The Spire

William Golding's latest novel is more a diagram than a story. He bases the book on a tension between the spiritual (the spire) and the worldly and instinctual (the foundations).

The aging hero, Father Jocelin, sets out to capture his religious passion in a monumental new cathedral spire. Opposed to his zeal is the practicality of the Master Builder, who points out that the cathedral's foundation will not support a spire. Father Jocelin gets it built by sheer force of will, in the process destroying the builder's self-respect and trampling on his old colleagues--neglecting the portentous advice that a solid spire "goes down as far as it goes up." At the end as the spire totters, Jocelin comes to recognize the human cost his fervor has exacted. He emerges from the destruction of his hopes able to face his impending death with a new, more comprehensive faith.

Doubtless Golding intends the reader to become involved in Jocelin's suffering, but the requirements of allegory constantly work against complexity of character. In order to generalize Jocelin's high, spiritual pre-occupations, Golding leaves out all but the formal vestiges of Christianity. Like Becket in Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral the priest uses paternal, beatific language; but Christ, salvation, and sin are carefully left out. Golding merely gives Jocelin the symptoms of faith, and leaves it to the reader to conjure up some kind of psychological reality from such cryptic sommentary as "Joy, fire, joy." Furthermore the artificial machinery of the allegory--the lack of foundations, the skinny pillars--imposes an arbitrary and implausible burden on Father Jocelin's psyche.

Golding's desire to draw a moral also leads him to simplify the other characters to fit general roles. He works out a set of convenient metaphors to describe each of them, and continually sticks in these formulas to remind the reader of the character's place in the general scheme. Jocelin's ecstasy always burns like a flame, and an angel continually appears behind him to stand for his inspired will. The Master Builder and his wife "revolve around each other." And the urge which entangles the Master Builder in adultery with an innocent townswoman is "the net." This repetition does convey the rigidity of Jocelin's mind. But it is also boring, and has to be justified as a part of Golding's slightly condescending fable-telling manner. Stylistic consistency is also apparently meant to account for the rather childish Anglo-Saxon in which Golding's characters think and converse.

Golding saves his full verbal resources for the descriptive sequences, such as the riot when the workers discover they will have to finish the shaky tower, and the reverberating interior of the church in a storm. But here again Golding's metaphors tend to defeat his purpose. They fail in the long descriptions due to overabundance (in two pages of storm description one sees cosmic wildcats, black crows, sails, masts, stone shoulders, Satan, and clouds of devils). And often they fail to evoke anything because they are simply overblown ("the sunrays wheeled about him;" "the spark and shatter of the sun").

In the concluding chapters, where the priest's doubts bring him close to madness, Golding's allegorical purpose at last follows him to expand the book's emotional breadth. By now he has dramatized the two opposite extremes and must show the priest's mind gaining complexity in order to illustrate a resolution.

Jocelin discovers his own sexuality with a jolt, in his passionate guilt toward the woman he had used to detain the Master Builder. He begins to question the pious motives which led him to marry her, his "daughter in God," to an important church sweeper. But even here some of the circumstances seem arbitrary. The spire's mysterious patroness turns out to have been the dead king's mistress, angling for immortality. The news that this woman also has supervised his rise in the church hastens Jocelin further into delirium.

But since an allegory is ultimately didactic, its ending not only concludes the story, but culminates the argument. It cannot, for instance, and in purely personal tragedy. Golding does a better job ending this book than he did with, Lord of the Flies, which relied on a deus ex machina--the arrival of Her Majesty's Navy.

But still the human sting is taken out of Jocelin's fall by Golding's wish to moralize. Nature is introduced in the final pages as a healing balm, so that the dying Jocelin can say as he views the tilting spire, "It's like the apple tree." There is a kind of vague inspirationalism to it all, but the book never becomes effective as the story of a man, and emerges as a foredoomed effort to stretch a proverb into a novel.