ABSTRACT
There is a curiously archaic property to the resuscitation of the issues pertaining to this excursus into a sociological noir. Memory pertains to images of commemoration of those gone to dust; ruins signify decay and death; the dark Gothic fantasises about spectral returns; Satan emerges as the pop star from hell; and sin reminds of ultimate transgression of a God, but also the need for expiation to some god unknown. The issues presented might seem intractable, yet in reality they are eminently resistible. Amnesia permits images of commemoration to be discarded; ruins might be just archaeological remains and no more; the dark Gothic could be treated for what it always was, a fantasy fit for the leisured classes; Satan might just be a wicked imaginary friend from an unoccupied hell; and transgression could have just floated away from God to the god of redress for infractions of supposed British values of inclusiveness and the rights of the sexually unrecognised. Yet, that ease in which God is denoted as absent has been undermined as the shades of death and suffering still irrupt disconcertingly.
