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Tony Harrison to headline Leeds literature festival the Big Bookend

Celebration of city's cultural heritage will ask the question: where is Leeds 25 years after Harrison's poem V?

Two and a half decades after Tony Harrison's working-class call to arms V was published to howls of offence from the conservative establishment, the Leeds writer is coming home to headline the Big Bookend festival – a huge coup in the event's second year.

Alongside Tony, the Bookend has lined up many Leeds lit-related events, including Wes Brown's search for new Leeds writers, asking the question: 'Where is Leeds 25 years after Tony Harrison's V?'

I should 'fess up here; although I have absolutely nothing to do with the Bookend I was part of the initial group of people who discussed the idea. The consensus was that Leeds is consistently under-represented and a central Leeds festival could change this by blowing Leeds' huge literary trumpet and celebrate the city's rich heritage.

Tony's appearance is timed well after BBC Radio 4's February documentary looking at the reaction to his reading of the poem on Channel 4 in 1987. Tony hasn't appeared in his home city for quite some time, but this will change on Sunday 9 June when he will take the stage at the West Yorkshire Playhouse, read some of his poems and answer questions from Anthony Clavane.

Tony is the perfect headliner for this event and a bit of a hero of mine, not just for his fabulous writing but for his championing of the expressions of 'ordinary' people which is central to Leeds literature and, in turn, the Leeds Big Bookend.

It's good to see the West Yorkshire Playhouse get involved in this event and becoming more involved with material that reflects their catchment area and USP. This is one of the things that differentiates the Leeds Big Bookend from many lit fests; its focus on the local, on Leeds. I'm not a big fan of publicly funded or 'community' arts festivals, for me, they're too often predictable and nepotistic; aiming at, doing for, rather than with people or looking for talent from outside their particular clique.

Big Bookend receives no public funding and one of their projects has particularly caught my eye. LS13 is a project organised by Wes Brown looking for 20 of the best 'young' Leeds writers and it's open to everyone under 40.

Describing the project, Wes says: "LS13 is about uncovering a new generation of writers at work in Leeds today. Where is Leeds today? Who are its new voices? The winners will be published in a print and E-Book anthology, perform at the Leeds Big Bookend 2013 and take part in a number of events across the city."

Wes is an interesting character; an activist, an enabler but most importantly an exciting writer. He runs the Young Writers' Hub for the National Association of Writers in Education (NAWE), set up Dead Ink, a digital-only publisher, and is Co-Chair of the Society of Young Publishers in the North and Midlands.

I first became aware of Wes when I read his debut novel Shark a colourful, fabulously written study of 'working-class' life and alienation. A revised version of this novel will be launched at the Made In Leeds event where Wes will read, answer questions about the novel and talk with Anthony Clavane about the wider impact of Leeds writers.

You can see a full run down of events on the Leeds Big Bookend website but I'd also point to the event featuring adopted Leeds lad Boff Whalley, which will no doubt be entertaining. Formerly of Chumbawamba, Boff will be playing some of his music, reading from his most recent book, Run Wild and talking about his life.

I've decided not to mention the play Boff wrote, which Red Ladder Theatre Company are putting on during the festival. It's the tale of a Lancastrian suffragette at a festival bigging-up Leeds and I'd end up sounding peevish by asking why Leeds' Mary Gawthorpe wasn't chosen as the subject of the play.

You'll not find a more interesting, working class suffragette than Mary Gawthorpe. This looks like a chance missed, but at least it's from a working class perspective and may ask questions of the deification of the Pankhursts.

Right, the campaign, for next year, to get Leeds Young Authors a slot, We Are Poets a special showing and John Lake out to talk about his Leeds 6 trilogy, starts here.

Anyway, People Of Leeds, your city needs you. Do you use words? If so, get y'butt down the Leeds Big Bookend in June and make this fabulous festival magical. Only we can do that. And let's hope this marvellous celebration can continue to cling onto that which makes it so special: its very Leedsness.

