Choice, Contingency, and the Crack of Doom: Penelope Lively's Judgment Day

Penelope Lively's fourth novel, Judgment Day (1981), although quiet and understated like most of her fiction, employs sophisticated thematic and structural patterns. The novel concerns an English village and focuses on four characters contributing to what Lively elsewhere refers to as her goal of "illuminating the conflicts and ambiguities" of being human. In Judgment Day these complexities involve its protagonists in the equivocal relationship between choice and contingency as well as entangle them in the circumstantial and psychological binaries of order and chaos, connection and isolation. The novel deploys two thematic and narrative trajectories in which the first factors in the three pairs jointly trend toward hope and the second toward its loss. The conclusion of Judgment Day leaves unclear which one, if either, will prevail, but the novel clearly favors humaneness as the appropriate response to the "conflicts and ambiguities" of being a conscious and overly-sensitive species. The community's attempt via a historical pageant to raise money to restore its medieval church becomes central stage for the playing out of the foregoing dynamics, which the church's ancient wall painting of The Last Judgment encapsulates. It does this as part of the novel's tactic of translating Christian concepts into secular ones as each of the four protagonists moves toward his or her own form of Judgment Day.