From trees they came, to trees they return...

With thanks to  Bookshelf Porn for these two holiday trees.



I like this one very much, but you really need something like a law library at hand to pull it off.

This is more manageable for the average reader. Who doesn't live with cats.

Wishing all readers (and cats!) a peaceful, contented and bookish holidays season.

The Lockwood Concern, by John O'Hara

Thanks once again to Anthony Burgess and his list of 99 best novels! I had never heard of this title, nor of the author. The Lockwood Concern was the 13th of John O'Hara's 17 novels, published in 1965, but it never received the acclaim (except from Anthony Burgess) of his much earlier works, Appointment in Samarra and Pal Joey.

I tend to view the time I spend with a book as a short-term relationship. Sometimes it ends with a deeply felt promise to meet again, or at the opposite end of the spectrum, it ends in a huff at the end of the first date (a chapter or less).  My relationship with The Lockwood Concern began with a mad thrill  -- that infatuated feeling that I could never get enough.  This led predictably enough to disenchantment and disappointment, but I didn't dump it. I pushed on; the plot threw me enough pleasant surprises to string me along. At the end of the novel, I was ready to say good-bye to it, but with no ill feelings. It's not at all a bad book, but I don't imagine I'll want to re-Kindle our affair.  [Sorry, couldn't resist that.]

The book opens with the construction of George Lockwood's enormous new house and the very high wall surrounding it.  Mr. Lockwood is a man who places great value on privacy.  He has two hidden staircases installed, one going from his bedroom to his library, and the other from the library to the wine cellar.  The Italian workmen brought in from New York and lavishly paid are the only ones involved in the project who know about these staircases. Less skilled and trusted workers lay the bricks for the fortress-like wall with the spikes around its top. What is more deliciously enticing than such great secrets?  Surely Mr. Lockwood has some fascinating concern obscured behind his tall, spiked walls.

That's human nature, isn't it?  We see tall walls and imagine that there must be a magnificent house (or a magnificent something) concealed behind them. We sense that someone is keeping secrets, and we leap to the conclusion that they are salacious, or hideous, or wondrous. Present us with news of a hidden staircase or two, and our imaginations run riot. And there you have it:  the seduction phase of my affair with this book.

As our affair progressed, however, I came to meet not only George Lockwood, but also his grandfather Moses. Moses had killed two men in early 19th-century Pennsylvania. Some said the killings were in self-defence; others were sceptical.  At any rate, his reputation was rather checkered. As he acquired wealth, there were always murmurs of ill-gotten gains and abuse of power. We then meet Moses' son (and George's father) Abraham, who pursues an unspoken but single-minded goal:  He wants to create a Lockwood empire in his small part of Pennsylvania.  He does not wish to join the well-established Mainline Philadelphia elite -- they're already too established.  He wants his corner of the world to be the locus of the Lockwood empire, and his every thought and every action are directed toward this goal.  This, it turns out, is the Lockwood Concern.

Abraham Lockwood, as stated, had heard of the Quaker Concern, and he was aware that his great plans could be called a Concern, but he did not so refer to them, or it. He gave no name to it. A concern. A cause. A campaign. A plan. A strategy. An obsession. A purpose. A mania - it did not matter that he gave it no name. It could have mattered if he had given it a name, since a designation, a definition would have inhibited his actions within the meaning of the name. It was so constantly in his thoughts and took so many forms of action that an action that could be called loving was sometimes followed by an action that could be called cruel, and neither modifier would be applicable to a third action. Since the Concern was Abraham Lockwood's secret it did not need a name.

Abraham's two sons fall relatively complacently into place as the next generation of secretive, dynastic Lockwoods, increasing the fortune but failing to share their father's vision of a local dynasty.  George and Penwood share office space (and a secretary, Marion Stademyer, to disastrous effect) in New York.  They go in on some business deals together, others separately. Their relationship seems rooted in business far more than in blood.

George has a son, Bing, who is tossed out of Princeton for cheating, much to his father's disgust. After a vicious argument, Bing removes himself to California to find his way in the new business of prospecting for oil. Some years later, through a prep school connection, George hears of his son's dazzling financial success, and he greets the news with rancour.

