Felicia’s Journey
By William Trevor
Viking, 213 pages, $21.95
For three decades William Trevor has wedded an Irish love of language to almost hypnotic psychological suspense. His 13th novel, “Felicia’s Journey,” a laconically chilling portrait of a lonely and sexually grasping madman, continues in a magnetic but an oddly matter-of-fact way to succeed on both fronts.
Easily one of the eeriest novels I have ever read, “Felicia’s Journey” evokes the most pessimistic pages of Hardy. A story almost heartlessly unrelieved by any warmth or comfort or the encompassing sympathy one might find, say, in Chekhov, to whom Trevor is often compared, it has the narrative effect of a python ever so slowly winding around the body of a hapless victim.
Felicia, a 17-year-old Irish innocent, steals away from a small Irish town to search for her boyfriend-she is pregnant-in an industrial sprawl of the English Midlands. There, by a spate of merciless coincidences, she falls in with a fat, unctuous and serpentine catering manager, the 50ish Mr. Hilditch. He is on the prowl for a new friend to join the five other girls in what he euphemistically calls Memory Lane.
Though the story is not at all derivative, I was very much reminded of Dreiser’s luckless Carrie Meeber, so buffeted about; we have in Felicia the same kind of beleaguered young girl who, living in crushing family circumstances and finding herself traduced, sets out to find her lover in a cold world. But unlike two other young women she at points resembles-Faulkner’s Lena Grove, a wanderer who, however, has her own inner light, and Joyce’s Eveline, who fears the whole idea of a journey, though she is trapped-Felicia in her innocence is completely without resources.
It is that innocence as contrasted-subjected-to Hilditch’s unsleeping guile that is so painful in “Felicia’s Journey.” Trevor, with his uncanny insight into character and plotting, manages to give this pervert every last bit of alertness that his poor heroine lacks, almost to the point where it seems cruel, if not dramatically irresponsible. In his fussy hypocrisy and evil matter-of-factness-he has “small hands” and a grotesque appetite for candy and precise finger foods-the bespectacled Mr. Hilditch reminds the reader of the English sex-killer Reginald Christie, who is mentioned in the novel and may well have acted for Trevor as archetype. In any case, the evil, smiling, deluded monster is matchless for horror.
At points when the poor girl, terrified, “senses his blubbery mouth close to her” or when she knows “she must not be drawn into the humpbacked car,” the reader is forced as much as the victim to deal with such intensified images-and yet one can do nothing but helplessly watch. It is the “banality of evil,” to use Hannah Arendt’s phrase, that makes the unfolding of the novel so painful.
Hilditch is on a journey himself, and as Trevor gives us an intimate, if not sympathetic, portrait of this psychopath-in his daily life, in his job, in his interest in popular music, in his commonplace world of listening to the news and reading books-he seems to be very much the modern, isolated man on the street. The hideous fact is, he is rioting inside and fully demented.
But with few exceptions, the entire population presented here is useless; for Felicia, tired, penniless, on the streets, stumbling from one lie to another, one dosshouse to another, is a victim of more than the heartless young soldier who deserts her. Her father is critical, dismissive and angry, her brothers thoughtless, and virtually everyone she meets on her journey-which, in a real sense, never ends-is cold or indifferent, too busy to help, aimless, suffocating in their own lives or preying on her themselves.
It could be argued that the chain of coincidences that slowly unfolds and puts the ironically named Felicia in such dire peril also places Trevor himself in the camp of oppressors, makes him guilty of like crimes-so little surcease in the story is there of Felicia’s pain. More likely, though, “Felicia’s Journey” will stand as further testimony to Trevor’s incredible skill as a writer.
