Harold Fry's pilgrimage to himself and to the world

The very title of the book brings to mind another pilgrimage, the one of Childe Harold, and like his famous predecessor, Harold Fry undertakes a journey, which is both physical and metaphorical, the latter being emphasized by Rachel Joyce in the dedication to the book ‘For Paul, who walks with me <…>.’ Being one of dozens of ‘walking heroes’, the title character of the novel is poignant and touching in his own way.

Harold Fry has recently retired and at the beginning of the story, we see him surrounded by mundane things representing his daily routine:

It was an ordinary morning in mid-April that smelled of clean washing and grass cuttings. Harold Fry sat at the breakfast table, freshly shaved, in a clean shirt and tie, with a slice of toast that he wasn’t eating <…> [Joyce 2014: 11].

He is accompanied by his wife Maureen, who is preoccupied with their son David, whom she misses bitterly every moment of her life. From the opening page, we feel that there is some tension between the spouses, and Maureen is cross and grumpy with her husband, which fact influences his appetite in a particularly negative way. On the day described in the novel, Harold receives a letter, which happens to be a turning point for many characters involved and literally pushes Harold to the road.

The book is sad and funny at the same time. It explores the themes of love, devotion and mutual understanding, of people getting

estranged and suffering from loneliness even being married to each other; the problem of coming to terms with one’s own past; the themes of regret and fault. Another plot-motive is memory. While walking from South to North, Harold also goes into the depths of his memory. During the journey, he learns to listen to others and to understand people’s sorrows and anxieties, ‘taking weight of others to his heart’:

He understood that in walking to atone for the mistakes he had made, it was also his journey to accept the strangeness of others. As a passer-by, he was in a place where everything, not only the land, was open. People would feel free to talk, and he was free to listen’ [Joyce 2014: 107].

Harold is walking into the past and into his own self, as well as into the confusing and often frustrating world of others. Very often people tell lies or try to seem someone else, ashamed of their own weakness and imperfection, and step after step Harold realises how fragile and vulnerable people are. He goes on walking, as he believes that through his pilgrimage he can prolong the life of Queenie Hennessy, his former colleague, who is dying of cancer and writes that life-changing letter to say good-bye.

From the opening lines, we feel that despite that external cleanness and wellbeing Harold is falling into pieces, with his family life and relations with the outside world being totally disintegrated. The question he addresses himself at the very beginning of his walk is simple and frustrating at the same time: ‘Who am I?’ Throughout the novel, we observe the character overcome this fragmentation resorting to his inner resources and to the others. Mikhail Bakhtin claims that ‘the Self becomes conscious of oneself and turns into one only after it has revealed to the Other, through the Other and by means of the Other <…>. Eventually the Self gains its consciousness dealing with the Other’ [Бахтин 1997: 343]. Thus, the certain way to lose oneself is to get detached from the Other, which has been gradually happening to Harold Fry throughout his married life. He long ago lost the spiritual connection with his wife, and the only friend he seems to have had, Queenie, had to move away after she had lost her job trying to save Harold. Due to his uncertainty that is often unseparated from cowardice, the main character loses a few connections he has had in life, and as a result, he discovers himself empty and distressed. He is separated from Maureen by the door as they stopped sharing the bedroom twenty year before the events of the novel and they are both separated from the outside world by the curtains on their windows. Both the door and the curtains are material representations of their inner crises and estrangement.

The phenomenon tackled in the book is even more interesting as the very concept of Otherness is being reviewed and rethought in comparison with the latest trends when the Other is embodied by foreigners. The main character deals not with representatives of other cultures and geographical locations, not with emigrants and migrants traditionally understood as the representation of the Other, but with himself, his own wife and people he meets on the road, mainly being British though different in many aspects. The only foreigner we come across is Martina, a young woman with thick Eastern European accent, who helped Harold after he had collapsed on the road. Evgenia Kislyakova claims that ‘the category of alterity does not necessarily focus on ethnicity only. Apart from race and national identity it has historically been defined to include different subcategories such as gender, class, sexuality, culture, religion, type of intelligence etc’ [Kislyakova 2012: 17].

