William Trevor has built a reputation in the past 30 years as a superb novelist and short-story writer in the traditional narrative mode. He is a craftsman who shuns the sensational. Instead, he elevates the ordinary lives of real people to precious significance.
His novels "Nights at the Alexandra" and "The Silence in the Garden" take a small canvas and detail it to precision. In his latest novel, Mr. Trevor creates a fable that uses elements of suspense and intrigue. The result is a complete success.
The plot works like this: The time is the present (unlike most of Mr. Trevor's other work). Felicia is a 22-year-old woman who has just lost her job at the meat factory in her Irish hometown because the factory closed down. Johnny Lysaght, a local boy who lives in England but comes home occasionally to visit his mother, catches her fancy, and Felicia becomes pregnant. Johnny was her first lover, and she is certain that if he knew, they would settle down and live happily ever after.
The problem is that no one will help Felicia. Johnny's mother won't give Felicia the address of her son in England and destroys the letter Felicia gives her to post. Felicia's father calls his daughter a whore and claims that Johnny is not a manufacturing worker at a lawn-mower plant, as Johnny claimed, but really a soldier in the British Army. Felicia will not accept that her Johnny is such a traitor.
Time is relentless. Felicia's pregnancy demands that she do something. So she takes some money from the old woman for whom she has been caring and leaves town in search of her Johnny.
Felicia proceeds on blind faith. But blind faith is not enough.
Enter Joseph Ambrose Hilditch, named by his mother for a character in a romance novel. The character was a news reader on the 6 o'clock news, but he led a double life as a cat burglar. " 'Really caught my fancy,' she [Hilditch's mother] said." Hilditch's other known ancestor was a British Army officer who served with the Black and Tans against the Irish in the Easter Rebellion.
After Hilditch's mother dies, he hangs pictures of anonymous people on the walls. People are all anonymous to Hilditch. He views them as "types" and never as individuals. In his job as catering manager, he views people and pastries as equally real. Like his namesake, he appears to be a banal picture of middle-class respectability. The operative word is "appears."
Hilditch is anything but ordinary. He is, in fact, a pathological killer who befriends lonely women before killing them. Unfortunately for Felicia, she is taken in by him. The action and reaction involving this relationship are the driving forces of this page-turner.
Like the plot, the arrangement of themes is masterful. The interplay of the characters in the small picture reinforces the larger political view of the British as lurking despoilers of the innocent Irish.
As in Mr. Trevor's best-known novel, "Fools of Fortune," fate plays an important role. Fate is both abstract and concrete, as represented by a brigade of the Salvation Army. The contrast to the Black and Tan couldn't be more striking. How does evil interact with innocence? Is chance merely spontaneity directed to some end? These are the cerebral themes that undergird this suspenseful plot.
"Felicia's Journey" ranks among Mr. Trevor's very best work. This is one trip that's well worth making.
Mr. Boylan teaches at Marymount University.
BOOK REVIEW
Title: "Felicia's Journey"
Author: William Trevor
Publisher: Viking
Length, price: 213 pages, $21.95