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. Ustayı delirtiyor. Usta ne kadar bırakıp gitmek istese de manyak rahip izin vermiyor. Adamın başka işler bulup gitmesini engelliyor. Kimse ustaya iş vermiyor ve dolayısıyla usta da bırakıp gidemiyor. Gizemli bir teyzesi var rahibin, ondan da para geliyor. Böylece kule inşaatı aylarca devam ediyor. Zavallı ustacık çaresizce bilimsel açıklamalar yapıyor. (Mukavemet analizi, zemin etüdü falan işte...) Ama yok. Manyak rahip o dili konuşmuyor ki. O tanrıdan alıyor emirleri. Senin fizik kurallarını koyan adamla konuşuyor rahip. Sen kimsin fakir usta! What is the dumb sculptor doing in the novel? He represents the muted objective narrative voice. Which we hear only as William James's description of consciousness: "one great blooming buzzing confusion".

I found it a challenging book to read yet a completely engrossing portrayal of obsession and mental degeneration The Spire by William Golding: Footnotes Craven, Peter (23 January 2015). "Benedict Cumberbatch animates William Golding's symbolistic novel The Spire". The Sydney Morning Herald . Retrieved 25 September 2020. However, the criticism of Jocelin is obliterated by Jocelin's subjectivity, his joy at having held in his hand the model of the spire that is to be built. "He looked down, loving them in his joy." And he refuses to accept explicitly that they are talking about him. He says: "Who is this poor fellow? You should pray for him rather …" He refuses to accept delivery of the insult he has overheard – and so we cannot be completely sure what he knows and what he doesn't know. The Spire confines us to Jocelin's consciousness – not absolutely, but for most of the novel's length. 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." This is a marvelous book, beautifully written and filled with mystery. I regret having waited fifty years to read it. I understand (I think) why some readers pan it, but that might reflect disappointed expectations rather than the novel itself. This is far far away from the genre of historical fiction in general, and from Pillars of the Earth in particular.Golding can scorch us by the immediate heat of his sentences. But sometimes he chooses the slower narrative burn. The first chapter begins with Jocelin holding the model of the spire and laughing: "He was laughing, chin up, and shaking his head. God the father was exploding in his face with a glory of sunlight through painted glass, a glory that moved with his movements to consume and exalt Abraham and Isaac and then God again. The tears of laughter in his eyes made additional spokes and wheels and rainbows. // Chin up, hands holding the model spire before him, eyes half closed; joy – "I've waited half my life for this day!"' T he Spire was published in 1964. The Dean of a cathedral, Jocelin, wants to add a spire to the building, which has no foundations and is therefore a kind of miracle already. The novel is about the second, highly imperfect miracle, the erection of the spire – and the cost, which is financial, physical and spiritual. And it is about creative realisation, bringing the impossible into being. William Golding wrote the first draft of The Spire in 14 days – itself a kind of miracle. Second readings are dangerous enterprises. Anything can happen. When I first read this novel, I thought the Spire, that gives the name to the title, stood defiantly by the end of the book. My attention was focused on the descriptions of how architects and builders managed to pull up the complex architectural structures that miraculously were built during the Middle Ages. I did not pay too much attention to the writing. At the time, my English did not have strong foundations, and it was as much a guess-work as the art & craft of the medieval masons.

I have so much will, it puts all other business by. I am like a flower that is bearing fruit. There is a preoccupation about the flower as the fruit swells and the petals wither; a preoccupation about the whole plant, leaves dropping, everything dying but the swelling fruit. That's how it must be. My will is in the pillars and the high wall. I offered myself; and I am learning. (92) I thought it would be simple. I thought the spire would complete a stone bible, be the apocalypse in stone. I never guessed in my folly that there would be a new lesson at every level, and a new power. Nor could I have been told. I had to build in faith, against advice. That's the only way. (103) 'I tell you, we guess. We judge that this or that is strong enough; but we can never tell until the full strain comes on it whether we were right or wrong.' (111) '...D'you think you can escape? You're not in my net—oh yes, Roger, I understand a number of things, how you are drawn, and twisted, and tormented—but it isn't my net. It's His. We can neither of us avoid this work. And there's another thing. I've begun to see how we can't understand it either, since each new foot reveals a new effect, a new purpose. It's senseless, you think. It frightens us, and it's unreasonable. But then—since when did God ask the chosen ones to be reasonable? They call this Jocelin's Folly, don't they?'

