posted on 31 Jul 2025

The Spire by William Golding

In 1940 William Golding was still a full-time school teacher and had just taken up a new post at Bishop Wordsworth’s School, Salisbury, from where, according to his biographer John Carey, he was able to watch the spire of Salisbury Cathedral being restored following bombing damage – an experience, Carey says, ‘that must have been part of the gestation’ of Golding’s 1964 novel The Spire. 

In a later TV interview with the critic Frank Kermode, filmed at Salisbury Cathedral, Golding gave some credence to this. Asked how he had researched medieval building methods Golding said, ‘I just came here and said to myself, “If I were to build a spire, how would I go about it?”’ But to know this, I think, is almost as misleading at it is helpful, for The Spire is not the kind of historical novel that involves factually accurate period reconstruction. For all that certain aspects do correspond to the real Salisbury, The Spire takes place in a fictional town that is as much a metaphysical as a physical location, and Golding’s approach – as with all his work – is interior and somewhat experimental, knotty and demanding, at times seeming to strain at the boundaries of what he is capable of articulating. It is a novel in which the reader must share some of the work of excavating its meaning.

It is set some time during the fourteenth century. Jocelin, the Dean of a provincial cathedral church – there is some suggestion that church officials consider both him and the cathedral relatively unimportant – has become convinced that it is God’s will that the squat, ornamented tower of the cathedral should be replaced with a towering four hundred-foot spire, a resplendent hosannah in stone, a declaration of God’s greatness that will be visible for miles. But the master-builder contracted to undertake this work, Roger Mason, has grave doubts that it can be done: the cathedral has insufficient foundations to support such an edifice and no one has built so high before. When the novel opens Mason is tearing up flagstones in the nave and excavating a giant pit in an effort to find out precisely what the cathedral does rest on. 

On one level, the story is about the immense battle of wills between the Dean and his builder. It seems the Dean will stop at nothing in his attempts to encourage Mason to greater efforts – he offers more money (scarcely knowing how the present cost will be met let alone a pay rise for the huge army of labourers); he threatens to get future church contracts awarded to other builders; and he even turns a blind eye to Mason’s affair with the wife of a cathedral servant, thinking that lust will bind the man more tightly to the work in hand. The Dean believes that God’s work must be achieved at whatever cost – even when, especially when, his sinful, fallible flock lack the faith to undertake it.

At times The Spire reads as if it was conceived with almost as great a struggle as the story it tells of the building of the spire. It is certainly one of the novels that Golding laboured longest over; it went through endless drafts and cost him immense effort and anguish. But in the course of rewriting Golding entirely reshaped the novel, abandoning his original idea of a twentieth century narrator recounting and commenting on the medieval action, and opting instead for a sort of stream-of-consciousness narrator, sometimes Jocelin, sometimes not, but always from a medieval perspective. 

This makes a crucial difference because it locates the ‘voice’ of the novel entirely in the medieval period and requires the reader to enter the medieval mind, to tussle with the same things as Jocelin – hope, ambition, duty, fear; ignorance and superstition, shame and lust; free will and predestination – and to do this without recourse to twentieth century hindsight, rationalism, or technical and scientific understanding. In a sense, we read the novel while groping in the same terrifying darkness as Jocelin. The other masterstroke, I think, is that Golding presents us not with a twentieth century version of a great cathedral, but a medieval one. It is a building that has become a little dilapidated in the century-and-a-half since it was completed and its past is shrouded in mystery, its architects little understood. Somewhat ramshackle, it is squalid in the long wet, bitterly cold winters, shrouded in a pall of fog and woodsmoke, surrounded by semi-frozen mire, its cathedral yard cluttered with sagging hovels.

I won’t try to further explain the plot except to say that the struggle to erect a spire eventually consumes all of those most directly involved. There are many deaths amongst the expendable labourers; Mason the master-builder will attempt to kill himself in an alcoholic delirium, but live on, crippled; there are several murders, including those of two of the cathedral’s most vulnerable servants; and Jocelin will lose his reason and be relieved of his position as Dean by the church Council. And before he dies he will also realise that his promotion to the position of Dean – his crowning achievement – was from the very outset compromised, based not on his own inherent qualities but a consequence of court intrigue and sexual favours.

In other hands The Spire would be a huge door-stop of a book, but that is not Golding’s way and all of this and more is packed into a novel of only 220-pages. It is densely written, and while not always entirely successful in this density, it is rich in metaphor, folklore, theology, echoes and allusion, and is open to many different interpretations which seem to multiply with successive readings. For example, this time I closed the book convinced that Dean Jocelin’s increasingly unhinged rule in an outpost of ecclesiastical empire contains a very strong suggestion of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. This may be an allusion too far but it gives some idea of how ripe for interpretation this profound and sometimes frustrating novel is.

 

Alun Severn

August  2025

 

William Golding elsewhere on Letterpress:

 

William Golding: The Man Who Wrote Lord of the Flies by John Carey

 

Pincher Martin by William Golding

 

The Pyramid by William Golding

 

Rites of Passage by William Golding

 

Fear in the classroom: reading Lord of the Flies

 

The Inheritors by William Golding