SPIRE

I was in Salisbury for a couple of days and thought it would be impolite to not re-read The Spire by William Golding. He used to teach in the city and looked at the cathedral spire every day from his classroom window, and wondered what it would take to build a spire of over 400 feet, and what sort of person would do it.

This is a story of an ambitious dean, Jocelin, of an unnamed cathedral. A man who believes he has been told by God to build a spire on a building with inadequate foundations and that faith alone will be enough. As his obsession grows he abandons his duties, his people, even his prayers in pursuit of ambition. He ignores the advice of the master builder and blackmails him into finishing the job. Jocelin is also sick, physically from TB – the ‘angel’ on his back,  and mentally as he is tormented by lust for a young woman, Goody  – his ‘devil’.

It’s not an easy read, it’s written in the third person but we are by Jocelin’s side for the whole suffocating story, and there’s no escape from him and the ‘dunce’s cap’ spire. But I love the book anyway for its immersion in the world of medieval construction, and the moral conflict between vision and personal ambition versus practicalities and humility.

The cathedral of the story has similarities to Salisbury cathedral which itself was built on poor foundations and whose pillars bent under the weight of the tower and spire and had to be strengthened in the 17th century.

I stayed at the Red Lion hotel, a wonderfully wonky old building that was once a coaching inn and allegedly the temporary home of the cathedral builders. My room wasn’t the best in the hotel by far, but I had a pleasing view of the spire from my window as I read the book.