• Mick McCann is a writer based in Leeds whose books include the local encyclopaedia How Leeds Changed the World

Tony HarrisonLeedsPoetryFestivals
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Richard Scarry unfinished manuscript to be published

A collection of sketches and text featuring Lowly Worm is due to be coloured and completed by Scarry's son

News that an unfinished manuscript by children's illustrator Richard Scarry is to be coloured up by his son and published this autumn may not immediately thrill the children of today, but it will provoke waves of nostalgia in those of us who grew up with his busy anthropomorphised beasts.

The book will feature one of Scarry's best-loved and most ubiquitous characters, the alpine-hatted, singly-shod Lowly Worm, who drives an apple and was probably the first worm in space. The unfinished book of sketches and text, devoted to the cheerful invertebrate, was discovered among Scarry's papers, and his son Huck, also an artist, is colouring and completing it. Appropriately, since its publication will form part of the 50th anniversary celebrations of The Best Word Book Ever, it will be published under the characteristically hyperbolic title Best Lowly Worm Book Ever.

Scarry, who died in 1994, published more than 300 picture books, which were distinguished by their bold, all-encompassing titles – Best Storybook Ever, Best Counting Book Ever, Cars and Trucks and Things Which Go. They've fascinated kids for more than 50 years with the minute detail of his smiling animal congregation's everyday American lives. Tow trucks, propeller planes, farms, supermarkets, manners, birthdays, burglaries, speedboats, road repairs, strawberries, school – Scarry caters effortlessly for young children's love of illustrated lists, avoiding dryness by incorporating random touches and humorous notes throughout. What he focuses on isn't grouped purely by adult logic – it's what a child sees and wants to see.

Featuring a huge anthropomorphised cast, with recurring characters such as Sergeant Murphy, traffic hound and pursuer of miscreants, and solid, cheerful, lederhosen-wearing Huckle Cat, Scarry's tales of mishap, derring-do, industry and shopping always feel deeply, richly safe. Some aspects of Busytown and its environs are slightly perturbing – a lot of traffic accidents happen, despite Sergeant Murphy's best efforts, and the bacon-proffering butchers inevitably seem to be rosy, possibly cannibal, pigs. But looking back at Scarry's most popular title, The Best Word Book Ever, which I had as a child, and revisiting the young bear's enormous breakfast – waffle, eggs, cold fruit juice, milk, hot cocoa, muffins and toast, although "He doesn't eat the toaster" – still makes me smile. To the small but dogged reader, Scarry's compendiums suggest that all knowledge is explicable and easily mastered, from the function of ailerons to the etiquette of a party. With a palette of vivid colours – saturated reds, suffused pinks and deep, gingery browns – he strikes an enticing balance between education and pure enjoyment.

I have a clear, fond memory, as an early reader, of flipping through a sectioned spiral-bound story book, Richard Scarry's Mix Or Match, which allowed you to cram a plump pig into Lowly's applemobile, or suit up a rascally gorilla in Sergeant Murphy's uniform. I think this was one of the first books which suggested to me the joy of learning, and then breaking, the rules of storytelling, mixing in a small frenzy to make a dadaist collage of heads, vehicles, clothes and professions. The ordered chaos of Scarry's populous, busy, smiling world felt like a very safe place to range and experiment as a child – long may it continue to do so.

IllustrationChildren and teenagersImogen Russell Williams
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Granta best young British novelists: who would you choose?

The first truly post-Thatcherite generation of writers will be revealed on Monday. Who do you think should be on the list?

On Monday Granta will reveal its latest list of Best young British novelists. Love it or hate it, the list has become a bit of an event since the first one was revealed in 1983.

The 2013 selection will be rendered all the more poignant by the death of Margaret Thatcher, who – as Robert McCrum pointed out this week – inspired many of the class of '83. Ian McEwan, one of their number, offered an explanation for this apparent iron lady irony: "We liked disliking her," he wrote. "She forced us to decide what was truly important."

