Rachel Joyce’s first novel — about a retired Englishman shuffling off to visit a dying colleague — sounds twee, but it’s surprisingly steely, even inspiring, the kind of quirky book you want to shepherd into just the right hands. If your friends don’t like it, you may have to stop returning their calls for a little while until you can bring yourself to forgive them.
The loyalty inspired by this unassuming story is surprising. Joyce was an actress for 20 years before she started writing plays for BBC Radio, but “The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry” is not a story of much drama. It begins on a spring day like any other in a small English village in Kingsbridge. Harold recently retired from the local brewery, and now has nothing to do. “He never did the unexpected,” Joyce writes. “Days went by and nothing changed; only his waist thickened, and he lost more hair.” Worse, after 47 years of marriage, he and his wife, Maureen, live like strangers in their spotless home, where the air is thick with blame. Their once-promising son never calls, never visits.
(Random House) - “The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry” by Rachel Joyce.
That grim stillness is disrupted on the opening page with the arrival of a “letter that would change everything.” Queenie Hennessy, a woman Harold worked with 20 years ago, has written to say goodbye; she’s dying of cancer. Recalling the “stout, plain-looking woman,” he composes a bland note of condolence and walks over to the post office. But along the way, he decides instead to deliver it by hand to Queenie’s hospice. That is, he decides to keep walking, past the post office, out of town and another 500 miles.
That marvelous note of absurdity tempers the pain that runs beneath this whole novel. Joyce has no interest in mocking Harold; she just describes his quixotic trek in a gentle, matter-of-fact voice, mile after mile. At 65, he’s never walked farther than his own driveway. He has no map, cellphone or change of clothes, and his thin yachting shoes couldn’t be less appropriate for such a journey across England. “Harold would have been the first to admit that there were elements to his plan that were not finely tuned,” Joyce writes. But when the idea of saving Queenie blooms in the fallow soil of his mind, he can’t be stopped. “I will keep walking,” he declares, “and she must keep living.”
Is this a late midlife crisis? Is Harold suffering the early symptoms of Alzheimer’s, or has he fallen under a spiritual delusion? Shouldn’t someone drive down the street and fetch him home before he hurts himself?
No.
For all of us perfectly responsible, stoop-shouldered suburbanites wearing a path in the living-room carpet, Harold’s ridiculous journey is a cause for celebration. This is Walter Mitty skydiving. This is J. Alfred Prufrock not just eating that peach, but throwing the pit out the window, rolling up his trousers and whistling to those hot mermaids. Released from the cage of his own passivity, Harold feels transformed, though he keeps his tie on. “The abundance of new life was enough to make him giddy,” Joyce writes. “England opened beneath his feet, and the feeling of freedom, of pushing into the unknown, was so exhilarating he had to smile. He was in the world by himself and nothing could get in the way or ask him to mow the lawn.”
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