Indeed, this is quite a novel of our age. First, build a barely adequate church with a minimal foundation and then try to make it rise to the heavens like a ghetto retelling of the Tower of Babel. And what is the answer to this question? The sculptor shakes his head. "Humming in the throat, headshake, doglike, eager eyes." Is the dumb sculptor denying that Jocelin's humility is vulnerable? Or is he denying that he ever thought of portraying Jocelin as an angel in the first place? Jocelin's extrapolation is, after all, based on a gesture.

I really can’t emphasise enough how visceral this experience is. Maybe it’s just me but I was completely swept up in Golding’s amazing writing. I don’t want to give the ending away, but those of you who only want to read books with happy endings should probably avoid this one. If it is all a figment of Golding's imagination, and there was no Jocelin, or anyone like him, The Spire becomes a tremendous mental exercise. A great abstract symbol of folly that is itself insubstantial; a symphony of words, surrounding empty space in a manner even more flimsy than that cone of scaffolding and ladders wrapped around the air at the top of the spire. Dean Jocelin brooks no argument in his determination to fulfill his mission. Despite warnings from the master builder Roger Mason, that the foundations are not strong enough to support the spire’s weight, he presses on relentlessly. He will not stop even when the supporting columns protest, “singing” as they bend under the strain. Nor when his fellow members of the Cathedral chapter complain that celebrants can no longer hear the services amid the banging and clattering way above their heads.However, as the spire is gradually erected, a hole is dug that seems to point to the fragility of the cathedral's underpinnings, an insufficiency of the original beams, also revealing an array of crawling specimens below ground that make the place resemble a painting by Hieronymus Bosch. The author's verbal imagery is often stunning and the interplay between good & evil is quite reminiscent of The Lord of the Flies, Golding's best-known work. I have loved Lord of the Flies since we read it in English Literature class at school and have read it again a couple of times since. It occurred to me a few days ago that, despite my love of Lord of the Flies it has never even entered my head to try any other William Golding books. With this in mind, I bought Golding’s fifth novel The Spire.

Another metaphor for the spire that Golding proposes is Jocelin's late exclamation that 'It is like an appletree!' Kitabın sonuna doğru rahibin ustayı sıkıştırmaktan başka neler neler yaptığını da öğreniyoruz. Ama o da okuyanlara kalsın. Tabi Kulemizin akıbeti ne oldu? O da sürpriz. 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". This section possibly contains original research. Please improve it by verifying the claims made and adding inline citations. Statements consisting only of original research should be removed. ( July 2021) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message)Golding knew exactly what he was doing. Later, he describes Jocelin's fractured memories in terms of narrative: "they were like sentences from a story, which though they left great gaps, still told enough." Clearly self-referential. True, we are afforded glimpses, dispatches, from the outside world. Two young deacons are overheard by Jocelin, denigrating someone unspecified: "Say what you like; he's proud." Second deacon: "And ignorant." First deacon: "Do you know what? He thinks he is a saint! A man like that!" The prose is dense and disorientated, flashing between coherent thought, delirium, reality, reverie and nightmare. Certain themes and motifs are repeated throughout some of which hints at an understated, repressed sexuality. There is often reference in the narrative to previous scenes and conversations that were either only partially, or just inadequately depicted in the first instance, meaning that at times the story loses coherency, even descending into abject nonsense. This may be an attempt to portray the thin line between revelation and delusion existentially? Jocelin ceases to care. He neglects his religious duties and stops praying. All his waking hours are devoted to spurring the workmen on to build higher and higher, even climbing up the scaffolding himself to help their endeavours.