The rallying posts of the first genuinely post-Thatcher generation are less clear – and politics certainly wouldn't appear to have a defining influence on any of the writers on the wish-list compiled for the Observer by Alex Clark, former Granta editor and doyenne of the 2003 selection.

Now it's over to you. Which British novelists under 40 do you think will define the literary culture of 2013?

GrantaIan McEwanClaire ArmitsteadAlex Clark
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Granta Best of Young British Novelists: who would you choose?

The first truly post-Thatcherite generation of writers will be revealed on Monday. Who do you think should be on the list?

On Monday Granta will reveal its latest list of Best of Young British Novelists. Love it or hate it, the list has become a bit of an event since the first one was revealed in 1983.

The 2013 selection will be rendered all the more poignant by the death of Margaret Thatcher, who – as Robert McCrum pointed out this week – inspired many of the class of '83. Ian McEwan, one of their number, offered an explanation for this apparent iron lady irony: "We liked disliking her," he wrote. "She forced us to decide what was truly important."

The rallying posts of the first genuinely post-Thatcher generation are less clear – and politics certainly wouldn't appear to have a defining influence on any of the writers on the wish-list compiled for the Observer by Alex Clark, former Granta editor and doyenne of the 2003 selection.

Now it's over to you. Which British novelists under 40 do you think will define the literary culture of 2013?

GrantaFictionClaire Armitstead
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Pablo Neruda's importance was as much political as poetic

On top of this week's exhumation, research is underlining why the newly-installed junta was so keen to be rid of him

On 22 September 1973, Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda – whom Gabriel García Márquez dubbed "the greatest poet of the 20th century" – received some visitors at the Santa María hospital in Chile's capital Santiago. Among them were Sweden's ambassador Harald Edelstam and the Mexican ambassador Gonzalo Martínez Corbala, offering a plane to fly Neruda and his wife Matilde into exile.

We know about their conversation thanks to as yet unpublished documents at the National Archive in Sweden. Edelstam asserts he found the poet "very ill" though still willing to travel to Mexico. In a memo sent to his superiors, Edelstam observes: "In his last hours [Neruda] either didn't know or didn't recognise he suffered a terminal illness. He complained that rheumatism made it impossible to move his arms and legs. When we visited him, Neruda was preparing as best he could to travel … to Mexico. There, he would make a public declaration against the military regime."

That made the poet dangerous to some very powerful people, who had shown they would stop at nothing to defend their interests. They had ousted his friend, Salvador Allende, from the presidency less than a fortnight earlier. Allende died in a coup that was as much about silencing dissident voices as bringing about regime change. Another voice, that of popular singer Víctor Jara, was cut off four days later. Neruda remained. He was perhaps the loudest. His face certainly the most recognisable worldwide. He was too dangerous.

Members of the junta are on record expressing the view on the morning of September 22 that if Neruda flew into exile, his plane would fall into the sea. In the afternoon, radio stations under military control announced the poet would probably die in the next few hours, at a time when he was still awake in the hospital. The following day he was dead.

That historical mystery alone explains why his body was exhumed this week. But there are more pressing reasons too, at a time when the destiny of the left hangs in the balance in Latin America. The death of Venezuela's Hugo Chávez, one of many leftist leaders in the region to have fallen ill to cancer, has combined with the 700 documented assassination attempts against Cuba's Fidel Castro to fuel all manner of conspiracy theories.

More important still is the fact that, faced with an economic crisis without foreseeable end and few alternatives, a new generation of world activists needs to reconnect with the vibrant political imagination embodied by Neruda. The question is not merely whether the commitment he exemplified is possible now, but whether technology, and the institutions we use to manage it, can allow the kind of freedom Neruda called for in his poetry.

In this context, Neruda's life, as well as the shadows cast by his death, are Google-bombs waiting to be set off by a new generation of networked freedom fighters at the heart of our austerity-obsessed, repressive, and frankly boring narratives.

