The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

 

Our reading group meets monthly at my house and has done for 8 years (next month). I order the books from the library, and collect and return them.  I provide tea, biscuits, and nuts, and a tidy table to sit around.  I also hold a certain amount of anxiety about the group and some of that anxiety showed itself with this book.  When I first started the group there were so many people interested that I ran two and from the very first time we met each person – 20 people in total – was given a copy of the same book.  I chose Cloud Atlas because it was short listed for the Booker Prize and it was new, etc.  Looking back, I could have chosen something safe, like a Daphne DuMaurier or similar, but I didn’t know then that there were safe books and ones that could create mayhem in a group.  Almost to a woman, the book was disliked, not understood, not read.  I felt I was on the brink of failing before we had really started.  Fortunately the group members had more faith than I did and they continued to come back.  It has to be said that two of us really liked the book.  Most of the group members had read the book, saying later that they were afraid they would be ‘told off’ if they didn’t read it.  (What a predictable nation of people we are, really: ‘follow the rules, perceived or otherwise, or else!’ – maybe that is a discussion for another blog.).

Cloud Atlas is still mentioned from time to time with a humorous tone that surprisingly brings back an inkling of the old feeling of potential failure.  It reminds me that I have continued to feel anxious about whether the group will like a book and reading The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry brought it back for me in bucket loads.  Fortunately, the group members no longer feel that they HAVE to read a book if they don’t get on with it, so, when I started this book, I thought that some may put it to one side and read something that was on their own reading list. I thought the book was Sentimental Tosh. But, as I continued to read my opinion changed and I realised this was a remarkable book.

Unsurprisingly, the group agreed;  the most consistent comment by group members was “I loved this book.”    The group’s score out of 10 was 8.5 with the  scores ranging from 9 to 6.  That is a pretty high score for our discerning group.

This unusual and moving book is about  what can happen to a marriage following the loss of a child and the difficult process of repair that is possible.  It is also about the inner struggle for parents if their own parenting had gone wrong.  Harold’s honest descriptions of feeling that he had failed as a father because he didn’t know what to do – The fathering he had received had been wholly inadequate, as was the mothering, so how was he to know if he was doing it right or not.   Equally, communication between him and his wife became non existent, probably because they had no idea how to manage the painful and fearful feelings in themselves, let alone together.

Woven around that story are some wonderful observations, of the countryside, minor physical ailments, but mainly about people.   It was noted at length what a good observer of people the author is.  She included  some quirky and unusual interactions between strangers that, we all agreed, could and do happen.   A line was pointed out that describes this well: “He understood that in walking to atone for the mistakes he had made, it was also his journey to accept the strangeness of others.”

I haven’t written about the plot – that is easy to figure out from the title – a man goes for a long walk, across the country in fact.  During the walk he remembers and sorts through parts of his life.  It is a book about love and loss and betrayal and transformation.  There are a few unexpected twists in the story, as there can be in any journey.

We loved it.