Of course, seeing the building through Jocelin's eyes is dangerous. Not least because, as becomes increasingly apparent as the book goes on, Jocelin is a fool. Early on we may be prepared to accept his vision of "the bible in stone" as something extraordinary and profound – but as we come to understand that he can barely read and has hardly a clue about church law, we have to question that vision. There's also Jocelin's extraordinary vanity. In his abstract thoughts, he sees himself as a kind of saint, a man who thinks only of the work and the glory it brings to his religion. Yet the stone cold reality is that he has demanded that statues of himself be built into the tower. What you can notice immediately about a novel like this is that it has nothing to do with today's shabby 'historical fiction' trend. Such books merely transpose today's sensationalism to a remote timeperiod; but deliver nothing more than the same tawdry potboiler intrigues we're familiar with from TV. 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. Mark well: this style did not prevent Golding from winning numerous international literary prizes. Golding enjoys one of the finest reputations in English letters. Besides his audacious ideas, (their variety, their execution) his prose is considered one of his many strengths even taken at blank, face- value. This 'forceful' and torrential style of text has won him many fans. Lots of readers enjoy his narrative voice, no matter what type-of-scene Golding happens to be describing. But will everyone appreciate it? No. There's never any doubt about the phallic symbolism of the spire – but there are variations in its meaning. At first it rises from the belly of the church as a fairly straightforward expression of Jocelin's pride and power. Yet the imagery becomes ever more dangerous and unpleasant. We see workmen waving models of it between their legs. It is the centre of the apparent rape of Goody Pangall. It then seems, for a while at least, to promise a kind of fertility, a hope of life and love, when Goody falls pregnant and has an adulterous affair with the master builder Roger Mason. But in this novel, such hopes breed death and madness. And afterwards, as the tower sways and looks set to fall, there is hopeless impotence.

How many completely inadequate people do we see promoted to positions beyond their ability in business, politics, the church? How much madness lies behind religious or creative vision? We have many great works of architecture, art or literature created by the efforts of individuals as driven and destructive as our poor dean. In that end what does this tell us about Golding's desire to make sense of his creative efforts in the context of his personal demons? If his building went up and stayed up, Jocelin would remain cruel, and vain, and foolish and avaricious – but perhaps not so broken. His struggles would have produced something enduring, and beautiful. Something that has been admired for centuries and will be for many more to come. And so the book becomes a commentary on what it takes to produce a monument. I've tended to read Jocelin's folly as part of a profoundly human condition – the search for meaning, the construction of belief, even as exemplar of the novelist's ability to invent and elaborate. Nailing The Spire to Christianity works, but it limits or rather narrows our understanding of Art's capacity."

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.

Autumn is coming. Endless rains lead to the fact that under the cathedral is constantly standing water. An unbearable stink emanates from the pit that Roger dug in the cathedral to study the foundation. “Only by painful willpower” Jocelyn forces himself to remember what an important work is being done in the cathedral, constantly evoking a divine vision in his memory. The gloomy sensation is aggravated by the death of one of the artisans, who escaped from the woods, the office of senile madness, and rumors of a plague epidemic. Jocelyn feels that all this is being recorded in the bill that will someday be presented to him. But he reached the top at last and squatted there among the ravens. While the sun sank in great stillness he sat there, and all the spire was in his head. 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. Day and night, acts of worship went on in the stink and half dark, where the candles illuminated nothing but close haloes of vapour; and the voices rose, in fear of age and death, in fear of weight and dimension, in fear of darkness and a universe without hope. (50) On the basis of that reality – and although it contradicts my scant knowledge of Salibsury Cathedral (which is to say, that it still exists and it has a spire), I'd be tempted to guess that the tower did not survive. There was calamity foretold in the way those supporting pillars bent and sang, and in the way Roger and Rachel Mason, Pangall and Goody (who represented the pillars in Jocelin's mind) all broke. Then there was actual catastrophe in the great climactic storm that plunged such large sections of masonry down to earth – and Jocelin along with them. Given what happens in the bulk of the novel, it would be almost miraculous if the spire survived.William Golding's excellent but challenging novel, The Spire is not so much a tale of the building of a spire to further accentuate an existing cathedral, modeled after the one at Salisbury in Wiltshire but rather a kind of personal referendum on the human condition. It represents a commentary that is both perplexing & dispiriting at times, while also being a structurally fascinating work that attempts to illuminate the fine line between divine inspiration & human obsession on the part of the main character Jocelin, the cathedral's dean & driving force to erect a spire that would stand for all time as "a prayer in stone". The more I think about this brilliant novel the more it opens up questions. The ambiguity that I am sure has frustrated many a reader is, for me, the core of its power and strength as a work of literature." Thus the erection of The Spire commences… And, similar to Isaiah, he sees the guarding angel by his side…