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…