And now George Lockwood was beginning to discover the cause of his forgetfulness. It was not forgetfulness at all. It was hatred, and it had been started with Preston Hibbard's visit, his report on Bing and Bing's wife and Bing's children and Bing's Rolls-Royce and Bing's standing in the Far West. The boy was self-sufficient and had made himself so with no help from the father; and he had made his mark in a kind of existence in which the father could not have survived. George Lockwood had not forgotten his son, but had banished him from his mind, and the son had made him lie to himself. He had not been overcome with desire for Marian Stademyer but by the urgent need to dominate a human being who, being a woman, could give him pleasure in the process. Yet even that was a form of postponement. He now knew that even without the violent consequences of his rendezvous with Marian Strademyer, a meeting with his son was unavoidable - because he would not have avoided it. The Hibbard snapshots had made the meeting necessary. George Lockwood had been compelled to have one more try at dominating his son even though the attempt would end in disastrous failure... The only thing left to save was his position. He had always been a sonofabitch in the eyes of his son. He would maintain that position. His son must be kept from knowing that his triumph in life was also a triumph over his father.

And there it is.  George Lockwood's walls, his hidden passages, his silences and his lies conceal only that:  he's a thoroughly unpleasant, unprincipled and unfeeling man.  There is no mystery.  And in the end, his secrecy and amorality will lead to his death, in a very fitting fashion.  So long, George. I can't say we'll miss you.

Although my initial infatuation was long gone by the end of the book, I admired this novel. I was glad to have met it and spent the time with it that I did. It reflects the desires of people everywhere, not only in America, to achieve a status that their society is reluctant to grant them.  It reflects perfectly the character of its author, who although he achieved a certain degree of literary success, never felt that he got the recognition he so craved.  Brendan Gill, who edited many of O'Hara's stories for The New Yorker, saw clearly O'Hara's distress.

"Oh," writes Gill, "but John O'Hara was a difficult man! Indeed, there are those who would describe him as impossible, and they would have their reasons." Gill indicates that O'Hara was nearly obsessed with a sense of social inferiority due to not having attended college. "People used to make fun of the fact that O'Hara wanted so desperately to have gone to Yale, but it was never a joke to O'Hara. It seemed... that there wasn't anything he didn't know about in regard to college and prep-school matters." Of O'Hara, Hemingway once said, cruelly, "Someone should take up a collection to send John O'Hara to Yale." O'Hara also yearned for an honorary degree from Yale. According to Gill, Yale was unwilling to award the honour because O'Hara "asked for it."

Sometimes we erect walls and build secret rooms simply to house what we feel we don't have.  And to give the illusion that we have something even better.

Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold Story of English, by John McWhorter

So many histories of the English language focus on etymology:  Look at all the fascinating languages from which we've borrowed vocabulary!  I love words. John McWhorter loves words. But a language cannot function on its lexicon alone -- there must be a grammar, or a set of rules to put the words into a meaningful pattern.  English has some fascinating grammatical eccentricities which set it rather far apart from its Germanic kin, and Mr. McWhorter is one of very few linguists to discuss them in terms that a general audience will enjoy.

English's Germanic relatives are like assorted varieties of deer -- antelopes, springboks, kudu, and so on --antlered, fleet-footed, big-brown-eyed variations on a theme. English is some dolphin swooping around underwater, all but hairless, echo-locating and holding its breath. Dolphins are mammals like deer: they give birth to live young and are warm-blooded. But clearly the dolphin has strayed from the basic mammalian game plan to an extent that no deer has.

He starts by examining our 'meaningless do'.  Why do we use it?  Other Germanic languages do not use it. In these sentences, the do has no function, yet it's required to avoid sounding like a foreign tourist, asking "Have you not a passport?" (That would be the exact translation from most European languages.)  When and from where did English pick up this quirk?

The other Germanic languages have grammatical features that English has shed, such as gender and case inflection. When and why did English drop these things when none of its cousins did so?

McWhorter reminds us that when it comes to detective work on ancient grammars, we must accept a certain amount of circumstantial evidence and extrapolation. In early times, reading and writing were limited to the very few educated and clerical men. In England, Christian writing would have been in Latin, although that's not the language the people were speaking. One of our earliest works in Old English, Beowulf, showed a language that "had been jangling with case markers, and nouns had three genders as in Latin, Greek, and Russian."  Where did they go? By the time Chaucer penned The Canterbury Tales in what we now refer to as Middle English, they had vanished.

