[Proxopera is important for] the insight Mr. Kiely gives into a disturbed community. His book, he says, is "a condemnation of the interference by violent men in the lives of ordinary people".

His greatest achievement is in conveying, extraordinarily economically, and as if it was not the technical and imaginative feat that it is, the layers of time coexisting in the mind of someone who has lived all his life in one place…. All the time, Binchey is seeing the past alongside the present: when he walks in the graveyard, the men and women buried there are all alive in his memory…. When he stops the bomb-laden car on the bridge he reads the words he himself scrawled in the wet concrete of the parapet half a century ago. Everything he sees is interpreted through memory and long knowledge.

As the present is overlaid by the past, the...