[In the following review, Bowman argues that despite Trevor's romantic depiction of the homeless, Felicia's Journey is well written.]

In Britain, William Trevor's 13th novel and 21st book of fiction won the Sunday Express "Book of the Year" award and the Whitbread Prize. Now published in the U.S., Felicia's Journey should be taken as stating a most persuasive case on behalf of its 67-year-old Irish author, who has long lived in England but continues to write about both his native and his adoptive countries, as one of the two or three best living writers of fiction in English. If you haven't read him yet, you should read him now.

The Felicia of the tale is an Irish girl of 18 who lives with her father and three brothers. She shares a room with and looks after a centenarian great-grandmother widowed in the Easter rising of 1916. Unemployed and not remarkably bright or pretty, she is seduced by a young man called Johnny Lysaght who soon after goes off to England without leaving an address. Her Irish patriot father thinks he has joined the British army, but she believes his story that he works in a lawnmower factory in the Midlands. Learning she is pregnant, she leaves home to seek him there without telling anyone. Mr. Hilditch, the fat, middle-aged bachelor who is the catering manager in the first factory she tries, offers to help her, and it soon emerges that Felicia has more to worry about than being seduced and abandoned.

That Hilditch is an improbable monster emerges only very gradually during the course of this improbable thriller. For the most part his twisted psychopathology is invisible, and, absent the Grand Guignol accoutrements of the Hollywood serial killer, he becomes a study in the banality of evil. To Felicia he "isn't a man you can be alarmed about for long" because he is so reassuringly bland and ordinary—albeit with a kind of ordinariness that is new to her, on her first trip out of Ireland. She finds the mind-numbing cliches of the lower-middle class English demotic, for which Trevor has an incomparable ear, fresh and comforting, as he tells her about himself:

"I've had a regimental career myself. The army's in my blood, as you might say."

"You're not in the army now?"

"I came out when Ada was first ailing. She needed care, more care than I could give, having regimental duties. No, I still help the regiment out, but it's office stuff now."

"At the factory where I met you—"

"Oh, no, no. No, not at all. I happened to call in there to see a friend. Well, as a matter of fact, to tell him Ada was going into hospital. People like to know a thing like that. No, I keep things straight for the regiment on the bookkeeping side now. Gets me out of the house, Ada says."

Again Felicia nods.

"You'd stagnate if you didn't, Felicia. You'd stagnate in a big house, caring for an invalid wife, nursing really."

"Your wife's an invalid?"

"Best to think of Ada as that. Best for Ada, she says herself, best for me. It's what it amounts to, as a matter of honest fact, no good denying it, no good pulling the wool. You follow me, Felicia?"

"Yes, I do."

"If you face the facts you can take them in your stride. I had a sergeant-major under me said that, top-class man. You meet all sorts in a regimental career."

Everything here is a lie—Ada, the invalid wife, the nursing, the hospital, the regimental career, the friend at the factory, the sergeant-major. But somehow it is rendered retrospectively plausible by leading up to that humbly respectable moral resolve to "face the facts." That is how Trevor's characteristic irony works. When, later, Hilditch squeezes out a few tears for the imaginary death of the imaginary wife, Felicia is ashamed for being mistrustful of him. "No one else had been so concerned" for her plight, she reflects. And with a jolt we realize that she is right.

It takes a writer with the highest gifts to do things like that. Or delicately to anatomize Felicia's reminiscence of Johnny and her feeling of

a call to account for the happiness she had so recklessly indulged in. "Don't worry about that side of things," he had reassured her once, as they hurried through the Mandeville woods. "All that's taken care of by myself." Her face went red when he said it, but she was glad he had. "There's nothing wrong in it," he murmured, saying more, "nothing wrong in it when two people love one another." Yet the night she wrote the letter she felt that maybe, after all, there had been: the old-fashioned sin you had to confess if you went to Confession; the sin of being greedy, the sin of not being patient. And why should she have supposed that the happiness his love had given her was her due, and free?

That is magical writing. The direct quotation breaks off after Johnny is remembered to have said "There's nothing wrong in it" and the prose itself takes on the shyness of the girl as it pauses a moment ("saying more") before it can proceed to the hugely significant use of the word "love." We know at once that this is the only time the boy used it. Felicia's preoccupation with the past gives her something in common with her ga-ga great granny who lives, as Philip Larkin puts it, "not here and now but where all happened once." It helps her go on believing that "only being together, only their love, can bring redemption."

The novel can be read as an account of competing romanticisms. Besides Felicia's mooning over the worthless Johnny, there is her father's romance of the Irish revolution and the part in it taken by the now helpless old lady in her unimaginably remote girlhood. "Not much older than yourself she was," he tells Felicia, "when the lads went off, knowing the color of their duty. Three days later and she's a widow. She wasn't married a month and he was gone. Don't talk to me of some back-street romance, girl." Mr. Hilditch, too, is a romantic who listens to the love songs of the Forties and Fifties on his gramophone of an evening. His everyday sentimentalism is capable of appalling acts at the same time that it inspires trust in victims like Felicia: victims who now inhabit in his mind a macabre "Memory Lane."

The only flaw in this subtlest and most beautifully written of thrillers is that Trevor has his own streak of romanticism—particularly about the street people whose lives Felicia drops into and out of again. It seems to me a weakness in the book, a stretch to ask us to accept that Felicia, without the following wind of drugs, alcohol, or disease, should have made such haste to join those so without resources of intelligence or industry as to have identified themselves (at ages well in advance of hers) as life's big losers. They make a convenient symbolic association for poor Felicia, but they do not ring true, except as very temporary companions when she is at her lowest and unluckiest.

Perhaps their purpose is to prevent the novel from committing itself too completely to the slow but inexorable working out of a species of divine retribution for the sins of Mr. Hilditch. With typically well-judged irony, Trevor shows him maddened by the continued importunities of the "God-botherers" among whom Felicia briefly sojourns—though it is only in his guilty imaginings that they have any ulterior motive beyond converting him to their weird cult, the Gatherers. As a tale of justice it would otherwise be too neat for modern tastes. But William Trevor is too good a writer not to make it a tale of justice as well as a compassionate, melancholy meditation on human wretchedness and the dark places in the heart.