Neruda wasn't surprised by the 1973 coup – most people knew that the consequences of restoring "economic order" would be vicious, and many accepted it as necessary – but it wasn't inevitable: under a deal accepted by the government coalition as well as the opposition, President Allende was going to call for a referendum and would have resigned if the result went against him. This made any show of force by the smaller but influential sector within the Chilean armed forces unnecessary. But the conspirators were bent on regime change, so they brought forward the date of the coup, subjecting Chilean society to a trial by fire in order to cure it of a supposedly menacing communist "cancer".

The invocation of "cancer" to provide yesterday's rulers with a pretext to unleash war abroad and repression at home is mirrored by the questions being asked about Neruda's cancer today.

Neruda and the other individuals behind the Chilean revolution of the early 1970s made mistakes and were at least partially responsible for the consequences. But the real story behind their defeat and deaths hasn't been told yet. This is one of the reasons why people are looking to unearth new truths, hoping to shed some light on the origins of our problems today.

Through histories, testimonies, and documents declassified in the US or revealed as recently as last year by Wikileaks, we now know that the fate of Neruda and others like him had been decided long before they had any hand in mismanaging the economy or dividing political opinion. Persecution against the left had begun in Chile as early as 1948, at the behest of a US government awash with anti-communist paranoia.

That year, a controversial measure known as "the Damned Law" ("la ley maldita") outlawed the Chilean Communist Party, sent the communist leadership into exile and imprisoned hundreds of militants at the Pisagua camp under the orders of a young lieutenant named Augusto Pinochet – the concentration camp's director who would become Chile's dictator, and a friend and inspiration to Margaret Thatcher.

Neruda, radicalised like many others by the anti-fascist struggle of the 1930s and 40s, chose to flee the country. Fearing for his life he crossed the Andes on a horse, carrying with him the manuscript of his epic poem Canto General, before resurfacing in Mexico thanks to the help of his friends Pablo Picasso and Diego Rivera.

His second exile would have been in 1973. Edelstam's conversation with Neruda took place a mere two hours before the poet went to sleep, never to wake up again. When the Swedish diplomat went to Neruda's house to offer his condolences, he found it destroyed. Pinochet's men were bent on erasing every trace of his existence. They would do the same with thousands of people during a reign of terror that would last for nearly two decades. That is why so many people this week are holding their breath to find out what clues Neruda's exhumed body might hold.

• Oscar Guardiola-Rivera's Story of a Death Foretold: The Coup against Salvador Allende, 11 September 1973 will be published by Bloomsbury in September

Pablo NerudaPoetryChile
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Tips, links and suggestions: Tell us what you are reading today

The space to talk about the books you are reading, and find out which ones we are reviewing

"Very quiet round here? Are we all busy reading?" So wondered Getoverit99 at the end of last week. His own reading had been of some Sherlock Holmes short stories, which he had heard were better than the more familiar longer works. But his desired for a TLS pow-wow got the better of his sense that they probably were:

And now for some controversy … I did enjoy reading these and I will read more, but I do feel a little underwhelmed. I think the television series, both BBC and Granada are much more enjoyable. I understand the exceptional plotting comes from the book and this is a main ingredient to the brilliance but I just think it really shines on screen. As I am typing this I keep thinking, yes but it all comes from book, and it does. But the production in the latest BBC series really is exceptional and takes it to a new level. Please feel free to disagree with me!

We love a bit of disagreement on this thread, and there was a flutter of it earlier in the week over Chad Harbach's The Art of Fielding, when conedison lamented: "I wanted to like The Art of Fielding, but sadly, I connected to no one presented."

In general, though, a spirit of shared enthusiasm prevailed. Danholloway reported: "I'm reading My Phantom Husband by Marie Darrieussecq - many thanks to Paul Bowes for the recommendation. It's a wonderfully thoughtful meditation that has all the qualities I loved in Breathing Underwater."

Mexican2 picked up on BeeAsBigAsABiscuit discovery of Stephen Milhauser's collection Dangerous Laughter, writing:

He's a wonderful writer! I've never understood why he's not better known: his best short stories are among the finest literary fantasies of the last century.

