The Spire

"I think he shied away from that. He felt that allegories reduce the story, turn it into something painted by numbers. There are meanings beyond concrete representation, that’s certainly true, but they coalesce with the actual physical objects in a way an allegory would not. I think he would rather it be regarded as a myth, which he gave high status to. In The Spire, he writes about a visionary, and I think he was trying to convey the sort of experience Jocelin thought was religious vision. Certainly. Jocelin is someone who has basically been over-promoted. He’s been kicked up through the ranks of the Church because his aunt was the mistress of the then-king. Jocelyn, now in a position of enormous power, has this vision: he’s going to put a spire on top of the cathedral, which will act as an enormous stone prayer. To achieve it, he’s prepared to do almost anything, and those compromises destroy him and several other people. Yes. He knew Salisbury Cathedral long before he taught there. All his life, really. But you’re quite right; he worked for nearly 20 years with a view of the spire from his window. I think he was curious about it. He was a very practical man, and I think it intrigued him; he was very interested in mechanical things and how they worked, and I think he must have looked at the spire and thought: that’s quite a thing. How did they build it? It must have taken someone with a will of enormous proportion to get it done. It means a lot to me. Partly because I know the spire very well. It’s so beautiful. If you lie on the grass in the cathedral Close and look up at the cathedral against the blue sky, it’s the most astonishing sight. Also, there’s the fact that he dedicated this book to me. I had absolutely no idea he was going to do that. I had been going through a rough patch as a teenager, and he said to me one day: ‘I’ve had a rather hard time writing this book, and I think you’ve had a hard time recently, so I’m going to dedicate it to you.’ I was looking at it only this morning and thinking how extraordinary that is. In some ways it’s quite a sparsely written book, but it really is a triumph. And it did take him a long time, he struggled over it."