Rachel Joyce’s ‘The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry,’ reviewed by Ron Charles
Marco Cibola for The Washington Post -
A well-worn quest
If Joyce allows Harold these initial moments of euphoria, she quickly proves herself a stern realist. Over the days and weeks that follow, the physical demands of such a trip take their bloody toll. This may be the first novel that gives you sympathy blisters. And Harold’s ravaged feet are the least of his problems. All this free time in changing surroundings inspires great waves of remembering and reconsideration — most of it miserable. How did his once-happy marriage wither into such aggrieved silence? Why was he such a timid father to the boy he loved? What drives him, after all these years to reach out to Queenie? Considering those questions is far more agonizing for Harold than walking 500 miles in his taped-up shoes.
But his pain resonates with others, too, and soon Harold finds that his strange odyssey serves a purpose beyond himself. “He understood that in walking to atone for the mistakes he had made, it was also his journey to accept the strangeness of others,” Joyce writes. “As a passerby, he was in a place where everything, not only the land, was open. People would feel free to talk, and he was free to listen.” Some of those people are even weirder than he is: “a tax inspector who was a Druid,” “a priest who confessed to tweeting during mass,” “a white witch from Glastonbury.” The most touching moments, though, are Harold’s encounters with people who need to see firsthand an act of pure, impractical hope like his.
(Random House) - “The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry” by Rachel Joyce.
Joyce experiments with Harold as a Christ figure, burdened with quarrelsome disciples who inevitably want to warp his simple trek into a set of practices and rules. Although it’s a clever bit of religious satire, I was happy to get Harold back on his solitary way. Whether he’ll succeed or not remains an open question — as does the meaning and purpose of his quest. Despite the light wit that sparkles through the early sections of the novel, Harold eventually must come face to face with horrors that would crush anyone’s faith. But what would a real pilgrimage be without a dark night of the soul?
Pilgrimages seem to have fallen out of favor in the West, though our literature began with one to Canterbury and took another giant step 300 years later with John Bunyan. Nowadays, the term sounds fusty, draped in black vestments. We’re more likely to go on a cruise than a pilgrimage; we travel to relax, not to be transformed. And yet hearing of Harold’s long walk — so simple, so impractical, so revolutionary — is a heartening reminder of just what those old pilgrims knew about the power of shaking off everything familiar and striking out for a distant place with a hallowed purpose and hopeful heart.
In 2010, I reviewed a spate of “wandering” novels — Joshua Ferris’s “The Unnamed,”Damon Galgut’s “In a Strange Room” and James Hynes’s “Next” — books about depressed men walking around wondering what it all means. They were all exquisitely written, more polished than “Harold Fry,” but I prefer Joyce’s novel, even with its detours and rough patches. For all her merciless insistence on the brutality of illness, she has a lovely sense of the possibilities of redemption. In this bravely unpretentious and unsentimental tale, she’s cleared space where miracles are still possible. When Harold’s bitter old wife realizes that “the world without him would be even more desolate,” I know just what she means.
Charles is The Washington Post’s fiction editor. You can follow him on Twitter: @RonCharles.
This commenter is a Washington Post contributor. Post contributors aren’t staff, but may write articles or columns. In some cases, contributors are sources or experts quoted in a story.
Comments our editors find particularly useful or relevant are displayed in Top Comments, as are comments by users with these badges: . Replies to those posts appear here, as well as posts by staff writers.
To pause and restart automatic updates, click "Live" or "Paused". If paused, you'll be notified of the number of additional comments that have come in.
Comments our editors find particularly useful or relevant are displayed in Top Comments, as are comments by users with these badges: . Replies to those posts appear here, as well as posts by staff writers.
.JPG)
Loading...
Comments