From his first novel, The Old Boys, onwards, [William Trevor] has specialized in harrying gentility. His books regularly shepherd into view the well-bred and/or well-heeled: then, unleashing some aggressive predator at them, they depict with sprightly relish the bleating distress and panic-stricken swervings that ensue.

The clash between herbivores and carnivores fascinates Trevor. His last novel, Other People's Worlds, absorbedly watched a psychopath wreaking havoc in a nest of gentlefolk. The preceding one, The Children of Dynmouth, recorded the tremors shaking rectory and bungalow as a crazy blackmailer harassed the mild citizens of a sleepy Dorset town. Retailing prim pandemonium, the book archly savoured such spectacles as that of a disgraced pederast trying to placate his virgin wife with a cup of Ovaltine.

Trevor's fiction constantly brings together the disruptive and the decorous, the sordid and sedate. The title of his new book, Beyond the Pale, epitomizes...