Finally, the last fortnight would not have been complete without some consideration of the late, great Chinua Achebe - and it came from AggieH, who wrote:

Achebe's novels always felt like stories that I am listening to, not reading. I have no doubt that effect will be even more intense next time I read him, now that I have his measured pace and melodious tone in my mind's ear.

Hannah will be back from hols next week to give a proper welcome to all the newcomers to this thread, but in the meantime here are some of the books we are reviewing this week:

Non-fiction:
Levels of Life by Julian Barnes
On Glasgow and Edinburgh by Robert Crawford
The Undivided Past by David Cannadine
The Last Sane Man: Michael Cardew - Modern Pots, Colonialism, and Counterculture by Tanya Harrod
Banished: Surviving My Years in the Westboro Baptist Church by Lauren Drain
Saul Bellow's Heart: A Son's Memoir by Greg Bellow

Fiction:
A Man in Love by Karl Ove Knausgaard
The Wall by William Sutcliffe
Idiopathy by Sam Byers
The View on the Way Down by Rebecca Wait
Pigs Might Fly: The Inside Story of Pink Floyd by Mark Blake
Children's:
Timmy Failure: Mistakes Were Made by Stephan Pastis

Poetry:
Dear World and Everyone In It: New Poetry in the UK, edited by Nathan Hamilton

Claire ArmitsteadGuardian readers
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Margaret Thatcher's mark on books

Aggressively philistine she may have been, but her impact on literature – and culture in general - was enormous

Margaret Thatcher, as those of us who lived through her premiership remember her, projected herself to the voters as a woman (housewife, mother, nanny, girl guide) almost belligerently indifferent to books and culture. She never went to the theatre; preferred Gilbert & Sullivan to Covent Garden; and often declared that her favourite reading was the latest Jeffrey Archer thriller.

It gets worse. Her speeches are memorable for their conviction not their language, which was usually as wooden as her podium expression. If there were jokes, they had to be explained to her, and even then she didn't get it. "The Lady's not for turning", an allusion to Christopher Fry's creaky 1940s verse-drama, The Lady's Not For Burning, bears the marks of a script-writer's midnight desperation. Compared to Winston Churchill, who won a Nobel prize for literature, and left the landscape of English prose on fire with inspiration, Thatcher is a non-starter.

And yet, it would be wrong to write her off, culturally. Thatcher, in fact, leaves a quasi-literary legacy, much of it unintended, that's inescapable. As was said of Christopher Wren on his death, if you want to find his legacy, just look around you. First, there's her own oft-repeated biography, the archetypal tale of rags to riches, of the provincial grocer's daughter who became the first woman to be the queen's first minister. This latterday Dick Whittington story has already inspired at least one movie (The Iron Lady), and many biographies, with more to come.

Part of Thatcher's appeal, in storytelling terms, is that she was an outsider: the scholarship girl who studied chemistry at Oxford, who broke through the glass ceiling to become a woman MP, and then the first woman to lead the Tory party. Not since Disraeli, an English Jew, led the Tories in the 1860s and 70s had the country seen anything quite like it. She was certainly no feminist pioneer, and used to play up her "housewife" image with references to home cooking and child-rearing. She may be a woman, they used to say in the 1970s, but she's no sister.

More widely, Thatcher's conviction politics had a literary and cultural dividend that was completely unintended. Hated by the Irish and the Scots, her politics galvanised cultural nationalism. Alec Salmond and Seamus Heaney both owe something to Thatcher's assault on Celtic Britain. Similarly, her single-minded belligerence towards the working-class communities of the north, especially during the war on the miners, gave rise to all kinds of cultural protest, notably the landmark television series, The Boys from the Blackstuff. Finally, the Falklands war, like all wars, yielded a modest literary and cinematic harvest in movies like Tumbledown.