The Normans, as we know, invaded in England 1066, bringing with them 150 years of Norman French as the official language. Surely the natives continued to speak English at home, but all official documents were written in French.  When English re-appeared, it reflected the spoken language, stripped of its case markers and genders, and with the 'meaningless do'.  How did such massive changes occur over such a seemingly short time? Well, McWhorter says, they didn't.

The 'meaningless do' is found in Welsh and Cornish, a couple of Celtic languages native to the British Isles.  When the Anglo-Saxons invaded, they did not slaughter all the Celts nor even completely subjugate them, and thus, this oddity made its way into English over centuries.  It appeared in writing about a thousand years later, because only then did the written language reflect the popularly spoken one.

However, starting in the Middle English period, when it became acceptable to write English more like it was actually spoken, this would have included not only virtually case-free nouns, but also our Celticisms. Therefore, it is not that Celticisms only entered English almost a thousand years after Germanic speakers met Celts in Britain. It is merely that Celticisms did not reach the page until then, which is quite a different thing. People writing the way they actually spoke. 

Likewise, it took centuries for English to rid itself of the genders and case markers. Where did they go?  Mr. McWhorter suggests that the Vikings axed them. When they came down to the British Isles in their ships, they found the English spoken there to be very complex. What do we do when we can't deal with a complex system of suffixes?  We tend to drop them.  And once again, the spoken language at that time would never have appeared in print, so when Middle English appeared after the 150 years of the Norman invasion, the absence of all those suffixes appears to be a much more abrupt change that it really was.  In the following excerpt, McWhorter uses a lovely analogy to illustrate the limited view of more conventional linguists who insist that the written record is the only acceptable proof of a language's changes over time.  Usually in stultifying academic prose, no less. They want facts, evidence, hard proof. That, however, is the problem with language -- in the absence of sound recordings or written records, we must gather the circumstantial evidence and surmise.  It does not really seem like such a stretch to reach McWhorter's conclusion that the Vikings lopped off all of Old English's pesky suffixes.

When it comes to charting how English got to be the way it is now from what it was in Beowulf, the common consensus is all about describing rather than explaining. "The such-and-such suffix -en eroded into -uh, then x centuries later it is gone entirely except in this document, likely written in a conservative register due to influence from factor y; meanwhile -um eroded into -en; see in Figure 7 how the erosion took place at such-and-such a rate in documents from this region but more slowly in documents from that region . . ." That is, this kind of work shows us what happened decade by decade in the English scriptures. Treating scripture as the only valid or interesting evidence in studying how English changed in ancient centuries risks leaving untold forever an interesting chapter in the saga of English. This is especially unsavory in that treating the peculiarity of Modern English as a matter of chance is like walking past cars parked along a street and happening upon one with the windshield broken in, three hubcaps gone, and no license plates, and deciding that all of this must have happened via ordinary wear and tear. But obviously, someone broke into this particularly smashed-up car. Something happened to it. Attention must be paid. We should report this car. Especially since this happens to be a neighborhood well known as a favored haunt of -- oh, let's just toss the analogy and say Vikings! ...

I suppose we should thank the Vikings for simplifying our language, but in rendering it such a misfit amongst its European relatives, they have made life a bit more challenging for us, as well. McWhorter of course cites Mark Twain's brilliant satire, The Awful German Language, as one example of an Anglophone struggling madly to re-learn the genders and cases that our language shed centuries ago.

English's simplicity is, in terms of explanation rather than mere documentation, weird. It is evidence of a blind-siding by adults too old to just pick up English thoroughly the way children of immigrants do. The Scandinavian Vikings left more than a bunch of words in English. They also made it an easier language. In this, in a sense, they clipped Anglophones' wings. The Viking impact, stripping English of gender and freeing us of attending to so much else that other Germanic speakers genuflect to in every conversation, made it harder for us to master other European languages.

Being very old, Bookface first encountered the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (the idea that the grammar of one's language colours one's world view and thinking processes) in her introductory Linguistics course in 1984.  I don't remember the professor endorsing it, but I don't recall her denouncing it, either. McWhorter completely discredits it and yet marvels at its durability.

