I read The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry and was moved by it, soon after it was published in January 2013. It is, indeed an unlikely premise for a novel as a sad, rather lonely, 60 something man impulsively decides to walk from his home in Cornwall to visit Queenie a former work colleague in Berwick-on-Tweed because she has written to say she is dying.
I also saw, and quite liked, the 2023 film starring Jim Broadbent and Penelope Wilton although inevitably it lost some of the nuances of the novel. This week I am scheduled to review a musical version, adapted by Joyce herself, at Chichester Festival Theatre. I have to say that Musical Theatre in this context seems an unlikely (sorry) development but of course I’m reserving judgement. Meanwhile I have re-read the novel to remind myself of what Joyce actually wrote in the first place.
And what I found was even more heartrending than I remembered because, of course, we respond to literature in different ways at different stages of our lives. The novels, poems and plays don’t change. But readers do. When I first read it, I had recently bombed off to Canada to escape the Olympics and had a pleasant break motoring round Vancouver Island with my beloved and energetic husband and we were just booking a city break in Philadelphia. Today I am a widow living alone – independent, healthy and content, but it’s a very different life informed by some pretty devastating lifestyle changes.
Harold Fry’s marriage is troubled. He and Maureen – lustily as they once loved each other – don’t communicate much and Joyce gradually reveals their issues through alternating chapters. We walk with Harold, in his unsuitable shoes, communing with nature, reflecting on the past and meeting people from whom he learns a lot about life. In that sense it is very much a traditional quest story with stopping points such as the Very Famous Actor he meets at a book signing and then over urinals and Martina, a doctor from Slovakia who takes Harold in and tends to his feet although, as an immigrant she can get only cleaning work in the UK.
At the same time we meet buttoned-up Maureen at home, cleaning obsessively, missing Harold and eventually pouring out her problems to Rex, the rather lovely widower next door. In time things escalate when Harold accidentally attracts publicity and other people join him on his walk but it soon it gets out of hand and he has to break free. At one point Maureen and Rex drive to Darlington to speak to him face to face rather than waiting for his phone calls or postcards.
The real issue is their son David. Harold is haunted by his own miserable childhood with an inadequate father and wanted to do better by his own son but things went wrong. We gradually learn that David, clever and accepted at Cambridge, fell off the rails with unhappiness, drink and drugs. Harold is dominated by guilt, disappointment and regret. Something happened twenty years ago and Harold hasn’t seen David since although Maureen speaks to him every day on the phone – or so it seems. Bound up with whatever happened two decades ago is something involving Queenie and Harold’s job. Joyce drops hints and keeps us guessing for a very long time.
Ultimately this is a rich and warm novel about redemption, reconciliation and the importance of self-forgiveness. And that’s where the titular pilgrimage actually leads. Of course, Harold does get to poor, very sick Queenie but in a sense that’s an anticlimax. The important thing is the “celestial city” which Harold doesn’t, for many hundreds of miles, realise he’s seeking – his marriage to Maureen. Yes, I wept at the end.
Since I first read this compelling novel, Rachel Joyce has written two linked ones: The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy (2015) and Maureen Fry and the Angel of the North (2022) neither of which I have read but shall do soon.
Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: A Parcel of Patterns by Jill Paton Walsh
