The Spire: With an introduction by John Mullan - Softcover

Golding, William

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0571307825 ISBN 13: 9780571307821

Publisher: Faber & Faber, 2013

Synopsis

'...the folly isn't mine. It's God's Folly. Even in the old days He never asked men to do what was reasonable. Men can do that for themselves. They can buy and sell, heal and govern. But then out of some deep place comes the command to do what makes no sense at all - to build a ship on dry land; to sit among the dunghills; to marry a whore; to set their son on the altar of sacrifice. Then, if men have faith, a new thing comes.'

Dean Jocelin has a vision: that God has chosen him to erect a great spire on his cathedral. His mason anxiously advises against it, for the old cathedral was built without foundations. Nevertheless, the spire rises octagon upon octagon, pinnacle by pinnacle, until the stone pillars shriek and the ground beneath it swims. Its shadow falls ever darker on the world below, and on Dean Jocelin in particular.

About this title

About the Authors

William Golding (1911 - 1993) was born in Cornwall and educated at Marlborough Grammar School and Brasenose College, Oxford. Before becoming a writer, he was an actor, small-boat sailor, musician and schoolteacher. In 1940 he joined the Royal Navy and took part in the D-Day operation and liberation of Holland. Lord of the Flies, his first novel, was rejected by several publishers but rescued from the 'reject pile' at Faber and published in 1954. It became a modern classic selling millions of copies, translated into 44 languages and made into a film by Peter Brook in 1963. Golding wrote eleven other novels, a play and two essay collections. He won the Booker Prize for Rites of Passage in 1980 and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1983. He was knighted in 1988 and died in 1993. www.william-golding.co.uk

John Mullan is Professor of English at University College London. He is the author of How Novels Work (OUP) and Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eightenth Century (OUP). He has published widely on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature. A broadcaster and journalist as well as an academic, he writes a weekly column on contemporary fiction for The Guardian.

Edition details

• Publisher: Faber & Faber
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0571307825
• ISBN 13: 9780571307821
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 272