In Laddenham, a neat village near the light industrial township of Spelbury in the southern English heartlands, Penelope Lively has set a nicely pertinacious account of the secular assumptions and irrational impulses which govern the way many of us live now. Judgement Day centres on the relationship the agnostic Clare Paling forms with a well-meaning and feeble man of God, and his church…. The ostensibly tidy lives of the retired, the respectable burghers, the young marrieds and their children, are more complex and fraught than appears; Clare's motives in seeking to graft her goodwill on to this community are more ambiguous than she realises; and the pageant [she plans in order to bring the townspeople together] is doomed to failure when violent forces impinging on village life suddenly erupt to shatter all the good intentions. It might sound like an honourably observant novel written to a formula; but...