[Like Any Other Man] is a retelling, in a modern idiom, of the Samson and Delilah story; by taking a pagan theme that fits nicely into biblical sanction, the author has been able to smuggle an outrageously funny, frank, and terrifying book into his own country. Patrick Boyle is the best thing that has happened to literary Ireland in a long time. Because he relates the modern obsession with sex to a vanishing sense of guilt, he is also something of an out of season Jansenist, a man who can make sin still see...

Working within the tradition of the modern Irish short story [in At Night All Cats Are Grey, Patrick Boyle] has freed himself of the gentle pathos that became Frank O'Connor's hallmark; he avoids, too, Sean O'Faolain's generally cheerful outlook on his countrymen. It is as though he wanted to dig deeper into a vein already well mined. Boyle's is a more somber disposition; a realist who rarely softens the edges of life, he is closer to the Joyce of Dubliners than to his con...

Sometimes—in moments of bleakness—it seems as though the main teams of modern fiction writers are the Moralists and the Amoralists. If this is so, then Patrick Boyle is a solid and creditable full-back for the first team. Beyond its humour and its sophisticated representationalism, A View from Calvary aims to lay bare the movements of the will; and, especially, that fatal lethargy, born so often from the self-imposed constraint of fear of social opinion, which leads to moral failure and human ...