Finishing William Golding's The Spire, I felt the same way as I had done at the end of Muriel Spark's The Hothouse on the East River: a need to read about the book and about Golding if only to contain what I had read, to contextualise it. Above all, I couldn't allow the book its distance, the distance it seems to take from itself in itself such that I was never quite sure what was happening, or rather that what was happening was (in the world of the book) really happening; Dean Jocelin, with whom the narrator sticks, seemed untrustworthy - or was it that he had entrusted himself to something else, manifest as a kind of madness. That he was entrusted to a rambling, coagulating madness that had thickened itself into the narrative.
Either way, I never felt on solid ground with the novel. I even put it away for a few days, returning to it last night after a long evening of computer games because I could think of nothing better to do. It had been waiting for me. It held me once again at its own distance. I read but I wasn't sure what I was reading. It seemed vague somehow - not wispy or cloudy but somehow blocky. It seemed too heavy for a book, or that its features had emerged as those of the Sphinx from some heavier, non-readable material.
What had happened in the book? I wasn't sure. I googled 'William Golding The Spire' for study notes to help me. What had happened? I lacked the distance. No: I lacked my distance by which I could hold what I read apart from me. I was struck to its surface like a fly ... Little to say about the book itself, though. Itself: as if it wasn't too heavy for commentary. As though it were not already lost in itself, falling into itself, a book like the spire and cathedral it describes unable to sit squarely on the restless earth. A book beneath which a kind of abyss opens, an anti-spire, the stirring of the earth 'like porridge coming to boil in a pot' which means everything, therefore is as unsure as the visitations Dean Jocelin receives.
Plot and character are like those visitations, those angels and devils which may only be the way Dean Jocelin's spinal tuberculosis manifests itself - pain and pain's alleviation, as if the novel were only made from that: pain and pain's alleviation, the possibility and impossibility of writing overlapped. It was almost impossible to read. I had to force my way through it. Even now, looking back, I wonder, what was it about?, and this after reading the study notes. Really, I have nothing to say about it. Relief that it is over. And a kind of wonder at this anti-spire of a book.
But I must have more Golding - immediately. I need to read everything if only to have done with it. I need to know of what this book is part - what movement. Madness - but not a private madness. Not the malaise of one character. A kind of existence-madness, being gone mad, the boiling earth ... and this as the law of writing to which the book corresponds. A madness that has come from some strange law of writing, where language takes a weird detour into itself, becomes thick, clots up the veins of sense.
