The Spire the Novels." "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. The Spire The Spire is a 1964 novel by the English author William Golding. "A dark and powerful portrait of one man's will", it deals with the construction of the 404-foot high spire loosely based on Salisbury Cathedral; the vision of the fictional Dean Jocelin. In this novel, William Golding utilises stream of consciousness writing with an omniscient but increasingly fallible narrator. Jocelin, the Dean of the
Cathedral Church of St. James (Toronto) be observed throughout the interior and exterior of the church. On the exterior, a dog-toothed fret runs along the aisle roofline, while on the interior, a band of continuous painted bosses similarly run along the top of the aisle wall. These horizontal bands balance the composition against the verticality of the exterior tower and pinnacles, and the interior pointed arches of the nave arcade, creating a sense of stability and repose. At , the tower and spire have remained the tallest in Canada and the second tallest in North America after St. Patrick's Cathedral, New York—although the spire of St.