With Pincher Martin, for all its real claims as a breathless and mysterious tour de force, two or three things went wrong. Mr Golding had taken a dive into the chaos of a single consciousness; to do this makes hay of the traditional novel, which is a work concerned with the differences between people. Pincher Martin was a one-man scream of pain. The defence may be that Golding is a poet-novelist, an exponent of the anti-novel, that he is writing 'black' literature or reviving the Gothic tradition; and these are worth considering. But it did look as though a distinguished writer was about to go down into the underworld of fashionable paranoia. The inquisitional scene in Free Fall, with its overtone of torture, confirmed this,… [In] The Spire, the process is complete and the result is obscurity, monotony and strain. His inventiveness is dulled. His clean narrative is choked and his sense of character and human conflict is paralysed.
Set, as far as one can judge, in the Middle Ages, The Spire is a story about the building of a cathedral. A dean overrides all opposition and organises the erection of an enormous steeple—say the spire of Salisbury cathedral—on a basic structure that cannot, according to the best advice, support it….
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