SOURCE: Banville, John. “Relics.” New York Review of Books 38, no. 15 (26 September 1991): 29-30.

In the following mixed assessment, Banville deems Two Lives as “more interesting than enthralling.”

Some years ago British television filmed an adaptation of William Trevor's short story “The Ballroom of Romance.” It was a grim little drama, set in one of those concrete and galvanized-iron dance halls which sprang up at crossroads in rural Ireland in the 1940s and 1950s. The story centered on a woman, no longer young, who comes every week to the dance in a last-ditch and ultimately vain search for a husband who will take her away from her bleak life of toiling on her widowed father's farm, to which the circumstances of the time have condemned her.

The film was a fine, understated, moving production by the Irish director Pat O'Connor and a cast led by the marvelous actress Brenda Fricker...