A review by wolfdan9
Felicia's Journey by William Trevor

4.0

  “Strange, how people are allocated a life.”

...

“Act on an impulse and you have a landscape all over you for the rest of your days.”

(spoilers ahead) Felicia's Journey is a hard book for me to pin down. It's rare in the sense that it's a literary thriller that is actually literary and actually a thriller. The blending of beautifully rendered contemplative and gentle prose with a tense narrative containing high drama like attempted rape, suicide, abortion, etc. is a challenge to find. I think of Crime and Punishment (which is obviously far superior) as a novel that accomplishes something similar by having a strong literary underpinning while presenting a plot and characters that are thrilling to read. The story is about a teenage Irish girl who falls in love with a charming boy and is impregnated by him while he's visiting home. Unbeknownst to her, he is a soldier and gives her a phony backstory before leaving home. Felicia, discovering that she has become pregnant, leaves Ireland for England in an attempt to track him down. In England, she meets Mr. Hilditch, an ostensibly saintly older man who manipulates her at every turn to cure his loneliness and make himself feel like he has a girlfriend. Hilditch, one of the most unsettling characters I've ever read, is captured with such a keen psychological insight that I don't recall reading since Humbert Humbert in Lolita. I was impressed by how Trevor captured his creepiness by dedicating chapters here and there to how he spent his days without Felicia, his yearning for any female attention or interaction and the great contrast between his inner monologue and actions out in the world. I was engrossed by his game of lying to Felicia; how easily he was always a step ahead of her and despite her instinct that something was wrong with him, how he always managed to make her feel like she was being paranoid or had no other options to turn to but him.

For such a slim novel, there is a lot to unpack. While the victimizing of Felicia by Hilditch is central to the novel, the many reflections this relationship casts create a thought-provoking experience. The "thriller" element is inherent in the plot; in one respect it's rather unrelatable -- a teenage girl leaves home pregnant to find her lover in another country and meets a master manipulator -- and this unrelatability is what makes the story exciting. But the reality of the world of Felicia's Journey is undeniable. Trevor, known for his ability to sympathetically portray the poor, destitute, and disadvantaged without a touch of sentimentality, doesn't disappoint in this novel and captures a society that is largely indifferent to the needs of the downtrodden. Felicia, who symbolizes the ultimate victim of circumstance, is sort of our guide through the world through her eyes and we learn a lot about it and how it feels about people like her (i.e., disadvantaged strangers, many of whom Felicia also meets on her journey). It seemed to me that Trevor’s message regarding society is that the world of adults is unfriendly and occupied solely with their own affairs. Sure, Felicia meets a few kind strangers, but very few offer her any meaningful help. There’s a lack of any true kindness or warmth from strangers – the strange middle-aged Hilditch and precocious Felicia are noticed together in various cafes and restaurants but nobody interferes – and those who do help her are doing so out of a sense of occupational obligation. Hilditch, who appears to be a beacon of light for her throughout the vast majority of the novel, is in actuality a predator. Her lost boyfriend, Johnny, is never directly admonished by Trevor (nor is anyone – he attempts to show the characters as they are, but in such a way that the reader draws the “right” conclusions about them) but is also a real piece of shit and one can infer that he has been cast as a more charming/handsome version of Hilditch. Interestingly, Felicia’s brothers knock him out cold and brutally beat him at the end of the novel and Hilditch’s fate also ends brutally. I did wonder if Trevor holds some notion that bad people are generally punished for their actions or a belief in karmic retribution.

Trevor’s society is one burdened by their own troubles. Whether they are the aforementioned cafe workers, or the drug addicts whom Felicia meets during a desperate escape from a fundamentalist religious group home, people are shown to be motivated by their own needs. There is a prevailing religious undercurrent throughout the novel, which I won’t spend time writing about because I’ve already almost used up my daughter’s whole nap, but it seems that Trevor scoffs a bit at the helpfulness of religion. It seems that religion is dichotomously either an asset to one’s reason for existence or an annoyance depending on which side of the fence one lands. As far as Felicia herself, her journey is a failure in almost every sense. The “process” of her journey is seeking out her manipulative lover and being manipulated once again by Hilditch for the entirety of her journey. She gains nothing – she is seeing and implicitly taking in all her surroundings but not clearly making sense of any of it (sort of like all of us moving through life?) — and loses her unborn child to an abortion that Hilditch manipulates her into receiving. She ends up homeless in London but receives some closure, learning of Hilditch’s death and seeming generally accepting of her fate. Whether or not that is any consolation for what she has been through, I’m unsure.