The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry (2012)

 

I have been interested in reading The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce, short listed for the Booker Prize in 2012, for a year at least.  However, I was reluctant to spend $12.95 or so for a Kindle edition of a book by an author I have not read so I forgot the idea.  Two things changed that.  Firstly I got a free review copy of the sequel The Love Letter of Queenie Hennessly.  I read the first few paragraphs and I liked the style.  Then about a week ago in a promotional E-mail I was notified that The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry was on sale for $1.95.  (I guess the publisher feels,rightly, readers of the first book will want the second.)

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry is a very enjoyable book, reading it made me feel good. It is about a just retired a few months ago from a meaningless job long time married man who for once in his life decides to do something totally unexpected.  Harold's life is not terrible but it is boring, every day until death seems like it will be the same.  His marriage has long ago become routiized, any passion long ago extinguished. The emotional life of the couple centers on their son David.  One day Harold gets a letter from an old coworker, Queenie Hennessy, telling him she is in a nursing home on the other side of England dying of cancer.  Telescoping a bit, he decides to walk across England to see her and sends her a letter saying wait for his arrival.  He begins almost totally unprepared to walk across England, without telling his wife in advance.  Of course she thinks it is crazy.  

There are lots of blog posts and online reviews of this book so I will just say what I ilke about it.  I think the portrait of the mental life of Harold is really well done, his feelings on aging and seemingly being put out to pasture.  The marriage is also very well rendered, Joyce makes us see what can happen over forty fives years.  Maybe the best part of the book is the encounters Harold has as he crosses England, the people he meets.  The prose style and the conversations are just wonderful.  We see how Harold is impacted as he walks, how he begins to throw off decades of blindness to the world outside of his very small world.  

The novel does pull your emotional chains, some of the minor characters, like those who join his walk toward the end, are not real well developed but we only see them a short time so maybe that is not a flaw.

For sure The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry was a very enjoyable read.  I have now begun the sequal.  Some will find it kind of schmaltzy and to this all I can do is shrug my shoulders and say OK but still a fun book and you want very much  to see what will happen next.

To readers of the book, how did you feel about the treatment of the son?  

I just checked and the book is still available as a Kindle for $1.95.  At that price for sure I endorse it but at the regular price of $12.95 I cannot in good consciousness recommend this book for purchase.