The Reread Diaries: Felicia’s Journey
William Trevor is best known for his lovely, brilliant, crystalline short stories. Like all of his admirers, I am a big fan of his stories and usually devour them when they appear in The New Yorker and when they are collected in book form (his most recent collection is Cheating at Canasta). As amazing as his short stories are, his novels are equally wonderful: dark slim tales wrapped in exquisite prose. The novels are tight and precise, creepy, and lovely. The first novel of Trevor’s that I read was Felicia’s Journey, and it still remains my favorite, though I certainly haven’t exhausted his output yet.
A recent re-read reminded me why I loved the novel—and reminded me why reading Trevor is as pleasurable as sitting by a cozy fire on a cold stormy night, with a cup of tea and a plate of cookies at your side. (Though, to be honest, I’ve never done such a thing. But it sounds very British or Irish, and thus very Trevor-like, since he really is a dual citizen of both countries.)
Felicia’s Journey is the dual story of two very different characters whose lives intersect with life-changing consequences for both. Felicia is a young Irish woman, part of a large family, though her mother died when she was very young. It is, at first glance, a quiet but somewhat dreary life, especially since she shares a tiny room with her great grandmother, a widow of a man who sacrificed his life for Ireland during “The Troubles.” Felicia’s father never forgets to remind her of that heritage. But when Felicia meets Johnny, a once-local boy who is taking a break from his life in England to visit his protective mother, a bright ray of sunshine breaks up her rain-soaked days, making life seem a little more magical and a lot less ordinary. Trevor conveys the pangs of first love—the euphoria, the doubt, the moony fantasizing, the dread of disappointment, the hopefulness—with heartbreaking honesty.
This we all learn though Trevor’s seamless use of flashback, for when the novel opens, Felicia is on a ferry, heading to England. She is pregnant, by Johnny, and she is both trying to find him to tell him the news as well as escape her dead-end life in the Irish village she calls home.
Mr. Hilditch, our other protagonist, is a lonely, fat, fussy “catering manager” at a factory, somewhere in middle England. He lives alone in a large house, and drives a “humpbacked green car.” He chances upon Felicia as she is wondering the city, hoping to find Johnny, who supposedly works at a nearby lawnmower factory, though this proves not to be the case. Slowly, with subtle yet menacing clues planted deftly by Trevor, we realize that Mr. Hilditch is not the sweet, innocent old man he portrays himself to be. Felicia, you see, is an ideal target for his nefarious designs: She is young, pretty, alone, and somewhat helpless, even desperate, in a land without any connections. He finds a way to worm himself into her life, offering a helping hand when she needs it most. But the reader realizes Felicia is walking into a trap, because the other girls who Mr. Hilditch has helped in the past are all dead and buried.
Since I already knew how the novel ended, the tension wasn’t as taut as it had been when I originally read it. But I read on with pleasure anyway, admiring the way Trevor wracked up the sense of dread and suspense, page by page. Will Felicia fall into his clutches? What will happen to her unborn baby? Will she find Johnny?
The other impressive thing about Felicia’s Journey—which struck me both then and now—is the way that Trevor makes you feel sympathy for Mr. Hilditch, not just Felicia. Sure, he is a sick and disturbed man, a murderer. But Trevor knows that murderers are still human beings, with complex though messed-up inner lives. He doesn’t go in for cheap psychoanalysis about why Mr. Hilditch has become the way he has become, nor does he portray Mr. Hilditch as a one-dimensional portrait of unexplainable evil. In characterizing Mr. Hilditch, Trevor shows how the disappointments and slights of his long life have added to his troubled mind, creating a potent cocktail of obsession, delusion, and violence.
I won’t spoil the ending, of course, but Trevor withholds crucial information for a long stretch of time before the reader realizes Felicia’s fate. In lesser hands, this might seem a cheap trick. But Trevor pulls it off masterfully. This is, of course, a novel about a journey. And where that journey takes Felicia is both heartbreaking, exhilarating, and ultimately revelatory.
By the way, Felicia’s Journey was made into a movie in 1999, by Atom Egoyan. And though Bob Hoskins gives a pretty good performance as Mr. Hilditch, the movie overall is not very good. Skip it–read the book!
