It won the Whitbread Prize, one of the highest awards for British fiction, in the year of its publication. It has also been adapted into a film of the same name. The novel begins shortly after Felicia is abandoned by her boyfriend, Johnny Lysaght. This is where the story gets interesting and very un-Trevor-like. The overweight man runs a factory cafeteria. He lives in the same house he grew up in, all alone since his mother died years ago.
He is friendless and when he has a day off he sits at home with tea and toast listening to old 78 rpm records. Why is he offering to pay for her abortion? But that was different because he said it to all the girls going by, trying to get them to come close to him. And he was blind in any case. Photo of an Irish village from Shutterstock View all 17 comments. Nov 05, Violet wells rated it really liked it. The lower your self-esteem the more prone you are to believing the lies you tell yourself, the more prone you are to ignoring factual realities.
Sometimes these lies become the guiding principle, in lieu of mounting contrary evidence, of how you see yourself and what you do. This is my second Trevor book and both have been studies in the art of self-deception and its eventual irrevocable sculpting of identity. Perhaps the first thing to say is that this was one of the creepiest books I've ever r The lower your self-esteem the more prone you are to believing the lies you tell yourself, the more prone you are to ignoring factual realities.
Perhaps the first thing to say is that this was one of the creepiest books I've ever read. A literary author entering the realms of more commercial sensationalist subject matter and on the whole doing an impressive job. Felicia has a fling with a boy who is visiting his mother in Ireland.
He soon returns to England where he tells her he works in a factory. Rumour though has it he's in the British army which would make him a pariah for Felicia's Catholic family and most of the town. Felicia discovers she's pregnant, convinces herself he loves her, steals some family money and sneaks off to England to find him, despite having no address.
Here she meets Mr Hilditch, an overweight bachelor locked into a regimented routine of banality, ostensibly the personification of middle class respectability. Except, by artful degrees, we are initiated into his warped secret life.
To my mind with every truly great the book the ending is inevitable when it arrives. With this book there's a point where there are several possible endings - any of which might have been equally possible. I think when this is the case, when a narrative doesn't possess a gathering unifying tidal force, it's often an indication that the author doesn't have full mastery over his material.
And I think this is why the book's ending felt distinctly flat. Though from a psychological point of view Hilditch was admirably convincing and compelling Trevor never quite convinced me he knew the methods of Hilditch's madness which ultimately made of him more idea than plausible living reality. One thing all my favourite writers who write in English have in common is I can recognise them in isolated sentences so distinctive is their prose style. This could never be the case with Trevor whose lyrical style is much more textbook than distinctive.
That said, I've reached the age when I've read just about everything by my favourite authors and need new authors and he's without question an immensely engaging Serie B writer. View all 12 comments. Oct 09, Robin rated it really liked it Shelves: literary-fiction , library , , irish.
My journey with Mr. William Trevor has led me on quite a winding road. With Felicia's Journey I hoped to return to the initial ecstasy I'd experienced, and instead found a truly mixed bag.
This novel, though a brief pages, is not a quick read. Its style is dense, rather formal, and has a certain remove, similar to Lucy Gault. It took a while to get into the book, and a certain effort to st My journey with Mr. It took a while to get into the book, and a certain effort to stay there.
The main gist of the story: a young Irish girl still living at home becomes pregnant by a boy who goes to England without giving her a forwarding address. She has very limited information about his whereabouts but she bravely leaves her small village to find him.
She doesn't have much luck, and then she runs into Mr. Hilditch, an enormous man who works as a catering manager, and who takes an unhealthy interest in "helping" poor Felicia. Cue the best part of the book.
Hilditch's character instantly brought to mind the villain in John Fowle's remarkable novel The Collector , though Hilditch is Trevor's own unique, twisted creation.
This part of the book comes alive. Suddenly, I realize, hey, I'm reading a fine work of psychological suspense. I'm excited, thinking, oh this is the stuff, here we go. And we DO go, and it's just as cinematic and utterly creepy and believable as I hoped it would be, and I don't want to put the book down. What will Mr. Hilditch do next, after he consumes a pork pie and a pineapple cake and a big jug of warmed condensed milk and two KitKat bars? I'm all in. And then That same type of unbelievable, I-had-to-make-it-literary bullshit ending reminiscent of what I experienced in Lucy Gault.
