SOURCE: “Those Big City Lights vs. Life in the Countryside,” in Los Angeles Times, November 25, 1991, p. E6.

In the following review, See argues that the main theme of both Circle of Friends and The Lilac Bus is the tension between life in Dublin versus life in the surrounding rural villages.

In different times, Ireland had James Joyce as its dour spokesman; now, the people who really speak for that sad and lovely isle are the lyrical, metaphysical Van-the-Man Morrison, and—far more down to earth—the prolific novelist, Maeve Binchy.

This writer has zigzagged from earlier work that is frankly “women's fiction,” romantic stuff, very heavy on love, to a more astringent, common-sensical, journalistic view of what it means to be Irish in these days—and it's not all good news.

In her last ambitious novel, Circle of Friends, two plots coiled within each other. The first, the...