The hypothesis has .. failed. Repeatedly and conclusively. Decade after decade, no one has turned up anything showing that grammar marches with culture and thought in the way that the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis claimed. At best, there are some shards of evidence that language affects thought patterns in subtle ways, which do not remotely approach the claims of Whorf. Yet the Sapir-Whorf idea is cited enthusiastically in textbooks even today, and is a favorite approach to language by journalists. In 2004 a New York Times writer supposed that the language of the Kawesqar tribe in Chile has no future tense marking because, having been nomads traveling often in canoes in the past, they would usually have been so unclear on what was going to happen in the future that there was no need to ever talk about it (!). Never mind that Japanese has no future markers either, and yet the Japanese hardly seem unconcerned with the future.

Whorf, as it turns out, was a fire inspector by day, and an amateur linguist in his spare time.  I don't mean to suggest that such a person has nothing of value to offer.  Einstein, of course, dreamt up his theory of general relativity during his quiet times at the patent office where he worked as a clerk. Unfortunately, Mr. Whorf based his hypothesis on a very limited knowledge of the Hopi language and some very flawed extrapolations from that.  

Why, the author wonders, do we still cherish such a flawed hypothesis, and yet reject the ideas that the Celts and Vikings moulded English grammar, when there is much more substantial indication that they did so? Besides being a thoroughly enjoyable read, this book was an effective prod to ask questions.  Question theories, hypotheses, theses and those who present them. Ask why one language has certain characteristics, and why another does not. And probe your language more deeply than its collection of words.  

Fondling the Details

With thanks to the book section of Flavorwire, who included this in their list of 10 Famous Writers on How to Read.

“In reading, one should notice and fondle details. There is nothing wrong about the moonshine of generalization when it comes after the sunny trifles of the book have been lovingly collected. If one begins with a readymade generalization, one begins at the wrong end and travels away from the book before one has started to understand it. Nothing is more boring or more unfair to the author than starting to read, say, Madame Bovary, with the preconceived notion that it is a denunciation of the bourgeoisie. We should always remember that the work of art is invariably the creation of a new world, so that the first thing we should do is to study that new world as closely as possible, approaching it as something brand new, having no obvious connection with the worlds we already know. When this new world has been closely studied, then and only then let us examine its links with other worlds, other branches of knowledge.”                                                                    

-Vladimir Nabokov

4... 5... 6..., by Kuan Guat Choo

I recorded this novel for Malaysian Association for the Blind on special request. It's the third novel by the Penangite author.  It opens during the years of the Japanese occupation, when a Malay farmer goes to check on his Chinese neighbours. He finds their home abandoned, their dogs shot, and he hears whimpering from beneath the house. Cowering there he sees little LiLian, his daughter's playmate, dirty and hungry, with no memory of what happened to the rest of her family.  He takes her home, and as she sleeps, she repeatedly murmurs "Si... ng... lok..." or "four... five... six..." in Hokkien.

Malay House at Balik Pulau,
watercolour by Ch'ng Kiah Kiean

Fearful that whoever killed the girl's family will come to finish the job, the farmer takes her by bicycle to his brother's home in Penang. Othman and Jamilah have no children of their own and are delighted to raise little orphaned LiLian.

Ms. Kuan uses the years of LiLian's childhood and adolescence to paint an evocative picture of life in a Penang kampong during the 1950s, when there was greater harmony between the races and religions as they enjoyed each other's customs and celebrations and grieved together at very different funeral rites. In the 1960s, Li Lian and her closest friends discuss having careers in a way that their mothers never had. Even well into her young adulthood, Li Lian continues to have nightmares, continues to murmur "Si... ng... lok" as she sleeps, although her waking mind has no memory of her original family.

She laughingly accepts the last piece of cake at her friends' weddings, indifferent to the superstition that doing so will render her a lifelong old maid. She doesn't mind, she says, she has a sense that there is a matter that needs to be cleared up before she would marry anyway.  Her plans, however, are disrupted when she falls in love with the Chinese man who has assiduously courted her for three years. She finally capitulates and marries him. As a reader, I began to fear a saccharine happily-ever-after ending with Li Lian's nightmares happily resolving into connubial bliss, but Ms. Kuan isn't a Mills & Boon author. Hours after the birth of her first child, Li Lian has a searing memory of her childhood.

She soon leaves the baby with an amah and goes back to the village where she was born, demanding answers from the Malay neighbour who had found her. At least, when she sees the house again, she remembers how she came to be beneath it, and what she saw when looking out through the front steps.  Her adoptive parents and friends advise her to forgive, to try to forget, to focus on a bright future for herself, her husband and her child, but Li Lian cannot let go of the wartime horror. She cannot find peace until she wreaks revenge. She recalls her Chinese grandfather's motto: Cut grass, sever roots.

