[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...