Felicia's Journey.

William Trevor is an eminent British writer, claimed--very properly--by the British literary establishment; winner of many of the most prestigious British literary awards. But importantly, Trevor is not British, but Irish--he was born in County Cork in 1928, brought up in provincial Ireland, and educated at Trinity College, Dublin. He is a member of the Irish Academy of Letters. He is a very Irish writer.

I simplify--there are, of course, many kinds of Irish writers. Ireland has produced some of the finest English prose writings and it would be ridiculous to try and claim that they all shared some profound Celtic singleness of style or intention. Nonetheless there is a strain in contemporary British writing which can fairly be called "Irish" and Trevor belongs in that tradition. It is above all a strain of an intense, lyrical emotion--a determination to make the reader feel; be moved by mundanity, by careful concentration on the little details of daily life.

Trevor is the most wonderful writer: the experience of actually being in the act of reading Felicia's Journey is extraordinary. "Page-turning" usually applies to plot but that is not what kept me utterly inside this novel--it was something about having to pay attention. Felicia's Journey is both demanding and exhilarating, frequently almost unbearable; sometimes even, the more intellectual part of this reader at least wanted to resist so blatant an attempt to have her heart wrung. It is more like the experience of reading poetry or the works of certain spiritual writers--a profound emotional engagement, coupled by a driving sense that something extremely important is going on.

Is that not enough? In the light of such a literary experience it may be unreasonable to mention that after you have staggered out from under this enchantment you may find yourself wondering whether it was all worth it.

Felicia's Journey is a novel about innocence. Felicia is, in the old-fashioned sense of the word, "simple." Pregnant, motherless, she leaves her small, dead-end Irish town in search of the father of her child who she faithfully believes loves her and has failed to learn of her plight only through the evil machinations of his mother. She has no address and rather inadequate clues. Her doomed journey takes her through the once industrial and now decayed heartland of northern England, where pathetic people live broken lives.

Trevor has the ability to present these lives without any tone of superiority--he neither minimizes nor sentimentalizes the individual brokenness, the structural despair and the darkness that both breed. But even here, he argues with passion, even at the extremes of human experience there is sweetness, there is kindness, generosity, and--by implication at least--grace.

Felicia comes from a background of harsh but clear values; formed and shaped by the heroic violence of Ireland. Her father's pride in his bedridden grandmother--the wife of a dead activist of the Easter Rising--strips Felicia of the ease of normal youth. Her father half-hopes her unemployment and consequent narrowness of aspiration will continue so that the old lady can be cared for properly. He hates his daughter's lover, not so much because of his morality but because of a rumor, neither denied nor proven by the story, that the man has joined the British army. Felicia's consciousness is filled with a mixture of a longing for love and life--but a life within the structures of this society--and a strange assortment of Catholic religious images.

She is thus totally ill-equipped to confront or even manage the destabilized, fragmented social reality in which she finds herself in England. The contrast here is finely managed: neither the rigidity of her Irish hometown community nor the complete loss of community, the sense that people can and do disappear forever in the wastelands, are offered to the reader as good, merely as different, contrasting sorrows. Nonetheless, everyone Felicia encounters has an agenda of manipulation and madness, while she is "pure" in her quest and in her heart.

Inevitably she enters hell, not a hell of her own making, but a hell provoked by her own simplicity (or, one might think, though Trevor would not say so, her stupidity). It is impossiblel to desclibe the harrowing--in all senses--of this hell without giving away the plot; and as Trevor almost manages not to do so himself (the unfolding is elliptical and mysterious and known only to the insane and the deluded), it would be mean of me to do so. But at the heart of the novel is a genuine darkness, a man so truly dreadful that one is moved weirdly to compassion for him. Trevor, with a moral integrity that is quite extraordinary, manages to explain this terror without ever "explaining it away" or minimizing or excusing. It is still ghastly, yet it is not beyond compassion, beyond our recognition of the cruelty of chance, the arbitrary nature of evil.

By the end of the novel "a terrible beauty is born." Felicia has become a street person, and has found there a calm, an almost joyful serenity and acceptance of herself and of her life. Felicia's fate, or redemption, if it is a redemption, if she needed redeeming, is so profoundly unacceptable that it is deeply disturbing, moving, touching. Disturbed, moved, touched, I still wanted to protest: to protest at Trevor's apparent acceptance that this is good enough--good enough for Felicia, good enough for any young innocent person. By claiming, through the mystery-weighted intensity of the prose, that there is a deep spiritual truth here, Trevor forces himself into a corner--a solution that might just be good enough for the individual he has described, has become a universal proclamation. Political busy--bodies like me have to protest at the magical loveliness of the end. I cannot believe it. I cannot believe that the "lost" in this sense--those lost without consent, through evil and the indifference of society--are or should be contented; or that we, in the comfort of our literary sensibilities, should be allowed to find this place of desolation so beautiful.

Felicia is as a lamb to the slaughter. This may be true, it may be how the lives of too many innocent and not very bright women are, but it should not be held up as beautiful and lovely.

Trevor makes it beautiful. As reader I cannot but admire this. As moralist I must protest. Which frame of reference should I bring to such a novel? To this novel, which forces the question more powerfully than anything I have read in a long time?