A Walk with Harold Fry

I go through spells of not being able to settle my mind to read or to settle on a choice of books. Now is one of those times when intriguing titles are popping up everywhere. Also must soon start on the book for September book club because it is huge: Goldfinch by Donna Tart. I had avoided The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce because it looked good but so many others were lined up in my reading queue. But when I repeatedly came across references to this book, I skipped ahead and pulled it up on my Kindle.

I was not disappointed. This is a book with an English setting and is a story of a man’s walk across England to reach a friend dying of cancer. Due to a short tale told by a young girl, Harold Fry thinks if he walks the length of England to reach his friend, he can save her from death. He writes, her tells her he is on the way, and then he begins the walk without proper equipment and totally out of shape himself. The book begins with the simple and sparse words of the ordinary; the tone reminded me of a fairy tale with detailing by a narrator.

As we see Harold’s ordinary life, we see some of our own. Then the prose ratchets up and draws us into to see his more complicated prior life. The sentences are still unpretentious but impart interesting details that track the gradual transformation of Harold Fry and indirectly his wife Maureen. The last third of the book has some rough areas I would have edited out, some chapters bordering on proselytizing instead of showing in the narrative. Many reviewers compare Harold Fry to a Christ figure, and indeed, in many places readers are reminded of Biblical parables.

For me the scenes with Harold’s sick friend Queenie were hard to read, and I admit to not studying those paragraphs. Joyce does a wonderful job of capturing the ravages of Queenie’s cancer. However since in February we saw a friend to the very end through his own battle with liver disease (which tortured me further by being reminiscent of my Dad’s fight with Mesothelioma), followed by a cousin’s death on the West Coast from pancreatic cancer, trailed by the loss of a very special 98 year old lady who was my friend for 40 years, and then faced the beginning death throes of a 30 year marriage of a beloved family member, I admit to reading across this part of the story lightly.

I found the wife Maureen just as interesting a character as Harold. While she comes across as a bit of a shrew when we first meet her, her shortcomings could be our own.
During Harold’s walk, Maureen stays at home but she is not idle. She revamps her own outlook on life, and we see  her character re-finding the essence of her original self in some agonizing self-discovery. Both these characters are in the retirement stages of life which proves to be no easy feat. Society has classes for newly pregnant women on babies and birthing, classes on how to parent, classes on how to handle nutrition for health, how to live with alcoholism, and even how to plan money for retirement. Someone ought to design a class for how to stay vital and how to live daily with a loved one during retirement!

However, with no real spoiler alert, this books ends with a special kind of “they all lived happily ever after”.  It is a good read, probes some heavy thoughts, and dares us to look at our own life to question are we living it fully. The author has another book due out sometime this year. I will be glad to give it a read as well.