Word: spiringly
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...SPIRE by William Golding. 215 pages. Harcourf, Brace & World...
...celebrated The Lord of the Flies, British Novelist William Golding neatly reduced human society to the scale of a few small boys on a castaways' island and briskly demonstrated that men are innately depraved and all social systems therefore doomed. Now, in The Spire, he symbolically sums up the works of civilization as a stone spire and all human consciousness as the exaltation, confusion and final despair of one lightheaded old churchman struggling to have the spire added to the body of a Gothic cathedral...
Faith or Folly? Offered with much advance fanfare after three intervening novels (widely praised but not very widely read), The Spire is clearly intended as a crowning work. Like Golding's other books, it is less a novel than a kind of fable in which a thin skin of realism is stretched to meet a rigid allegorical frame. Sometimes brilliant, sometimes tedious, it does not fully confirm the remarkably high reputation Golding now enjoys. But it proves that he has made himself the relentless modern master of two ancient and provocative themes-the loss of paradise and the sinfulness...
...swirling, wavelike bar, supported by a pair of pincers ("It has more grace than most of my work, so I thought it belonged there"); Lynn Chadwick's batlike, three-legged Stranger III will remain on the ramp leading up from the duomo; Nino Franchini's leaping spire of torn steel will stay on the spot where it was made, a cleft between two ancient houses...
...imaginative shapes, Netsch had to do far more than satisfy one specific congregation, and one creed. He not only had to build a private place of worship for the cadets, he also had to create a national monument. Furthermore, his building would serve Protestants, Catholics and Jews. A single-spire motif would imply one religion, and a three-spire motif would make no sense. The problem was how to produce a building that would be unmistakably a house of worship, without benefit of using, on the exterior at least, any of the traditional architectural hallmarks of any one faith...