Something Old

 Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published year or two ago.

“THE SPIRE” by William Golding (First published in 1964)

Seen at first glance, William Golding’s fifth novel The Spire is a very simple fable. Pride comes before the fall. Arrogance leads to destruction. But read closely, it is much more than these old saws. The Spire is a complex analysis of a certain sort of temperament, and the limits of religious belief. Golding’s first four novels, Lord of the Flies, The Inheritors, Pincher Martin and Free Fall all told us why and how we human beings are deeply flawed, more-or-less referring to the Biblical “Fall”. All but The Inheritors raise notions of God and religion, no matter how sceptical Golding himself could be. There is the prophetic boy Simon in Lord of the Flies who understands what real Evil is. There is the drowning seaman who directly curses God in Pincher Martin. There is the soul-searching of a man in Free Fall who has had a bad religious upbringing but rebels against it… even if he eventually understands the need for faith. Golding is not in any way proselytizing. He himself was very much a sceptic. But he does suggest that most human beings yearn for something greater than themselves, a desire very like what is now often called the  “God-shaped hole” that is left when religion has been set aside.

In The Spire, Golding deliberately puts his characters into a very religious context. It is medieval England, perhaps somewhere in the 13^th or 14^th century. Jocelin is the Dean of a cathedral – he can over-rule the other clerics. Against the wishes of some of his colleagues, Jocelin has ordered that the old cathedral’s spire be made much higher, reaching to the heavens. He is obsessed with this project, “a construction of wood and stone and metal” four hundred feet high. But the Master Builder, Roger Mason, has great misgivings. When he and his hired workers dig deep down, Roger hits mud and realises that the new foundations would not be able to support the huge spire that Jocelin has ordered. Jocelin ignores Roger’s warnings and orders him to get on with his work. The stones and wood that make up the cathedral begin to shake and make creaking sounds, to “sing” as Roger calls it. But the building goes on and the workers have to climb higher. Joselin is buoyed when, from a bishop in Rome, he is sent a sacred relic, a Holy Nail, which he believes will protect his spire. But the gales and the rain come and the situation worsens. Roger begs Jocelin to let him and his workers be relieved and allowed to quit the project, but Jocelin threatens him and makes him honour the contract he has signed. The great building shakes. It can only end in catastrophe, and eventually it does.

This is the flimsiest synopsis that I have yet concocted.  The Spire is about much more than an impending disaster. Golding has clearly researched the nature of medieval cathedrals and he examines closely the ambulatory, the transept, the cloister, the buttresses, the Lady Chapel and all the other parts of the cathedral. The images Golding presents are sometimes linked to the majesty of the cathedral; but more often medieval life is not glamourised. Gritty dust hovers around as the builders cut and smash rock and plaster and sometimes break statues, not to mention filling the ground with sawdust. Foul smells rise from the mud and filth down where the foundations are supposed to go. In this environment, fewer worshipers come to Mass. There is also the matter of different social classes. Jocelin is very upset by the way the artisans go about their work whistling or singing bawdy songs they have picked up from ale-houses; there is drunkenness and sometimes fights.  Near the cathedral is a poor man, more-or-less the cathedral’s caretaker, called Pangall who lives with his wife Goody. Pangall is regularly harassed and ridiculed by the workers. It is not clearly spelled out, but  seems Goody later in the novel she dies in a sort of riot. Roger Mason’s wife Rachel is barren – like the Rachel in the Bible. She is pious but in her own way she is very assertive. This is  something that Jocelin does not like in women. Rachel separates from Roger and as the situation gets worse Roger takes to drink [yet they later get together again.]

As for Jocelin, he himself has to face the criticism of his fellow priests. A “Visitor” [a senior priest who had the authority to examine the state of cathedrals] interrogates Jocelin. He points out that Jocelin has neglected some of his duties. He has not been to confession for months. He has been so concerned with the spire that he has not said mass as often as he should. He has in effect turned people away. An older priest Father Adam tells Jocelin that the prayers Jocelin has told him, of an angel that directed him, could really be merely a matter of his self-promotion – or what we might now call his ego flattering himself. And later, most cutting of all, Jocelin’s confessor, a mild priest called Father Anselm, reminds Jocelin that much of his community dislike him because he had been promoted up in the hierarchy only because he had connections with wealthy people.

More important, though, is that Golding emphasises Jocelin’s private thoughts. He believes the Devil himself is fighting him but an angel is protecting him. He speaks to a woman – his aunt – who tells him about his family’s trials… but when he speaks with her she has long been dead. He is sometimes haunted by women and market girls and their bodies and the Devil. He thinks of Rachel and her forthrightness. And he thinks of the horror of a woman giving birth…. And after all this, he at last understands that Roger Mason was right about the spire. So he tries to apologise to Roger for his folly. But Roger is now a very sick man, drunken, who has lost his job, lost all the men who worked for him, Rachel has left him, and he curses Joselin for putting him though the torture of trying to create an unstable spire.

Joselin  staggers into the street. When he is nearly dying of “a wasting, a consumption of the back and spine”,  he is half awake, half  his mind rushing though his memories and weighing his life. What has he achieved? Father Adam comes to give him his last rites. He sees Joselin’s lips moving a little and thinks Joselin is saying “ God! God! God! ” so he lays the host on the dead man’s tongue. Golding apparently liked ambiguous endings  [see the ambiguous last words of his novel Free Fall]. In this case we could say Joselin was piously reaching for God… or, like Pincher Martin in the novel of that name, he could be cursing God.

The most common interpretation of this novel is that it is a matter of hubris. Like the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel which over-reached itself, so Joselin over-reaches himself  in trying to make a monument for himself with his spire. At the same time, Golding is in some way pitting the faith of Joselin against the practical sense of Roger… or maybe religion against science. Yet both of them are radically flawed, Joselin with his obsession and Roger with his temper and drunkenness. The human race in short – never perfect.