The Spire - Softcover

Golding, William

3.49

3,751 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0571225462 ISBN 13: 9780571225460

Publisher: Faber and Faber, 2005

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Dean Jocelin has a vision: that God has chosen him to erect a great spire on his cathedral. His mason anxiously advises against it, for the old cathedral was built without foundations. Nevertheless, the spire rises octagon upon octagon, pinnacle by pinnacle, until the stone pillars shriek and the ground beneath it swims. Its shadow falls ever darker on the world below, and on Dean Jocelin in particular.

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About the Author:

John Mullan is Professor of English at University College London. He is the author of How Novels Work (OUP) and Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eightenth Century (OUP). He has published widely on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature. A broadcaster and journalist as well as an academic, he writes a weekly column on contemporary fiction for The Guardian.

Review:

In the 14th century, when men broke their backs and lost their lives toiling with stone to build the great cathedrals, Den Jocelin is visited by an angel who tells him to erect a spire upon a building that has no foundations. Despised as a lunatic and self-deceiver, Jocelin's will forces the spire upwards, course by course, until the pillars begin to sing and the earth to crawl. Golding's exposition of one man's struggle with the noble and ignoble sides of his nature confirmed him in 1964 as a writer of fantastic imaginative power, and the magic of this book is still extraordinarily potent to me today. (Kirkus (UK))

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