A suspenseful thriller that alternates between the story of a potential victim and that of her potential predator, Felicia’s Journey follows the title character from her bleak young life in Ireland to an unknown future in England. She is pursuing the hope that the young Irishman who seduced her—whose child she is carrying—and who she believes loves her will welcome her and make everything right.
She is a simple girl of few needs and fewer expectations, and she is completely unprepared for the larger world she thrusts herself into. Her naïveté is touching, yet the reader cannot help but fear for her as she faces a world she barely understands.
In contrast, Mr. Hilditch runs a well-oiled machine at the cafeteria he manages at a factory. He lives in the large house he had shared with his mother, now deceased, although her clothes still hang in the closets where she left them. He has a sharp eye for a lost lamb such as Felicia, and he knows just how to manage his chances so as to manipulate events into the appearance of chance and coincidence. He is a skilled and resourceful storyteller who can make himself the object of a desperate young woman’s pity, effectively disarming her instinct for self-protection.
Felicia is in a danger that she herself cannot recognize as she searches everywhere for her lost love—everywhere, that is, except the right place—since she is unable to believe that a proper Irish boy could lower himself to serve in the British military. The man she is searching for can be found easily enough in the town’s pubs frequented by soldiers, but Felicia, believing his lies, looks everywhere else.
Meanwhile, Mr. Hilditch contributes to her growing desperation any way he can, until she has no one to turn to but him. As she sinks into more and more dire straits, she first receives and then loses the charity of a religious cult before running out of options, which is just where Mr. Hilditch wants her to be. Her life and the life of her unborn child are at risk, but Felicia has none of the skills or the knowledge she needs to fend off her impending doom, and her luck cannot completely save her.
Trevor builds the story’s suspense by carefully doling out the details of Mr. Hilditch’s previous experiences with women, including his late mother. The narrator presents the story from a third-person limited point of view that peers into the minds of Felicia and Mr. Hilditch but that also withholds information to heighten tension and suspense.
In the end, Mr. Hilditch discovers his own vulnerability, providing a sense of closure to the story that he cannot bear to recognize as the story of his life. Felicia narrowly escapes the fate that befell Mr. Hilditch’s earlier “friends,” but though she survives, she is broken by life’s hardships, not saved from them. The grimness of the story is relieved by the humanity with which it is told, a style that won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award in 1996.
Bibliography
MacKenna, Dolores. William Trevor: The Writer and His Work. Dublin: New Island, 1999.
Schirmer, Gregory A. William Trevor: A Study of His Fiction. New York: Routledge, 1990.
Categories: British Literature, Literature, Mystery Fiction, Novel Analysis, Psychological Novels
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