A wholly unsatisfying aftertaste to something that had gathered so much momentum. I don't know what it is with Trevor. He has to make sure everyone is as miserable as possible by the end of his books. He goes out of his way, so far that I just don't buy it. I feel like he's slathering me in defeatism. It's annoying, because he's so brilliant. I mean, he's such a great writer, despite my complaints.
The economy of pages but the deep riches therein, is something I can only admire. I love the way he structures the telling of his stories - beautifully layered and highly crafted. And in this book in particular, the portrayal of the plight of a pregnant, unmarried woman from a Catholic family is brutal and accusing.
So, let's end on a positive note. I think I'll give Trevor a rest, just for the time being. The journey has been well worth the effort, but my feet are aching. View all 34 comments. Her mourning is to wonder. In England, without knowing the whereabouts of the man and all by herself, she falls prey to one Mr.
Hilditch, a middle-aged predator with a dark past who maintains a respectable social profile. This, then, becomes the story of her loss and s Her mourning is to wonder. This, then, becomes the story of her loss and survival. But we have heard all that before. Many times over. The writing is good at times, lyrical and evocative, brooding and haunting, but for the most part very ordinary and run-of-the-mill.
The character of Felicia is underdeveloped. Nothing more can be said of her. Hilditch, who, however, is more carefully drawn and passably credible. He is a conniving, deceiving, manipulative man with a stable job but lives a lonely and loveless life.
He has a history of preying on the emotionally and financially distressed vulnerable young women. Felicia becomes his undoing but the train of events that unravels him does not seem quite plausible to me.
The narrative follows a linear stream with plentiful flashbacks to contextualise their lives and reveal the backstories of both characters. These later revelations of important details skew the reading experience of the earlier two-third of the novel. I have a number of other quibbles with the authorial choices. There is too much info dump of names and places, brands and businesses etc with no real bearing on what's being told, which hinders the smooth reading of the story.
For instance, early on, fifteen characters plus five extra names are introduced in less than two pages. Only two or three of them are used again in a few inconsequential situations which could easily have been dispensed with. And of places, I do not want to know the names of so many businesses establishments on so many streets just to locate a setting where they dine or meet once or twice, and whose location is absolutely unnecessary anyway to what came before and what is to come after.
This kind of detailed geographical mapping and name-naming has its uses but not in the story under question. You read a couple of paragraphs full of pronouns to find out what it is that's being talked about. All things considered, it is possible to appreciate this novel for the nature of its topic. It is essentially a sad story of a broken-hearted young girl who finds no redemption and is lost to the vagaries of fate. You would shed a tear or two at Fecilia's fate as you turn the last page.
No wonder the book is so popular. November ' View all 7 comments. Aug 18, Michael rated it really liked it.
Deliberate, precise, and suffused with dread, this novel explores the lies we all tell ourselves and each other, and how much we're willing to do in the name of our shabby little fantasies. This is my final book from the Mookse Madness list, and is perhaps the most difficult of them to assess and review there are 64 books on the list, but I had read 43 of them before it was announced.
As always Trevor's prose is immaculate, and he shows great empathy for his characters while subjecting them to hideous torments. Initially the story appears to be that of Felicia, an innocent year old Irish girl who becomes pregnant by Johnny Lysaght, a slightly older man who works in England and This is my final book from the Mookse Madness list, and is perhaps the most difficult of them to assess and review there are 64 books on the list, but I had read 43 of them before it was announced.
Initially the story appears to be that of Felicia, an innocent year old Irish girl who becomes pregnant by Johnny Lysaght, a slightly older man who works in England and has told her he works in a lawn-mower factory though her father tells her he is in the British army. Felicia's attempts to contact him fail, and she steals some money from her family to enable her to travel to England to search for him, taking just a couple of plastic bags of belongings.