In the metropolitan south, the satire boom (Spitting Image) and alternative comedy (the Young Ones) would have been unthinkable without Thatcher's divisive programme. Moreover, if there is one group that is usually apathetic towards politics, it must be the London literary scene. Not under Thatcher. It's the paradox of her time in power that the most philistine PM for decades, who delighted in humiliating her arts ministers, saw a boom in bookselling (Waterstones), and publishing, plus the emergence of a new generation of gifted writers, from William Boyd, Kazuo Ishiguro and Hanif Kureishi, to Jeanette Winterson, Will Self, Jonathan Coe and Caryl Phillips, among many. Salman Rushdie paid her the back-handed tribute of putting her in his novel, The Satanic Verses, as Mrs Torture.

Some of the writers who dominated the literary scene during the Thatcher years, notably Martin Amis and Ian McEwan, actually pre-dated her rise to power. But novels like Money and films like The Ploughman's Lunch reflect the upheavals that shaped the first half of her years in power. In hindsight, her torments had a dynamic effect on the cultural community, at an intolerably high price, no doubt. The Britain over which she presided saw many of the cultural innovations whose consequences still shape our lives. On the page, and on the screen, the Britons of 1979-91 remain Thatcher's children.

FictionRobert McCrum
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Reading group: What does William Golding's Spire stand for?

There are multiple ways of interpreting the struggle depicted in this complex novel

I'm writing this at the end of a week spent in a house where there is no internet connection. This is information I share not only to make you jealous of the fact that I've been on holiday, but because it's had an interesting effect on the way I've read The Spire. I've consumed it almost in a vacuum, with hardly any background information about William Golding's intentions – or the building work he describes so vividly. Which has left me slightly confused.

That's not to say I haven't liked it. It was all-consuming; strange, haunting, unsettling, mad, and visually overwhelming. My head is still full of precarious scaffolding, ladders leading to more ladders, leading to more ladders, of great slabs of stone swinging on tiny ropes, of the empty space at the top of the spire, of the terrible antihero Jocelin's gaunt face scored with lines, staring eyes, open-mouth, crying out…

That is enough for a satisfactory reading experience – but not get to the bottom (or should that be the top?) of this extraordinary novel. There's a great deal that I feel one unaided reading can't quite answer. Most notably, I'm left wondering what exactly the spire may be – or what combination of things. Before I plug back into the great google-brain, I thought it might be interesting to set down these musings. As I see it now, the spire is:

• An act of faith
Most of the length of the book we see the cathedral through Jocelin's eyes – and for him it is "the bible in stone", the realisation of an exalted vision, a tremendous prayer to his god made physical.

Or, in his perhaps more realistic moments, it is the realisation of Jocelin's extraordinary "will". It is what he has been able to force on the world through the power of his mind. It is a testament – as Jocelin himself frequently urges those around him to see it – to the power of faith.

• A dunce's cap
Of course, seeing the building through Jocelin's eyes is dangerous. Not least because, as becomes increasingly apparent as the book goes on, Jocelin is a fool. Early on we may be prepared to accept his vision of "the bible in stone" as something extraordinary and profound – but as we come to understand that he can barely read and has hardly a clue about church law, we have to question that vision. There's also Jocelin's extraordinary vanity. In his abstract thoughts, he sees himself as a kind of saint, a man who thinks only of the work and the glory it brings to his religion. Yet the stone cold reality is that he has demanded that statues of himself be built into the tower.

Similarly, he dwells often on his "love" for his "children" and his sympathy for those around him, but he destroys most of them, knowingly and methodically, in order to get his vanity project off the ground.

Jocelin sees the tower as a "great finger sticking up" as a new hub, reshaping the city and country around it - but it is a wagging finger. Every disaster in its building becomes a reflection on Jocelin's faults, while its very shape, lancing the sky, cutting up the horizon, dominating the plain below, is a reminder of his brutality.

Jocelin may feel he is "comforted" by an angel – but we can't help but feel that the angel is a sign of his madness, or, in fact, a devil. Jocelin's act of faith is folly.

