final lcc newsletter 2007 for output:Lucy Newsletter v2
09/01/2008
10:47
Page 46
You Can Live Forever. Julie Maxwell (Jonathan Cape, 2007) Alice is having a crisis of faith. She
has been brought up by her mother, Oonagh, in an End Times church,
The Church of the Worldwide Saints of God, a community sustained by a gratifying belief that they will
shortly ‘be taken to a place of safety - protected from the abominable
sights but still able to hear the faint screams of sinners and the muted pounding of their fists as they
begged to be let in’. The faithful repudiate the limits of a
conventional heaven; they expect to become gods on earth, the
‘universal HQ’, and rule over other, distant, planets. They minimise their contact with Worldlings:
‘everyone in the church said that everyone in The World was a
drug baron or necrophiliac ... so you could be glad to know the
plain truth and be spared their
company’. The sect’s central text is The Unbelievable Potential of Human Beings supported by volumes such as All about
Dating and Courtship Leading to a Christian Marriage, which rejects unmarried physical proximity between couples (‘the grossly
indecent handling of another’s
genitals’) but is vague about what
might follow in virtuous marriage, stressing the need for a sense of humour on honeymoon.
Page 46 | Lucy Cavendish College Cambridge
Julie Maxwell with her book You Can Live Forever
Alice’s Irish father, William, also
disposal, the appropriation of
wife loves him, doubts that Alice
possibly, with poison.
has few doubts. He doubts his
belongs to anyone but him and
obsolete explosive and, quite
doubts the entire belief system of
Alice is not meant to indulge in
with secret girlfriends, arson, body
world - doomed one way or another
the Saints. His certainties are to do
forward-planning in the present