The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce

Harold Fry has recently retired and now, he doesn't do very much. Even mowing the lawn, like his wife Maureen tells him to do, seems too much work for him. When, one day, he recieves a lettre in a pink envelope, this lazyness changes. In it, his collegue from long time ago, Queenie Hennessy, tells him she is going to die soon from a cancer in a hospice at the other end of England. Harold, at first helpless, decides not only to write her back, but to walk the whole way from Kingsbridge to Berwick-upon-Tweed.

During his walk, he will not only meet a lot of people, listen to their story, but also make a journey into his own past, his relation to both Maureen and Quennie and his son David. He is walking to save Queenie, but is he also saving himself?

This book about an ordinary man facing his ordinary insecurities through a real and spiritual journey is moving. Makes for a surprisingly quick read, uplifting at times and terribly sad at others.

Not since Tolkien has so much walking been so exhaustively recounted, yet been almost completely tangential to the actual story. (And though there weren't any eagles, there were, like, cars and stuff to explain away.)

Harold is quintessentially British. I completely lost count of the times where he did something like walk into a shop and feel compelled to buy something because the worker was staring at him, and he was the reason they weren't able to close yet.

When he finds out an old friend with whom he's lost touch is dying of cancer, he finds that he can't find the words to say. I'd blame this on the Britishness, but I really don't know that any nationality has the proper phrasing for this, with exception of possibly hakuna matata, which is actually Swahili but not the phrasing anyone who speaks Swahili would actually use.

Anyway.

He goes to mail a trite letter, only when he gets to the postbox he decides he's going to walk to her instead. 600-some miles away.

That's probably enough of the plot. It's not about the destination, it's about the journey. Except it's not really about the journey, either. It's more about Harold's life, and the walk is a penance for all of it. It's purgatory for his wife, who's at home and has held Harold in a subconscious begrudging resentment. And it's a little slice of heaven for the neighbor, Rex, who hasn't had so utility for or interaction with other people in months.

The heartache and emotion that's screwed out of Harold with every step is riveting, if punctuated with several gut-punches. The plotting of the walk itself gets fairly repetitious, as Harold vacillates between rapture and despair with numbing regularity. But peoples' reaction to Harold, his walk and the inevitable nonsense that encircles all of it are eminently believable, especially in the age of social media. And the ending, while not exactly Disney-happy, feels satisfying and earned.

I'm not saying I'd want to read a whole trilogy about the walk (and we're already two-thirds of the way there), but it's worth the effort to amble through.