• Jocelin's pinnacle
Yet even as the spire stands for a certain sort of idiocy, it also exalts those who work on it. It is only when Jocelin is finally grounded that his earthly problems start crowding in. Up on the scaffolding, in the heights, he is somehow purer – a man with a real sense of purpose, a good luck charm for the builders, someone with courage and conviction, working on something extraordinary. It's madness that takes him up the ladders – but his life in the spire is spiritual and devoted. Away from the tower, he is left, physically and metaphorically, crawling through gutters.

• A cock
There's never any doubt about the phallic symbolism of the spire – but there are variations in its meaning. At first it rises from the belly of the church as a fairly straightforward expression of Jocelin's pride and power. Yet the imagery becomes ever more dangerous and unpleasant. We see workmen waving models of it between their legs. It is the centre of the apparent rape of Goody Pangall. It then seems, for a while at least, to promise a kind of fertility, a hope of life and love, when Goody falls pregnant and has an adulterous affair with the master builder Roger Mason. But in this novel, such hopes breed death and madness. And afterwards, as the tower sways and looks set to fall, there is hopeless impotence.

• A real human creation?
As noted, removed as I am from the internet, I have no idea how much of The Spire is based on real events, how much of Jocelin's erection was actually built and how much remains. I do know there's still a spire on Salibsury cathedral. But I don't know if this was the one Jocelin is supposed to have built. Whether the one Jocelin built fell down and the current one replaced it. Or whether there was no Jocelin, there were no worries about the depths of the foundations and no drama about the construction.

This is perhaps unusual ignorance. I'm guessing that even when the book came out 50 years ago most people picking it up knew something of the story's background. Or were very quickly able to find out. But I'm quite enjoying being so lost. It opens the book up to many possible readings.

If it is all a figment of Golding's imagination, and there was no Jocelin, or anyone like him, The Spire becomes a tremendous mental exercise. A great abstract symbol of folly that is itself insubstantial; a symphony of words, surrounding empty space in a manner even more flimsy than that cone of scaffolding and ladders wrapped around the air at the top of the spire.

If there was a Jocelin, and his spire fell, it becomes something else. All that incredible effort was for something – but left nothing, Or in fact, less than nothing, given the financial, physical and mental toll it took on everyone connected to its construction.

Alternatively, if the spire that Jocelin built is the actual and still extant pinnacle of Salibsury Cathedral that changes things, doesn't it?

Of course, I could easily answer all such speculation with a quick trip down to an internet cafe. But for a while longer I want to know only the reality that Golding presents.

On the basis of that reality – and although it contradicts my scant knowledge of Salibsury Cathedral (which is to say, that it still exists and it has a spire), I'd be tempted to guess that the tower did not survive. There was calamity foretold in the way those supporting pillars bent and sang, and in the way Roger and Rachel Mason, Pangall and Goody (who represented the pillars in Jocelin's mind) all broke. Then there was actual catastrophe in the great climactic storm that plunged such large sections of masonry down to earth – and Jocelin along with them. Given what happens in the bulk of the novel, it would be almost miraculous if the spire survived.

Yet there remains the strong possibility that all that incredible effort wasn't wasted. Although in the concluding pages there is no doubt that Jocelin himself is "a building about to fall", the last image we have of the spire is of it "rushing upward to some point at the sky's end", still standing, "slim as a girl", heading to infinity in "cascades of exultation that nothing could trammel".

If his building went up and stayed up, Jocelin would remain cruel, and vain, and foolish and avaricious – but perhaps not so broken. His struggles would have produced something enduring, and beautiful. Something that has been admired for centuries and will be for many more to come. And so the book becomes a commentary on what it takes to produce a monument.

