I kind of enjoyed The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry despite feeling somewhat resistant to it, and I don’t really know what to say about a book that I found overly sentimental at times, but that also totally made me teary-eyed on the subway one day.
OK, so, the premise: Harold Fry is 65, recently retired, and unhappily married. He gets a letter from Queenie Hennessy, a woman he used to work with but whom he hasn’t seen or heard from in twenty years. She has terminal cancer and is writing to say goodbye; Harold writes her a letter in reply, but then feels like it’s horribly inadequate. He decides that he’ll walk from where he lives (which is in the very south of England) to the hospice (which is in the very north of England) and also decides that if he does so, she’ll stay alive.
I wonder how I would feel about this novel if I hadn’t already read and really liked Werner Herzog’s Of Walking In Ice, which is his true account of his 1974 walk from Munich to Paris, which he undertook because his friend Lotte Eisner had cancer and he felt that by walking, he would keep her alive. Herzog’s journey is like the misanthropic version of Harold’s: he tells one guy he meets that he likes the guy’s dog better than he likes the guy himself; he breaks into summer cottages to sleep in them and says that in one of them, he peed in a rubber boot. Herzog writes a lot about the physical pain of his walk, and about the loneliness he experiences. Harold’s walk has some of that, too, and is not without its other conflicts, but overall it’s a lot more twee: Harold gains confidence through walking, and learns life lessons along the way. He learns to trust himself and others, and not to make assumptions about other people’s lives/sadnesses/secrets/hopes/loves. His wife Maureen, meanwhile, also learns things in his absence, including how much she still loves him. I was mostly OK with all of this, while also rolling my eyes a little at some pieces and being legitimately moved by some of it, and then I was deeply annoyed by a scene near the book’s end that just tipped the sentimentality meter way too far for me, leaving me a bit grumpy.
I do still like some of the descriptive passages, though, like this, from when Harold’s walk becomes a slog:
His clothes no longer dried. The leather of his shoes was so bloated with water, they lost their shape. Whitnage. Westleigh. Whiteball. So many places beginning with W. Trees. Hedgerow. Telegraph poles. Houses. Recycling bins. (120)
Or this, from a more satisfying portion of the journey:
The evening shadows lay long beneath the trees, like a separate forest that was made of darkness. He walked against an early-morning mist and smiled at the pylons poking their heads through the milk-white smoke. The hills softened and flattened, and opened before him, green and gentle. He passed through the Somerset wetlands, where waterways flashed like silver needles. (156)
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