[The] idea of traveling—in the mind, over the mountains, or back in time—is central to ["The Welsh Sonata" and "A Kingdom"]. A day has its own elasticity—a morning "is beginning to stretch itself," and elsewhere, "to grow." The past of a man is never lost, but accumulates in the common memory: "Yesterday a man, today a tale."…

The writing in both books is sometimes laconic, sometimes poetic, sometimes graphically realistic….

Mr. Hanley's solitary characters are mostly seen from the outside. The reader picks up clues about them, spurred on, like the policeman Goronwy Jones, by curiosity. In neither of these books is isolation examined minutely from the inside, as it is, for example, in Brian Moore's "The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne." Yet solitude does not necessarily mean being invisible to others; indeed, the invisible ones are the conformists…. Mr. Hanley's solitaries are not unwatched...