It also becomes a commentary on the cathedral itself. To admire that spire is to admire a work of madness and evil. And so, perhaps to admire any such art is to admire a dark, selfish and wild part of the human psyche. Perhaps, in fact, that is the ultimate message. That great art involves sacrifice, cruelty, inhumanity. Yep. That sounds like William Golding…

William GoldingFictionSam Jordison
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The books you cannot let go

They may be falling apart, you may know you'll never read them again. But as talismans they have an indispensable power

I'm very bad at getting rid of books. As a child I argued with increasing shrillness, eventually resorting to night-raids on crates marked for disposal, to preserve long-outgrown picture books and baby reading (I feel slightly vindicated now that my daughter is enjoying my faded, fraying Mog books and Ahlbergs. But moving day, alas, draws on apace, as doth the evil hour when I'll have to take the shears to my sprawling collection in earnest. I can save most of the children's books (again) by the simple expedient of shoving them onto the littl'un's shelf – she can't argue convincingly yet – and calling them hers. Multiple copies, junk-food reads and substantial classics I'll admit, with a sigh of shamed relief, that I'm never going to get round to reading - charity shop ho, my chicks.

The prospect of purging talismanic texts, though – books I'm unlikely ever to open again, but which I superstitiously believe exhale helpful knowledge or distilled memory – is harder. These finger-prickling, magical objects include several cloth-bound volumes of Latin poetry, ancient stock bought secondhand or absent-mindedly liberated from school bookcases (sorry, Mrs McDonough). A few proclaim via age-spotted plates that they were speech-day prizes for diligent girls and boys. I'm never going to sit down and study them again, unless I slip through a timewarp and get the Pro Plus palpitations retaking my finals. But I might, in some unspecific emergency, still need them. And I love them, even unopened. I remember that some have careful, bowdlerising glosses, fitting rude and sparkling verse for the innocent eye of youth – some even resort to asterisks in particularly racy sections. They are old and crumbly and useless, their dye comes off on your fingers, and they're leaving my collection over my dead body.

Other books I could never consign to the recycling include half a dozen scribbled and maltreated play scripts, bent backwards, frantically doodled and defaced into illegibility; entirely useless for reading, but transporting me instantly to the rehearsal room with one glimpse of their covers. Like the Latin books, they're no longer texts so much as tiny time machines – handling them zips me back with a jolt to obsessions with the precise length of a Pinter "pause" as opposed to "silence'" or weighing up how many lamb's hearts you need to last a week-long run of 'Tis Pity She's a Whore, with two matinees. (The answer is one per performance - otherwise they work down the blade, or go off and knock out the front three rows with their stench.)

As I begin packing up my books – or rather, sit cross-legged and read between guilty, frenetic bursts of packing – I know another pile of talismanic volumes will appear at my elbow. Which are your talismanic books, never opened now but never to be disposed of? And what do they represent?

Children and teenagersImogen Russell Williams
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Is reading different in the 21st century?

Mohsin Hamid says technology has compressed and changed the way people read – but how much has really altered?

In last week's books podcast novelist Mohsin Hamid suggested that his novel, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, was a "sprawling 19th-century epic novel" compressed into 200 pages.

The reason for this was because he believed people read differently now: "There are numerous reading strategies and compression techniques that are available when you are addressing a 21st-century reader which weren't available when you were addressing a 19th-century reader," he said.

His argument didn't convince Aggie H, who asked:

Do people really 'read differently' now? Have we really devised new 'reading strategies'? Do writers really think about 'compression techniques' as they write for 21st-century readers?

He's right that not all books need to be 800 pages. Some of today's over-excited, over-writing debut novelists might take note. I'm less convinced that good television dramas have reduced our need for deep, long books.

An 800-page book gives you 'a 16-20 hour engagement with one work of art'. But, he says, we now get our multiple narratives and deep characterisation from televised drama series with 16 or 20 one-hour episodes. I question the direct comparison. A television series is more fragmented. The novel still has the advantage of immersion.

AggieH's point was taken up by jmschrei, who wrote:

As to the question of whether people read differently or whether our need for the engagement afforded by 800-page novels has been usurped by television miniseries and dramas I think it is important to remember that many of the long novels of the past that we now approach as a singular works were originally published in serial format.

Do you agree with Hamid that people read differently today? And if so, what effect do you think it is having on literature?

Mohsin HamidFictionClaire Armitstead
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