[In the following review of Felicia's Journey, McGrath praises Trevor's ability to create memorable characters and a satisfying resolution to a dramatic story.]

William Trevor is an Irishman who lives in England and writes often about the English. He is a moral realist who possesses a deliciously dry wit, a nice sense of the macabre and a warm sympathy for the flawed and suffering characters he creates with such fine psychological precision. There is a conviction implicit in all his work that people divide into predators and prey, that the human condition is marked by secrecy, shame, deceit, blindness and cruelty, and that evil not only exists but also can be understood, and can even be vanquished by unpredictable eruptions of grace.

Human sexuality, with all its vagaries, is one of Mr. Trevor's preoccupations, as is the victimization of the weak. In his new novel, Felicia's Journey, which won the 1994 Sunday Express Book of the Year Award in Britain, he plays a deceptively simple variation on these themes. In the process he creates a subtle, plausible and infinitely pathetic portrait of a monster.

Felicia's Journey is about an unmarried Irish girl, adrift and friendless in the industrial English Midlands. Felicia has crossed the Irish Sea to search for the young man who made her pregnant before he disappeared. If ever there was a soul at risk, it is Felicia's. With her possessions stuffed into two shopping bags and her heart filled with naive confidence in the empty promises of the rogue who seduced her, she presents an enticing prospect both for those who would save her and those who would destroy her.

With every passing day her tiny store of money diminishes, and the fetus grows in her womb. She trudges about a landscape of grim industrial parks, knowing only that the man she loves works in the storeroom of a lawn mower factory. As her hopes die, she becomes increasingly vulnerable. She is a weakling, limping lamely behind the herd; it must be only a matter of time before some hungry creature picks her off.

Enter Mr. Hilditch. William Trevor is unsurpassed at creating such characters. Mr. Hilditch is a large, genial, unmarried, middle-aged man who thinks and talks in platitudes and takes great satisfaction in his job as catering manager of a factory. His special pride is the canteen, with its hot meals and puddings for the workers. Mr. Hilditch is the type who spends his Sunday afternoons visiting stately homes and engaging strangers in the sort of mindless chat the English are so good at. He is, it appears, a man of stultifying banality, respectability and mediocrity.

What tips us off to the existence of concealed depths in his psyche—and the possibility of something rather unwholesome going on down there—is his eating. Mr. Hilditch eats constantly. He is very fat as a result. Powerful and massive energies are being sublimated.

So it is with no little alarm that we watch this enormous man begin to focus his attention on the hapless and miserable Felicia. Mr. Hilditch has obviously done this sort of thing before, since he doesn't try to befriend the girl; he is much too cautious to risk frightening her off. Instead he allows her to glimpse the possibility that he might help her, and then, secure in the knowledge that sooner or later she will come to him, he waits. Never did spider more hungrily anticipate fly.

By this stage, the reader is utterly engaged in Felicia's plight and feels frantic but helpless, wanting to cry out to the young woman not to go near this man—to go home, to go anywhere, to flee him. But of course, Felicia does not know the danger she is in. And curiously, neither do we, precisely. For although Mr. Trevor has skillfully persuaded us to believe that Mr. Hilditch is a monster who intends to do Felicia serious harm, he has not been at all specific.

This, in part, is what makes Felicia's Journey such a good read: its vague, tantalizing suggestion of unspeakably evil acts being hatched in the black, foul-smelling cellars of Mr. Hilditch's mind and the pleasurable frustration aroused by the fact that we cannot know, at least not yet, the form these horrors will take.

But were the novel merely an account of Felicia's struggle to avoid the clutches of a man who means to hurt her. it would not sustain such interest. The contest would be ill matched, and Mr. Hilditch would too easily overwhelm his prey. Felicia needs a friend, an ally, if she is to put up a fight and escape being devoured—and she gets one. This ally takes the improbable form of the improbably named Miss Calligary, a black woman who goes door to door with her Bible, spreading news of the "paradise earth" and the wonderful future in store for "the one who dies."

In his fiction Mr. Trevor has always displayed an amused and somewhat ambivalent attitude toward priests and vicars and others of God's representatives on earth. Miss Calligary and her companions at the Gathering House are no exception. Like Mr. Hilditch, they want to lay hold of Felicia and gather her in. With their appearance, therefore, the drama begins to take on the classic outline of a battle for a soul, waged between the forces of good and evil. It's in his human fleshing of these conflicting forces, in his bestowal of these awesome roles to as unlikely a pair as Mr. Hilditch and Miss Calligary, that Mr. Trevor shows just how wise and wry and funny and morally astute an observer of the human comedy he is. Yet despite the absurdity of the antagonists, we never lose sight of the fact that the stakes they are fighting for could not be higher. Felicia is the prize.

At this point Mr. Trevor does something unexpected, and the story becomes much richer than a mere moral chess game, with Felicia as the white queen. Part of the great charm and pleasure of the book is the way it changes form, shaping up at the outset as a Gothic drama in which the uncertain nature of the monster—or, rather, of his projected acts—seems central, then turning into a sort of passion play, with angels squaring off against a demon, before finally settling to explore its true theme. This is the depiction of a severe and terrible personality disorder, and the question of whether one so afflicted might find, if not redemption, at least a scrap of saving grace.

Mr. Trevor does answer this difficult question, and his answer is suitably complicated and dramatic. For this is a story in which not only innocence and aggression are pitted against each other, but also terror and a sort of hope. There is much darkness here, but it is not unrelieved; nor do these characters and the bizarre string of events that entangles them strain credulity for a moment. Rather the reverse. They are frighteningly real.

The resolution the novel arrives at, the answer to its central question, is deeply right and satisfying. Felicia's Journey confirms the maxim that to understand all is to forgive all, and it demonstrates as well that in hands like Mr. Trevor's, fiction is a tool without equal for creating such understanding.