Harold Fry, six months retired from his job as sales representative for a local brewery, gets a letter from Queenie, a woman he'd worked with twenty years before but hasn't seen since. She tells him that she's dying of cancer. The news upsets him for years earlier, Queenie had done him a great favor and he'd never had the chance to thank her. He sits down to write a letter to her but finds it hard to say anything without seeming . . . "limp,' is the word that comes to his mind. When he has finished the letter, he leaves the house to mail it but when he gets to the mailbox, he walks on to the next one, and then the next, and the next, and soon he's at the opposite edge of town. He stops at a convenience store to get something to eat. He tells the girl at the counter that he has a friend who has cancer and he's got a letter he's going to post to her. The girl talks about her aunt who had cancer. She says science doesn't know everything, you have to believe a person can get better. "You see, if you have faith, you can do anything."
In that moment, Harold, who's spent most of his life doing only the ordinary and comfortable at all, realizes what he must do. He's going to walking to his friend's sickbed. He knows it's not reasonable but he's convinced that as long as he keeps walking toward her, his friend will stay alive. He telephones the hospice, tells Queenie's nurse to take her a message: "Tell her Harold Fry is on his way. All she has to do is wait. . . . I am going to save her, you see. I will keep walking and she must keep living. Will you say that? . . . Tell her this time I won't let her down."
And that's how Harold sets out on a six hundred mile journey, from Kingsbridge to Berwick upon Tweed, utterly unprepared for the trip and dressed in everyday clothes, not hiking gear. On his way, he meets all sorts of people and has all sorts of adventures, more small than large. ("Life was very different when you walked through it," Harold observes.) As he walks, the memories pile in: memories of a mother who abandoned him and a harsh, unforgiving father; the happy early years with his wife, Maureen; their hopes for their son David. But David intimidates Harold and Maude with his intelligence and his intransigence. He puts down his father for reading the wrong newspaper, as though that single fact renders him unfit to comment on anything. His mother makes excuses for him, "He's clever, you see," and the author observes, "implicit in the remark was the conviction that cleverness was both an excuse for everything, and out of their reach." (How sad!) Something happens and Maureen and he fall out. They no longer connect, no longer talk or share experiences. They still live together --in a modest cottage, shuttered with white net curtains that hide the world outside- but their lives are loveless and claustrophobic, where once they had been happy. What happened?
It would be wrong to reveal more of what happens in this lovely novel. In the end, both Harold and Maude learn something about themselves but as to what they learn, read it for yourself.
This is a quite good read. I'm uncomfortable with books that are overly sentimental - but though at times, this book comes close to being mawkish, it never is. The author avoids excess even in a book as filled with feeling as this one is; she doesn't clobber the reader over the head with a message. At one point in the book, Harold picks up followers, who want to join him on his pilgrimage across England. This part of the book seems contrived -too deliberately comic in its overtones- but still, even this portion is eminently readable. As to Harold and Maude, they are wonderful creations.
I particularly like the way the author describes things. She catches the way a not terribly well educated, not at all original late-middle aged man like Harold would see things, expressing his view of them in ordinary (concrete) language that yet has its own poetry. Thus Harold observes a woman he meets on the way: "Her eyes were round, as if she had contact lenses that maybe hurt." His next door neighbor, Rex, "was a short man with tidy feet at the bottom, a small head at the top, and a very round body in the middle, causing Harold to fear sometimes that if he fell there would be no stopping him. He would roll down the hill like a barrel."
Ultimately this novel is about redemption. It's not grand and certainly not flashy. But it is very human.
