SOURCE: "The Saving Touch of Fantasy," in The Times Literary Supplement, No. 46005, May 31, 1991, p. 21.

O'Faolain is an English novelist and short story writer. In the following review, she examines the tension between reality and fantasy in Trevor's Two Lives.

William Trevor's fictions swing between realism and the escape-hatch of fantasy and the process is symbiotic, for it is his characters' plausibility which earns credence for their excesses. Like real people, they can commit cartoonish follies without becoming cartoonish. Reality dogs them. Realism delivers them up to scrutiny and we, like Peeping Toms, may even feel an uneasy shiver at its verisimilitude. Humour rarely distances his subjects for long. Just as we settle to the release of laughter, a twitch of the plot hauls them back in for another shock of recognition. They are apt to be close to the end of their tether and are often very like...