Reading Note:
Judgment Day
19 March 2015

Partly, it’s the cold that I’m on the edge of. It has knocked me down on two days in the last month, but, for the most part, left me walking wounded. Mostly, though, it’s the impending trip to San Francisco. In a perfect world, I would never travel; people and even places would come to me. In this imperfect world, I start shutting down about a week before departure, so that, by the time we leave (for I never travel alone), I’m numb to most anxieties. Airport terminals are, increasingly, places of terror, with authority figures playing the part of terrorists. Everything that I dislike about the way we live now is concentrated in queues of apparently miserable wretches. I don’t want special treatment. I just want to be spared the hugely demoralizing sight of drab, careworn people.

The worst thing about this shutting-down is that it becomes harder to take an interest in things. That, in turn, makes it harder to judge the things that do engage my attention. Are they mere escapes?

Last night, I sat, stunned, for about twenty minutes, after finishing an early (1981) novel by Penelope Lively, Judgment Day. I had fetched it out of the pile the day before and swallowed it whole. Many of the earlier scenes were funnier than anything that I had read in Lively. But there were some very strong notes, too, of understated darkness, and, in the end, it was this darkness that prevailed. I was desolated by the ending — as desolated as if I were all, and all at once, of the characters who were desolate at the end. It was not a good feeling at half-past eleven at night, with Kathleen, unusually, long since asleep.

Lively’s characters are socially defined. We get to know them primarily through their relationships and interactions with others. (Regular readers won’t have any trouble understanding why I find this arresting.) In Lively’s later work, events, the things that happen, are also determined by things that have happened before. That sounds rather obvious, but it is actually uncharacteristic of long fiction in English, which relies on the introduction of new characters and unexpected developments, however plausibly foreshadowed, to maintain the pitch of excitement. In The Photograph, a widower discovers a photograph that he was not meant to see, and everything that happens afterward is a result of that discovery. Of that discovery by him, I ought to say, for it’s really the effect of the photograph on a particular man that sets off a chain reaction among a particular set of acquaintances, who themselves constitute the chain. It is in the light of this chain of events that we see all of the other characters. Everyone in Lively has a private life, but there is no privacy with regard to the world of the novel itself. Because Lively writes very generously, scrupulously registering everyone’s good qualities while letting the bad speak for themselves, her novels do not suffer from the suffocating rage that gives Ivy Compton-Burnett’s fictions their somewhat ludicrous, even autistic atmosphere. You do not want to escape from Lively’s novels. Although, in her later books, Lively quite strictly omits all the irrelevancies, she leaves the world large enough for comfort.

In Judgment Day, we see the characters in light of each other, but there is no chain of events, only a sequence. The plot is ignited by the need to raise funds for the repair of a village church. Almost all of the characters happen to live on the Green over which the church, flanked by a tavern and a petrol station, somewhat humbly presides; but they don’t necessarily know each other well. In fact, there is even a new household, headed by Clare Paling. Clare, a stand-in for the author to the extent that she is an Oxford-educated stay-at-home mother, is happily married to Peter, but Peter is a busy executive, always dashing off to a day at the factory or to a week in Brussels. The fragility of the Palings’ marital arrangement is so delicately hinted at that I can’t locate any actual hints; they consist primarily in the breeziness of Peter’s tone. You would not be surprised to learn that he is having an affair, nor that Clare would forgive him. But Peter is never linked to the slightest misbehavior. Such unrealized potential would not occur in a later Lively.

Naturally, the vicar has a leading role. I have never run into anyone like George Radwell. In George, the laughter and the darkness are united, with the laughs that respond to his early appearances drying up completely as the end approaches. George is a mediocrity, or perhaps something even worse. His being a vicar at all is the result of clerical error. Neither notably good-looking — he is pink-skinned and flabby — nor particularly intelligent — he’s not stupid, but he can never think of the right thing to say until the moment has passed — George is unattractive without being repellent. We laugh at him at first (he makes a fool of himself over Clare), but then we sense, and soon taste, the terrible loneliness of this man whom no one would miss. It begins to seem a living death.

The novel’s true stoic is Sydney Porter, a retired accountant. Porter keeps to himself and cultivates his garden. He has already experienced the living death of surviving the death of his wife and young daughter in the Blitz. Off somewhere else on naval duty, he was close enough to come to London afterward.

He’d asked to go, though there was no need, the identifying had been done already, before he came up from Portsmouth, done by the ARP Warden, who was a neighbor, who knew them well. They were side by side, and the attendant had pulled back the sheet that covered Mary first and for a moment he’d been shattered anew, thought wildly that perhaps there could have been a mistake, because her hair was gray, quite gray, her short, fine, brown hair. And then he’d realized it was the plaster, the plaster dust that had spewed out of the house as it fell about them, covering them, drowning them, suffocating them. And he had stood there staring not at her face, which was gray-white too, but at her dusty hair, until at last someone put a hand on his arm and steered him away.

I’d never read anything like that, either. Just how people died in the Blitz was never made very clear. Did it need to be made clear? But here it is. Drowning in plaster dust. Like the dead at Pompeii. Not burned by flames or boiling lava. Not concussed by falling bricks. Suffocated. Like George Radwell’s mediocrity, Sydney’s loss is expressed with shocking vividness in a very few words.

One other character whom I can mention without spoiling the story is Mrs Tanner. Mrs Tanner is a monster, no doubt about it, and all the more monstrous for having no idea whatever that this is the case. She is the one who deserves the living death of an isolated, unminded existence, but of course she is married to poor Mr Tanner and she even has a grown daughter. She appears in George’s study, “a massive figure in blue crimplene” with a “doughy, expressionless face,” to seek help with her “illness.”

“It’s this phobia, see. It’s been ten years now — ten years this spring. The doctors haven’t ever been able to do anything, so my husband said the other day, why not try the vicar? See what he’s got to suggest, if anything. Can’t do any harm, can it, he said, and that’s what they’re there for, that sort of thing.”

This scene occurred early enough for the idea of George Radwell as a faith healer to convulse me with laughter. Whither could this possibly lead? Several pages later, it leads to Mrs Tanner phoning the vicar to tell him that she’s going to take the place of his housekeeper, who’s off having a baby. So that’s what her “phobia” was all about: the opposite of “meet cute.” This is funny, too, but not quite so funny. Mrs Tanner’s barging around the vicarage with doughy inexpressiveness that nonetheless can’t keep silent turns out to be a very effective device for making sympathy for poor George at least imaginable.

I don’t believe that Penelope Lively was a young mother when she wrote Judgment Day, but the novel is haunted by any young mother’s anxiety about vehicular traffic. Clare herself is oddly immune to this dread. She drives, in fact, rather recklessly, too fast at least, and indeed she drives herself and a carful of children into a ditch. (This accident turns out to be providential, as George tries to counsel her, sparing her a much worse accident occurs at Clare’s intended destination — hardly a recommendation of providence, Clare retorts.) The village Green is vandalized by midnight motorbikers who can’t be caught; eventually, the marauders invade the church and put an end to the plot. (Except the story is not quite over.) Despite the appearance of Old England, the people of this town, like people everywhere who want things to be both convenient and picturesque, have failed to create a safe world. Inevitably, a child riding a bicycle is struck and killed.

This death either destroys or ruptures the two relationships that have grown in the course of the story. I can mention only the one between Clare and George. Working together for the good of a church in whose doctrines neither of them believe, these two, whose early encounters were marked by contempt and equally hostile lust, also work past their belaboring first impressions, but this appreciation culminates in a respect that prevents them from coming together.

Make sure that you do not finish this book alone, late at night.