[Penelope Lively's] quality can best be conveyed by saying that she is the kind of writer that Barbara Pym might have been if she had married and had children. The setting of Judgement Day … might be that of a Pym novel; and that, at the centre of this village and the events that take place in it, there should always loom up the church of St Peter and St Paul, with a 14th-century wall-painting, the Doom, as 'its glory and surprise', is precisely what one might expect if Barbara Pym had been the author. Also reminiscent of Pym, in its undemonstrative tenderness, tentativeness and frustration, is the relationship between Clare Paling, a newcomer to the village, and the vicar of the church, a lonely and unloved man of 40, who has never married.
But whereas, if this were a Pym novel, Clare would be some churchy spinster, here she is both an agnostic and the possessor of a frequently absent husband and two children. She is cultivated enough to object, on a visit to Matins, to the ghastly flatness and triteness of the Good News Bible in use …; she is sensitive enough to overcome her initial distaste for the vicar and to pity him in his uncertain isolation. She is tough enough to give a tongue-lashing to a callous brute of a man, who parks his car in such a way in front of hers that she is stuck for more than an hour while waiting for his return.
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