What Book to Read?

I’ve been writing this blog for quite a while now, but I still sometimes find it difficult to say why I like a book, or why I don’t. I can see that this book is one many people will like, and indeed it was long-listed for this year’s Man Booker Prize. But instead of being moved, or touched by it as I know other readers are, it rather irritates me. The challenge is to find out whether this says something about the book, or about me – or some combination of both.

Harold Fry has recently retired from his job as a salesman for a brewery. He is shy and retiring to the point of self-effacement. He feels he is a failure. He and his wife Maureen scarcely speak to each other, and neither seems to have anyone or anything meaningful in their lives. One day Harold receives a letter from Queenie, a former work colleague, telling him she is dying of cancer. Harold writes to say he is sorry, and goes out to post the letter. But instead of doing so, he decides to walk to see her, just as he is, even though he lives on the south coast of England, and she is in a hospice in Scotland. The story then follows his journey, the people he meets and the memories he has of his life. ‘In walking, he unleashed the past that he had spent twenty years seeking to avoid, and now it chattered and played through his head with a wild energy of its own.’ The narrative is shared with Maureen, as she struggles to come to terms with his abrupt departure and to decide what she really feels for him.

On one level the story deals with the reality of blisters, weather, washing and sleeping arrangements. I didn’t find these details particularly convincing; no one could walk with their feet and legs in the condition that Harold’s are soon in. Nor do I find it convincing that his mind could be occupied only by memories; no one’s mind could be as blank as that. But this isn’t primarily about reality – it’s about Harold’s journey of self-discovery. That the difficulties are unrealistic, and yet he keeps going, is the whole point. He needs to achieve something. ‘I have to keep walking’ is his mantra. And the primacy of memory over any other thought is essential to the structure of the story; much of the narrative drive relies on the gradual revelation of events earlier in Harold’s life. But the hints that are given along the way undermine – for me – the power of Harold’s final revelation.

Harold begins his journey in the faith that it will somehow help Queenie, even though a doctor he meets along the way tells him that incurable cancer is – well – incurable. But it seems that the world needs ‘a little less sense and a little more faith’. I guess one of the things people like about the story is Harold’s fidelity to his purpose in the face of various obstacles to it. He is a modern version of John Bunyan’s Christian in Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), with his own hill of difficulty and slough of despond. Indeed, the book’s epigraph is from Bunyan. But there is nothing overtly religious about this pilgrimage, even if at times it seems almost to take on the air of a search for Buddhist enlightenment. ‘But you have to let go,’ he says. ‘I didn’t know that at the beginning, but I do now. You have to let go of things you think you need, like cash cards and phones and maps and things. ’

All this is perfectly reasonable, so what am I complaining about?  I think it is the way Harold’s self-discovery is expressed. Take this passage where Harold is reflecting, as he often does, on his new understanding of things. ‘He had learned that it was the smallness of people that filled him with wonder and tenderness, and the loneliness of that too. The world was made up of people putting one foot in front of the other, and a life might appear simply ordinary because the person living it had done so for a long time.’ Really? It comes down to whether you think this is meaningful or trite. One reviewer praises Joyce’s ‘unerring ability to convey profound emotions in simple, unaffected language.’ I find the writing too often lacks depth and the story feels contrived. But I can imagine other people, like the reviewer, feeling quite differently.

So is it the book, or me?  Probably both. The book is sometimes sentimental, and I often don’t have the warm emotional response to books that I know other readers have. Best you try it yourself.

This is Rachel Joyce’s first book. You can read more about her here.