ON NOTRE-DAME

Paris's famous landmark is reopening five years after it was torn apart by fire - a mark of a great cathedral is how it recovers from disaster

Ask a medievalist for their favourite historical novel and you might get any number of answers. But the true deep cut is The Spire by William Golding.

Golding is best known as the author of Lord of the Flies. That book is (in the UK at least) a text often set to high school literature students, since like other such mid-century novels (Steinbeck’s Of Mice And Men; Orwell’s Animal Farm, etc) it is short, written in plain prose, and laden with heavy symbolism: when it comes to exam day, even the thickest kid in the class should find something obvious to say.

The Spire is also short, but it is a somewhat more difficult and opaque novel than Lord of the Flies. It was published in 1964 and its plot concerns the interwoven struggles of a stubborn, obsessive, foolish cathedral dean called Jocelin, who wishes on the one hand to build a gigantic new spire on his cathedral and on the other to get his hands in the knickers of the cathedral janitor’s ginger wife.

From this you will gather that, like Lord of the Flies, The Spire is a book flecked through with a tortured Christian sensibility and an unsubtle approach to allegory. But its central drama is staggeringly well realised. It is not so much the human torment of Jocelin and his cathedral colleagues so much as the awful, impending wrenching of the building itself.

As the spire Jocelin dreams of is erected on top of the foundationless masonry that forms the cathedral’s crossing, the walls and pillars begin to tremble and sing under the immense and almost unbearable weight of that bears upon them. The builders build, the columns scream. As the story ends, the collapse has yet to come, but we know that it can only be a matter of time.

If you haven’t read The Spire, I recommend it. And now might be the time to do it. Because this is the weekend when - at long last - one of the world’s most famous cathedrals, Notre-Dame de Paris reopens, after it was ravaged by fire more than five years ago, in April 2019.