Her searches soon prove fruitless. Next we are introduced to Hilditch, a lonely middle-aged man who works as a catering manager for a factory. He initially appears to befriend and help Felicia, tells her he has a wife who is seriously ill in hospital and provides a few leads for her search for Johnny, but it soon becomes clear that he is not telling her all he knows.
A lighter subplot concerns a crackpot religious sect who go round door to door pushing their message - one of these also befriends Felicia.
The denouement starts when Felicia discovers that most of her money has disappeared. I can't describe how I feel about this without resorting to spoilers, so please do not read on if you intend to read this book soon! About two thirds of the way through there is a dramatic scene in which Felicia asks Hilditch for money to return home, he suggests a late night drive and she rightly suspects his true motive is to dispose of her, so she tries to escape.
We then move to Hilditch's perspective, and the next few chapters describe his further mental disintegration as he is unable to remember what happened to Felicia - we are led to believe that he has murdered her as he has dealt with the several other lonely troubled girls he has befriended, a torment which eventually leads him to suicide.
He is harassed by the religious group, who know that the missing Felicia mentioned him, and he eventually admits to having taken her money. But in the final chapter we discover that Felicia escaped to a vagrant life in another city, so there is a tentative note of redemption. This is a brilliantly executed character study, Hilditch is a chillingly macabre but very human creation, but it is a very bleak book and a deeply uneasy one to read, and it left me with serious reservations about Trevor's motivation to write it and his intentions.
View all 6 comments. Sep 19, Julie added it Shelves: 20th-century , ireland. When all the pages had settled on the lawn and been re-gathered by their respective authors, each walked away with a bundled manuscript, not realizing that their pages had become enmeshed in each other's work.
Result: William Trevor, story-teller extraordinaire! What a wondrous web he weaves! While channelling Munro's obsessive attention to domestic and mundane detail, and capturing King's ability to make your skin crawl on even a sunny Sunday morning, Trevor delivers a captivating portrait of the life of a diseased mind who spins his web to ensnare a lonely, lost and heart-sick young woman.
I was not prepared for how this novel unravelled: I imagined something more sedate, more conventional heartbreak than the kind that was to come. What made it more disconcerting was the way the trail crept up on the reader, much like the protagonist crept up on Felicia: the slow, insidious seduction-that-was-not-a-seduction. View all 11 comments. Nov 08, K. Shelves: , core , drama. One of the few modern fictions that I liked despite having not a single character I could relate to.
Two reasons: 1 the writing is unique. Start earning points for buying books! Uplift Native American Stories. Share: Share on Facebook. Add to Cart. Observation and, again, imagination. Trevor never describes what has happened to Mr. What effect does this have on the story? What does this lack of information reveal about Hilditch himself? What effect does the ending have? Would Felicia have been better off staying in Ireland? Why does she seem to accept her final fate so readily? Both Hilditch and Felicia are haunted by memories of their mothers.
How are both mothers portrayed in the novel? How is each character controlled by these memories? What is the significance of music in the novel? What does the music Hilditch listens to reveal about him? What does the Spa represent? What impression of Johnny Lysaght do we have?
How does Trevor portray him? Is Felicia truly an innocent at the end of the novel, or has she gained a deeper understanding of the hand that fate has dealt her? Related Books and Guides. England, England. Julian Barnes. He has nothing good to say about Felicia's condition either, so, feeling ashamed, she leaves Ireland to go find Johnny.
Click here to see the rest of this review. The young man is supposedly working in Birmingham. She crosses the Irish Sea, and arrives in the Midlands in search of him. She never finds him, but we do find out that, as Felicia's father suspected, he has joined the English army.
We have a strong suspicion that whatever he's been up to, he's essentially disappeared from Felicia's life and so her quest seems hopeless almost from the start. When she arrives, instead of finding Johnny, she meets Joseph Ambrose Hilditch who is a catering manager at one of the local factories. He is the second main character in the book, and arguably, he is THE main character, and Felicia is actually secondary to the unpleasant struggles that are happening within Hilditch's mind.
However, Felicia will remain the focus of the reader's sympathy, especially as the reader becomes aware of the sinister aspects of the man's personality.
0コメント