Review of The Spire from a priest’s perspective

Fr de Malleray, FSSP, who himself is author of several books, is one of the first readers of The Spire who wrote a review. In an article on Crisis Magazine about tradition inspiring fiction, he highlights the spiritual desolation and the contrasting discovery of faith and tradition.

Bernice Zieba lives with her husband and children within a Traditional Latin Mass community in England. She published, in 2026, The Spire (Jan Webmedia). Its main protagonist is Alice, a young Englishwoman living in 2075 in Preston, Lancashire. Zieba’s depiction of our country in half a century, when digital technology is ubiquitously applied by the woke State to control every move and thought of the population, is painfully credible. Scheduled for demolition, a church with a very tall spire becomes the gate through which Alice travels back to the 19th century and then as far back as penal times under Protestant persecution.

Along her rabbit hole, modern Alice falls into no wonderland, but she discovers periods in history when faith, and Catholicism in particular, were worth standing up for and even dying for. In The Spire, the heroine embodies modern young generations in our secular Western world. They are unchurched, lack basic knowledge of history, and, consequently, assume that religion and family are long shaken-off shackles from a bygone era. But human nature in them cannot be eradicated as long as they breathe, nor the craving for God and His created reflections as truth, beauty, and bounty.

Thus, Alice warms to a fellow time traveller, Fr. O’Brien, first encountered as the zealous pastor of the 19th-century parish church and then as a heroic recusant priest under Tudor persecution. Mrs. Zieba’s attention to detail shows in her carefully researched depictions of the slums and cotton mills in Preston during the Industrial Revolution, with moving Dickensian hues. Why may mature readers, not only teenagers, enjoy reading The Spire? Because its juxtaposing of three epochs feels neither artificial nor childish but aims at showing that our era, the 2020s, is blessed with small, budding Traditional Latin Mass communities which we should support and make widely known, thus helping curb secular oppression and investing in the lasting reconversion of England.

Read the full article here: https://crisismagazine.com/opinion/when-tradition-inspires-fiction