Word: spire
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...SPIRE, by William Golding. Overriding church, chapter and parish, a saintly dean drives his architect to build a huge, prayer-envisioned stone spire on the shaky foundations of his cathedral, and then realizes on his deathbed that his spiritual inspiration was probably only worldly ambition. A metaphysical summation of his four previous novels (Lord of the Flies, Free Fall, etc.), William Golding's medieval fable is a provocative and often brilliant statement of the helpless and iniquitous nature...
Golding The Spire...
...SPIRE, by William Golding. Overriding church, chapter and parish, a saintly dean drives his architect to build a huge, prayer-envisioned stone spire on the shaky foundations of his cathedral, and then realizes on his deathbed that his spiritual inspiration was probably only worldly ambition. A metaphysical summation of his four previous novels (Lord of the Flies, Free Fall, etc.), William Golding's medieval fable is a provocative and often brilliant statement of the helpless and iniquitous nature...
Jocelin, the dean of the cathedral, at first seems a perfect incipient saint. Unworldly, passionate, sure of God's love, he is imbued with a vision of the spire as a living prayer of praise. His master mason and architect threatens to quit, the cathedral has no real foundation so that the spire, even if built, is likely to fall, his fellows in the cathedral chapter all oppose the plan, but Jocelin will brook no interference. Consumed by his dream he goes into debt, disrupts the services of the cathedral, fills the choir with the blaspheming of dirty workmen...
...thought he had, at least, been chosen by God for his post in the cathedral. He finds that the choosers in fact were the king and his paramour (Jocelin's aunt) who pleased the king and asked a favor for her nephew. He thinks his vision of the spire is divinely inspired - but Golding insistently suggests that it may just as well be a phallic sublimation of Jocelin's repressed yearnings for the red-haired wife of a cathedral worker. Even the warming presence of an angel who, Jocelin believes, comes to watch over him as he prays...