This is an excruciating portrait of the lasting wounds that can fester through generations following war. It's also a well-crafted image of the cheerful coexistence between Malaysia's ethnic communities, and I pray that continues and grows.

A captious sort of day

I made the acquaintance of a new word yesterday. At least I don't recall meeting it before. It caught my attention when I was reading John O'Hara's The Lockwood Concern.

"I thought I'd say something to get you into a different mood. You've been very captious since you got here, and I don't enjoy that."
"I'm very sorry, Geraldine."

The Kindle's built-in dictionary defines captious as "tending to find fault or raise petty objections".

Captious cat 

www.dictionary.com offers a bit more:

1. apt to notice and make much of trivial faults or defects; faultfinding; difficult to please.
2. proceeding from a faultfinding or caviling disposition, example: He could never praise without adding a captious remark.

What a useful word! I am often captious, and I'd much rather admit to it than to being nitpicky, hypercritical or judgemental.

I like captious. It's a practical and unpretentious word. It seems unbelievable that I'd never seen it before yesterday afternoon, or at least had never noticed it before. Then last night, I was reading Helen Hoover Santmyer's ...And the Ladies of the Club, and would you look...!

Anne, who was in a captious mood that fall, thought, "Another body to act as librarian-for-a-day!" Mrs. Beattie had never volunteered for that chore, but now it would be a responsibility. 

Is this a dazzling coincidence, or is captious a quite commonly used word that I've somehow managed never to notice all these years?  After two meetings in a day, I'm not likely to forget it.

The Spire, by William Golding

Salisbury Cathedral from the Bishop's Grounds,
by John Constable

A former colleague once told me that he never reads fiction. His reason? He said that he preferred to learn facts, and fiction... well, fiction is fabrication.

It may well be a sign of my intellectual torpor, but I will never likely reach for a history of the Salisbury Cathedral, nor for any volumes discussing the feats required to erect its 401-foot spire (presently the highest cathedral spire in England). What Mr. Golding gives me, though, is an obsessed cathedral dean, Jocelin, and the master builder he has chosen to do his work, Roger Mason. As the former hauls himself up the scaffolding and ladders into the unfinished spire and sees the countryside for miles around, feeling affirmed that he is doing the work God requested, and as the latter battles his nauseating fear of heights, I realise the enormity of the Spire, in a way that I never could, even by visiting the cathedral and climbing the steps myself, alongside other tourists. Dean Jocelin heard the supporting pillars first scream, then bend. (They are still bent today, bearing the great weight of the spire, added in the 14th century.) The faithless Mason told him the task was impossible, but Jocelin believed that it was ordained by God, physics notwithstanding. These particular characters may not have existed, but someone was driven to build a colossal spire atop this 10th-century church, and it most certainly required mountains of stone, courage and ingenuity to accomplish it. Non-fiction can give us the facts, some more captivating than others, but only fiction can really elicit the emotions -- the vision, despair, fear, rage and elation -- which were all most surely part of every inch of the spire's construction, just as surely as the mortar.

When we look at the soaring spaces of ancient cathedrals and mosques today, it's all too easy to forget that their designers had no computers, and their builders had no cranes. Throughout the novel, Dean Jocelin asks himself and others, "Has it fallen yet?" Roger Mason, the master builder, repeatedly tells him that the task is impossible. As the spire rises, driven mostly by Jocelin's passion -- and his alone, as the other clerics quietly disapprove -- the human toll rises alongside it.

...and when a workman fell through the hole above the crossways, and left a scream scored all the way down the air, which was so thick it seemed to keep the scream as something mercilessly engraved there, he did not wonder that no miracle interposed between the body and the logical slab of stone that received it. Father Anselm said nothing in Chapter; but he saw from the sacrist's indignant stare how this death had been added to some account that one day would be presented.

The master builder baulks more than once, first ranting then pleading to be let go from this hopeless task. Jocelin likewise pleads and then connives to hold him to the contract, and "the army" of his labourers as well. God has ordained their partnership, and although Roger Mason is an irreverent drunk, he is still the man best qualified for the job. Roger may not hear God's command, but Jocelin intends to convey it.

