The Spire is essentially a dramatic poem on the lines of [T. S. Eliot's] The Waste Land. Indeed in many ways, it is curiously similar to The Waste Land, and not the least in its power of arousing echoes which constantly refer one out to a variety of works and with varying degrees of significance. In some cases, the echo arouses little more than the pleasing sense of recognition…. At the other extreme, the myth of Balder is as essential to the construction of The Spire as the Grail legend is to...

One never has to read more than a few pages of a William Golding novel to know that it contains the essentials of good fiction. First and foremost, one feels the energy that has been put into it—the intensity of mental concentration that one responds to as if it were a strong physical act. Second, one notes the precision and discipline that funnel the energy into the chosen course, and without which energy is just a sprawling nuisance. "The Spire" is only 215 pages long, but a bad autho...

[The Spire] is possibly the best thus far of William Golding's haunting parables of the human condition. The setting is medieval England at the time of the building of the cathedrals, but the atmosphere is at once so much of a never-never land and so full of nervous suspense that it seems like a cross between [Maurice] Maeterlinck's Pelléas et Mélisande and the high-strung melodrama of the early Graham Greene. The implications of Mr. Golding's tale, as always, are ominous ...

[The Spire] is a book about vision and its cost. It has to do with the motives of art and prayer, the phallus turned spire; with the deceit, as painful to man as to God, involved in structures which are human but have to be divine, such as churches and spires. But because the whole work is a dance of figurative language such an account of it can only be misleading. It requires to be read with unremitting attention, and, first time perhaps, very little pleasure. It is second-period Golding; the voice is auth...