Word: spire
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Golding 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...
...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...
...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...
...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...