The actor Benedict Cumberbatch is to narrate the first ever unabridged recording of William Golding's vision of an immense spire erected on a cathedral.
The story of Dean Jocelin and his belief that God has chosen him to construct a spire on his cathedral, despite the fact the old cathedral was built without foundations, Golding's novel The Spire was first published in 1964 but there has never been an unabridged audio recording of the book before. It was announced on Wednesday that Cumberbatch, known for roles including that of Sherlock Holmes in the current BBC series, would narrate a new edition to mark the 60th anniversary of Golding's most famous novel, Lord of the Flies. The audio edition will be published on 7 September. It will precede his much-anticipated performance as Hamlet in London next summer.
In a statement, the Golding family said it was "delighted" at the news. "We look forward to enjoying the novel through the medium of his agile and expressive voice, and we are sure that his interpretation will be fascinating," said the Nobel laureate's family.
Despite warnings from Dean Jocelin's mason against putting up the spire, it "rises octagon upon octagon, pinnacle by pinnacle, until the stone pillars shriek and the ground beneath it swims. Its shadow falls ever darker on the world below, and on Dean Jocelin in particular," said the new edition's publisher, Canongate Faber Audio.
Golding won the Nobel prize in literature in 1983, cited for novels which "with the perspicuity of realistic narrative art and the diversity and universality of myth, illuminate the human condition in the world of today", after taking the Booker prize in 1980 for Rites of Passage. The novelist, who died in 1993, lived in Salisbury, with a view of the city's cathedral spire from where he worked for 15 years.
John Mullan writes in his introduction to The Spire that the novelist "apparently took little interest in architectural research for the novel, but he knew Salisbury Cathedral intimately". "Like the cathedral in the book, it 'floated' on the marshy ground on which it was built. He knew that the spire's weight caused its supporting pillars visibly to bend, and that it might well have eventually collapsed under its own mass if Sir Christopher Wren had not added reinforcing beams in the seventeenth century," writes Mullan. "The cathedral in The Spire is likewise a near-impossible building … the spire is also beyond reason – a glorification of God that leaves the earthly behind."
Frank Kermode described The Spire as "quite simply, a marvel" in the New York Review of Books, and Mullan writes that it "could only have been written by a man who himself felt viscerally the dark powers of religious feeling", and that "like the spire itself, it is a testimony to the irresistible power of the imagination".
