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 pain….

In those stories where he [maintains] the narrative posture demanded of moral fiction—a more or less explicit authorial judgment—[it] is never simplistic: it aims for, and sometimes reaches, that tough acceptance of ambivalence which passes from moral fiction to enter upon the moral life itself. The smaller squibs, really only elaborate jokes, are supported by this broader vision in much the same...