The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

I was given this 2012 novel by Rachel Joyce before Christmas last year, but didn't read it as I had what I thought were bigger, and more important books to be getting on with. Last Monday, while in the process of searching for something else, I came across it again and sat down to read it it. I was mesmerised and finished it in two sittings.

The phrase which sprang immediately to mind when thinking of this post was "a charming little book" but while the book in some senses "felt" like that to me, the description is inaccurate. At 330 or so pages it isn't little, and the themes it deals with are profound. But it is engaging and Rachel Joyce's genius lies in her ability to fit those profound ideas into a form which is domestic and accessible.

The novel is about Harold Fry, a man just past retirement, living in suburban blandness with his wife Maureen. One day a letter arrives informing Harold that a former workmate is terminally ill. Harold drafts a properly sympathetic note and pops out to post it. When he reaches the letter box he doesn't post his message, but carries on walking. He is possessed by the idea that walking to deliver the note by hand will somehow keep Queenie, his stricken friend, alive. Thus, dressed in a collar and tie and wearing boat shoes, he begins a walk which takes him from the southwest corner of England to the very Northeast, a journey of around 600 miles.

As he walks he encounters various people and there is a sort of Pilgrims Progressish tinge to it all, but the real journey Harold is making is an inner one. As he walks he is confronted with the incidents that have shaped his and Maureen's lives. It is a book about death, including the death of the self. It is also about love, in its various forms including some distorted ones. Rachel Joyce is grittily realistic and her picture of the Fry family's entrapment is exquisitely drawn. The main characters in the book - Harold, Maureen and their son David - are endearingly, heartbreakingly presented as are the stream of minor characters who appear and have their lives influenced by the Fry family. Her conclusion is satisfying for its realism and compassion, so that in the end this becomes a book about the transformation which comes from embracing death (resurrection if you like). It is also, ultimately, a book about the transforming power of love.

You might well be wondering why on earth I would be drawn to a book about a bloke in his 60s going for a very long walk, but it is also, of all that I have read on the subject and all I have thought, one of the best explorations of the nature of pilgrimage that I have come across. Rachel Joyce gets it exactly: the surrender to the path; the stripping away of material possessions and the inner baring which that symbolises; the inner work prompted by engagement with landscape and the relentless rhythms of the body; the deep healing which the simultaneous inner and outer journeys accomplish. I'm glad I read it and I'm glad I read it this week.

Comments

Barbara Harris said…

Yes, I loved it too.
Somehow the reader is invited to accompany Harold as he walks out of his own life and back into it
again, restored, renewed.

Bless the author and the reader

12 March 2014 at 09:26

Camino, by David Whyte

This poem captures it perfectly Camino. The way forward, the way between things, the way already walked before you, the path disappearing and re-appearing even as the ground gave way beneath you, the grief apparent only in the moment of forgetting, then the river, the mountain, the lifting song of the Sky Lark inviting you over the rain filled pass when your legs had given up, and after, it would be dusk and the half-lit villages in evening light; other people's homes glimpsed through lighted windows and inside, other people's lives; your own home you had left crowding your memory as you looked to see a child playing or a mother moving from one side of a room to another, your eyes wet with the keen cold wind of Navarre. But your loss brought you here to walk under one name and one name only, and to find the guise under which all loss can live; remember you were given that name every day along the way, remember you were greeted as such, and you neede

Kindle

Living as I do in a place where most books have to come a long way in an aeroplane, reading is an expensive addiction, and of course there is always the problem of shelf space. I have about 50 metres of shelving in my new study, but it is already full and there is not a lot of wall space left; and although it is great insulation, what is eventually going to happen to all that paper? I doubt my kids will want to fill their homes with old theological works, so most of my library is eventually going to end up as egg cartons. Ebooks are one solution to book cost and storage issues so I have been using them for a while now, but their big problem has been finding suitable hardware to read them on. I first read them on the tiny screens of Ipaqs and they were quite satisfactory but the wretchedness of Microsoft Reader and its somewhat arbitrary copyright protection system killed the experience entirely. On Palm devices they were OK except the plethora of competing and incompatible formats

Ko Tangata Tiriti Ahau

The Christmas before last our kids gave us Ancestry.com kits. You know the deal: you spit into a test tube, send it over to Ireland, and in a month or so you get a wadge of paper in the mail telling you who you are. I've never, previously, been interested in all that stuff. I knew my forbears came to Aotearoa in the 1850's from Britain but I didn't know from where, exactly. Clemency's results, as it turns out, were pretty interesting. She was born in England, but has ancestors from various European places, and some who are Ngāti Raukawa, so she can whakapapa back to a little marae called Kikopiri, near Ōtaki. And me? It turns out I'm more British than most British people. Apart from a smattering of Norse - probably the result of some Viking raid in the dim distant past - all my tūpuna seem to have come from a little group of villages in Nottinghamshire. Now I've been to the UK a few times, and I quite like it, but it's not home: my heart and soul belon

En Hakkore

In the hills up behind Ranfurly there used to be a town, Hamilton, which at one stage was home to 5,000 people. All that remains of it now is a graveyard, fenced off and baking in the lonely brown hills. Near it, in the 1930s a large Sanitorium was built for the treatment of tuberculosis and other respiratory ailments. It was a substantial complex of buildings with wards, a nurses hostel, impressive houses for the manager and superintendent and all the utility buildings needed for such a large operation. The treatment offered consisted of isolation, views and weather. Patients were exposed to the air, the tons of it which whistled past, often at great speed, the warmth of the sun and the cold. They were housed in small cubicles opening onto huge glassed verandas where they cooked in the summer and froze in the winter and often, what with the wholesome food and the exercise, got better. When advances in antibiotics rendered the Sanitorium obsolete it was turned into a Borstal and the

Return to Middle Earth

We had a flood, a couple of weeks back, and had to move all the stuff out of the spare bedroom, including the contents of two floor to ceiling book cases. Shoving the long unopened copies of Sartor Resartus and An Introduction to Byron into cartons, I came upon my copy of The Lord of the Rings . Written in the flyleaf are the dates of its many readings, the last one being when I read it aloud to Catherine, when she was about 10 or 11, well over 20 years ago. The journey across Middle Earth took Catherine and me the best part of a year, except for the evening when we followed Frodo and Sam across the last stretches of Mordor and up Mount Doom, when we simply couldn't stop, and sat up reading until 11.00 pm, on a school night. My old copy is a paperback, the same edition that every card carrying baby boomer has somewhere on their shelves. The glue has dried and hardened. The cover and many of the pages have come loose. I was overcome with the urge to read it again, but this old

Available Light

Search This Blog