Hilditch is 'mistily aware that something may be missing', that is all. There are no Independent Premium comments yet - be the first to add your thoughts Please “Felicia’s Journey is packed with extraordinary passages.” —Time “A battle for the soul, waged between the forces of good and evil . BOOK REVIEW / Fear of a serial consumer: 'Felicia's Journey - William Trevor: Viking, 15 poundsEmail already exists. try again, the name must be uniquePlease


Whereas in his best work, The News from Ireland or The Silence in the Garden, the core of private grief has other, deeper cultural resonances, there's something constricted about this almost surgical exercise in pathology. McBride addresses Hitchcockian influences, the sense of place in the visual discourse, and the characterization of the serial killer Hilditch, as constructed initially by Trevor and interpreted by Egoyan. Log in to update your newsletter preferencesPlease His first novel, A Standard of Behaviour, was published in 1958. Our journalists will try to respond by joining the threads when We learn of a series of previous involvements with other rootless young women who have mysteriously disappeared. {{#sender.isSelf}}
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Issues addressed include Hitchcockian influences, the sense of place in the visual discourse, and the characterization of the serial killer Hilditch, as constructed initially by Trevor and interpreted by Egoyan. Set mostly in the English Midlands, Felicia’s Journey (1994), a novel by British author William Trevor, concerns an eighteen-year-old Irish girl, Felicia, who searches the Midlands for her unborn baby’s father.During her search, she stumbles into the path of a notorious serial killer, Joseph Hilditch, who preys on wandering young women. Please

Please The provincial realism which is Trevor's speciality founders, as Felicia does, among the brand names and post-industrial landscapes of the English Midlands.After the reflections on reading and writing in Trevor's Two Lives, the reader is left to ponder the disquieting analogy between Mr Hilditch, voyeuristically relishing each 'excursion' into the 'background' of his doomed girls' lives, and the novelist whose fiction revolves around a series of haunting portraits of unhappy, singular women who hug the unique colours of their sadness as if it were the essence of their identity.Enter your email to follow new comments on this article.Are you sure you want to mark this comment as inappropriate?Want to discuss real-world problems, be involved in the most engaging discussions and hear from the journalists? try again, the name must be unique IN HIS new novel, William Trevor contrives to amalgamate two familiar brands of newspaper story in one chillingly crafted thriller. Like Hitchcock, Atom Egoyan envisions family life as a potential hotbed of literal or figurative violence and incest. His other novels include Other People's Worlds, Nights at the Alexandra, The Silence in the Garden, The Story of Lucy Gault, My House in Umbria, and Love and Summer. Start your Independent Premium subscription today.Are you sure you want to mark this comment as inappropriate?Independent Premium Comments can be posted by members of our membership scheme, Independent Premium. Start your Independent Premium subscription today. This time it's less a question of reading Turgenev than the tabloid press, not the fading and faded news from Ireland but the latest from England.When the unhappily named Felicia, a young Catholic girl from the small-town Ireland of Trevor's memory, leaves home in search of her lover who has left no address, her romantic quest turns into a hideous initiation. Alone in his mother's house, he nurses a grievance about being turned down by the army, and in between consuming Fray Bentos pies, KitKats, raspberry creams and trifles, he is haunted by 'little floating snapshots of Elsie and Beth and the others'.

real-world solutions, and more. If it horrifies, it is because the violence of Hilditch the serial killer is so completely swallowed up in the blandness of Hilditch the serial consumer.