 "My son. When such a work is ordained, it is put into the mind of a, of a man. That's a terrible thing. I'm only learning now, how terrible it is. It's a refiner's fire. The man knows a little perhaps of the purpose, but nothing of the cost--why can't they keep quiet out there? Why don't they stand quietly and wait? No. You and I were chosen to do this thing together. It's a great glory. I see now it'll destroy us of course. What are we, after all? Only I tell you this, Roger, with the whole strength of my soul. The thing can be built and will be built, in the very teeth of Satan. You'll build it because nobody else can. They laugh at me, I think; and they'll probably laugh at you. Let them laugh. It's for them, and their children. But only you and I, my son, my friend, when we've done tormenting ourselves and each other, will know what stones and beams and lead and mortar went into it..."

The construction of course wreaks havoc in the everyday life of the cathedral. Normal services move elsewhere as the excavations below the floor of the nave burrow into ancient graves and loose noxious odours. Blocks of stone fall from above. And then, of course, there is the noise from the groaning pillars. Alone in the cathedral, Jocelin pauses to question whether those voices and songs and messages are coming from within or without.

Silence from the crossways. He thought to himself: It's not the stones singing. It's inside my head.

The original care-taker of the cathedral, a lame man, is driven away by the taunting of the pack of builders. His wife, Goody Pangall, begins an affair with Roger Mason. Jocelin takes note of this and is horrified, partially because he has been battling his own forbidden attraction to the red-haired young woman. When he realises that her husband has fled and that she is bearing Roger's child, he thinks he must do something to help her. He is, however, distracted by his own process of creation, one with divine parentage. His more human obligations take lower priority.

If she seemed about to come near, she circled him quickly, looking away and hurrying on, head down as if he were an unlucky corner, or a ghost, or the grave of a suicide. But he knew that she was only ashamed with the shame of a deserted woman; and her shame squeezed his heart. But my will has other business than to help, he thought. I have so much will, it puts all other business by. I am like a flower that is bearing fruit.

He sees flashes of Goody's red hair, whether she's actually present or not, representing the mortal temptations that might distract him from his work. As he kneels to pray, however, he feels the "warmth" of the angel at his back, an angel who appears to guide and comfort him with increasing frequency. At the end, we learn that the warmth at his back is a terminal consumption. The angel (and would the sense of a terminal disease not have the same effect?) keeps him on track, banishing the demonic distractions, driving him to complete the spire.

Often, his angel stood at his back; and this exhausted him, for the angel was a great weight of glory to bear, and bent his spine. Moreover, after a visit by the angel--as if to keep him in his humility--Satan was given leave to torment him, seizing him by the loins, so that it became indeed an unruly member.

In one of my favourite images in the novel, Jocelin climbs up into the unfinished spire on a summer night on which the workmen have all quit early. Golding makes only a veiled reference, but it was enough to remind me of the cathedral's proximity to Stonehenge. In the 14th century, it's all too plausible that the Church was still battling for souls with the old ways, and that Jocelin would view his spire as a competitor with the dolmens atop the hill.

He saw a fire on the rim and guessed it was a haystack burning; but as he moved round the rim of the cone, he saw more and more fires round the rim of the world. Then a terrible dread fell on him, for he knew these were the fires of Midsummer Night, lighted by the devil-worshippers out on the hills. Over there, in the valley of the Hanging Stones, a vast fire shuddered brightly. All at once he cried out, not in terror but in grief. For he remembered his crew of good men, and he knew why they had knocked off work and where they were gone. So he shouted aloud in anger at someone. "They are good men! I say so!" But this was only one feeling. Inside them, his mind knew what it knew. "It's another lesson. The lesson for this height. Who could have foreseen that this was part of the scheme? Who could know that at this height the thing I thought of as a stone diagram of prayer would lift up a cross and fight eye to eye with the fires of the devil?"

Mr. Golding does not tie things up neatly at the end of his novel. Roger Mason, now a crippled drunk living above a pub, fails to make peace with the dying and half-mad Jocelin. Goody Pangall has died in childbirth. The spire is unfinished. But we know it will be finished, and we know (unlike Jocelin, who dies asking if it has fallen yet) that it will stand for at least another 700 years. What this novel gives us is the knowledge that someone long ago was consumed -- by madness, piety, grandiosity, or glory -- to build an impossibility of a spire. It was something no average man or woman would have ventured. If I ever visit Salisbury and see the spire, I will see it with proper reverence, because Golding's fictional characters brought the reality of its construction to life.