Solvitur Ambulando

“It is solved by walking” — attributed to St Augustine, circa 400 AD

Rachel Joyce’s first novel is one of those quintessentially British, slightly quaint, gentle, a tad sentimental, but still charming stories. It is described as being about ‘an ordinary man’, but over the course of the novel, this man emerges as both very ordinary and unusually determined.

Harold Fry is a 60-something retiree living with his irritable wife Maureen in Kingsbridge, a small town on the southwestern English coast. A letter arrives from Harold’s old colleague Queenie Hennessy, wherein Queenie says she is dying of cancer in a hospice in the far north. Harold writes a reply, but he is not one to express himself easily, either in prose or verbally, and the letter is stilted and formal. On his way to post it, Harold goes past one postbox, then another, then the post office, and before he knows it, he is suddenly inspired to walk up the length of England to see Queenie.

He pictured Queenie dozing at one end of England and himself in a phone booth at the other, with things in between that he didn’t know and could only imagine: roads, fields, rivers, woods, moors, peaks and valleys, and so many people. He would meet and pass them all. There was no deliberation, no reasoning. The decision came in the same moment as the idea.

And thus starts Harold’s pilgrimage. He is woefully unprepared: he is wearing a suit and tie and ‘yachting shoes’, has previously walked only to his car and back, he has no map or compass, and he has only the vaguest idea of the distance and hurdles between him and Queenie’s hospice. What he does have is the illogical notion that he can save Queenie’s life, somehow, by this pilgrimage.

This book is set in a calm, peaceful England with hedgerows and streams that have potable water, so the reader has more concern for Harold’s own limitations than for any perils from his environment. Indeed, after Day 1, Harold has only covered a few miles and is resting in a hotel when he discovers his leg is badly cramping. He has just about decided to give up when his fellow guests, having heard of his plans, rush out to wish him well on his journey.

They believed in him. They had looked at him in his yachting shoes and listened to what he had said, and they had made a decision in their hearts and minds to ignore the evidence and to imagine something bigger and something infinitely more beautiful than the obvious. Remembering his own doubt, Harold was humbled.

Along the many miles, he has time to think and remember, and hints of long-submerged problems emerge. Something happened twenty years ago that still affects Harold and Maureen, there is a bit of a mystery about their brilliant son David, and there is also some way in which Queenie did Harold an enormous favour that he has never repaid.

He meets many people along his route, and quiet, shy, introverted Harold immediately tells them exactly what he is doing and why (which requires some suspension of disbelief on the part of the reader). Nevertheless, the people are invariably kind, friendly, helpful and supportive. He hears their stories, and we, the readers, hear more of his own: the detached mother who abandoned him, the distant father, the first years of thrilling love with Maureen and the birth of their child, and then that same child detaching from his own parents.

About halfway up, Harold’s pilgrimage hits the news and he becomes a minor celebrity, which only enhances the kindnesses pushed upon him. But along with celebrity come fellow passengers who wish to milk fame for their own purposes (but given the nature of this book, those are not terribly nefarious).

This is the kind of novel where the journey is the purpose. There is little tension in waiting to see if Queenie survives until Harold arrives, or if Harold and Maureen rekindle their relationship. This is not a criticism of the novel, but a heads-up for those readers who might be expecting something different.

The major characters — Harold and Maureen and Queenie — are drawn with sympathy. It is a wise choice by the author to present Maureen’s side of the story as well, which breaks up the occasional monotony of Harold’s long walk and provides an outside view of Harold himself. In fact, the relationship between Harold and Maureen was, for me, the best-written part of the book.

The more ‘difficult’ characters remain remote to the reader: their son David and the youth Wilf who walks with Harold both have drinking and drug problems, but their motivations and thought processes are opaque. The pacing is a bit uneven too, with all the mysteries resolved in a flurry of exposition at the end.

After his journey, Harold has discovered much about himself and the world, but his eventual insights can seem a bit trite:

“Life was very different when you walked through it.”

“Life is made up of people putting one foot in front of the other.”

There is a touch of sentimentality that comes from the lack of sharpness and wit (see, in contrast, Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand or John Mortimer’s novels). Laurie Lee walked miles through England and Spain in 1935, and wrote about it beautifully in As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning (but perhaps that is an unfair comparison as Laurie Lee walked through the Spanish Civil War and therefore had meatier material). Harold Fry is gently introspective, but for me, it was a pleasant but not outstanding read.