symbol of folly that is itself insubstantial; a symphony of words, surrounding empty space in a manner even more flimsy than that cone of scaffolding and ladders wrapped around the air at the top of the spire. Unfortunately for virtually everybody involved, Jocelin believes he has been chosen by God to build this spire and refutes every logical argument and explanation by the master builder with the classic ‘it will stand because God wills it so’. The master builder’s problem, of course, is that he can’t refute this without being burned as a heretic (or whatever the punishment was for being a heretic in twelfth century England… I could look it up but sod it). The Spire at Salisbury Playhouse". William Golding. 20 November 2012 . Retrieved 25 September 2020. 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.

In Golding's opening sentence we read "God the Father was exploding in his face …" which is initially as enigmatic as it is dramatic – until it is resolved as a metaphorical description of sunlight streaming through a stained glass window. The delay is important. There is a semantic lag, a slight, postponed understanding throughout The Spire.

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." 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. Bu kez bir manastırdayız. Bir baş rahibimiz var. Adı Jocelin. Şahsi yorumumu şimdiden söyleyeyim. Bence bu adam delinin teki. Yaşlandıkça ve Hıristyanlık aleminde yükseldikçe kafayı yemiş. Bir meleği var. (Kim bilir hangi psikolojik rahatsızlıktan muzdarip. Yazık la kimin çocuğuysa...) Meleği sürekli sırtında. Ondan hiç ayrılmıyor. Konuşmuyor da. Sadece peşinde dolanıyor, sırtında ağırlık yapıyor hepsi bu. Dolayısıyla bizim başrahip "ben seçilmiş kişiyim" diye dolanıyor ortalıkta. 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]

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. Services, Tribune Media. "PRYCE SAYS PRESS MADE UP TIFF WITH DIRECTOR". Sun-Sentinel.com . Retrieved 25 September 2020. 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. 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."