Thus, the novel is preoccupied with personal identities rather than national or cultural ones. The Other as understood for the purposes of this paper is not necessarily someone hostile or causing fear, disgust and misunderstanding, but rather someone different, that is everyone, who is not Harold Fry, and as the reader gradually understands, Harold Fry himself.

So, what kinds of Others does Harold Fry face while walking and what may be the reason of othering in each particular case?

Strange as it may seem, the first Other met by the character is he himself. In the title of the novel, the pilgrimage of our hero is called ‘unlikely’, as it is absolutely opposite to the nature of Harold. Suddenly he realizes that he is completely unaware of his own self and his abilities and desires, and not only the future but also his past needs revision. A whole chain of previous events raises strong dislike if not hostility, the feelings Harold Fry has towards Harold Fry. This Other is being gradually turned into the Self as Harold moves to the North.

The second stranger, or the Other, is represented by Maureen. She is completely detached and estranged from her husband and makes him a constant target of her reprimands and frustration. He in his turn seems unable or unwilling to put a bridge to her, trying to protect himself via indifference. Maureen in her turn also fails to deal with hardships of life on her own, and when Harold leaves and she finally realises that the escape into the routine with constant cleaning and ironing is a dead-end, and the son she constantly refers to in her thoughts has been dead for many years, she finds a certain relief and understanding in communication with their neighbor Rex, who gives sound pieces of advice when Maureen is mostly in need of them. Rex is understanding and helpful also due to his own misfortune, as his wife whom he loved dearly died six months before the beginning of the novel.

All other characters Harold meets during his pilgrimage may be roughly divided into those self-concentrated and people with deep sense of empathy despite their own sorrows (and often because of them, as in case with Rex). In this respect, a certain optimism of Rachel Joyce is evident, as the number of people genuinely interested in Harold and his motives outweighs the number of those seeing nobody and nothing outside their narrow world.

The first encounter is the most significant one not only because the garage girl who sold Harold a burger encouraged him to start his walk, but also because this conversation and its later reflections in Harold’s soul demonstrate the way he deals with this world, interpreting things sometimes the way he wishes them to be rather than they are. Though he tends to be honest with himself in the analysis of his past, which often hurts, sometimes the reader traces some elements of self-deceit, as it happens with the girl. Harold keeps sending the girl postcards from many places on his way to Queenie, being deeply thankful for the hope she gave him and for this non-religious faith and trust that helped him going. He is so emotional in his messages that finally the girl feels being a fraud and even comes to Maureen to confess. She tells the woman that actually her aunt died years before, and the reader starts feeling ill at ease together with the girl because of that fake hope she sowed in the desperate man. However, if we return to the beginning of the novel and reread the episode with the girl we realize that there was no fraud or fake hope. The girl never said that her faith had saved or much prolonged her aunt’s life. When Harold enquired whether the girl’s aunt with cancer felt much better thanks to the girl’s belief, she simply replied that ‘she said it gave her hope when everything else had gone’ [Joyce 2014: 25]. The very grammar of the sentence suggests that most probably, the woman passed away, but Harold refuses to notice it, as he himself needs hope and faith.

Another meeting is worth mentioning as the couple he sees partially mirror Harold’s family situation when the spouses are blind and deaf to each other, making each other anxious and unsatisfied, though they are different in their motives. The hiking man travelling together with his wife represents some extreme egotism, being unable to hear not only Harold, but also his own wife. All his phrases sound as some slogans of success, prosperity and satisfaction, ‘walking is what makes our marriage’, ‒ he exclaims with enthusiasm and selfabsorption.

The hiking man continues talking. It occurred to Harold that he was one of those people who didn’t require other people in order to have a conversation [Joyce 2014: 88].

The hiking man speaks on behalf of himself and his wife and manages to pay no attention to Harrold’s rare remarks. However, his wife’s sudden outburst changes the picture dramatically, as she happens to disagree with her husband in all the main points. Harold is too sensitive to witness such scandals and suffers even more as the woman’s words disturb his own memories and bitter contemplations:

Harold wished the woman would stop. He wished the man would smile or take hold of her hand. He thought of himself and Maureen, and the years of silence at 13 Fossebridge Road. Had Maureen ever felt the impulse to say, where everyone could hear, such truths about their marriage? The thought had never occurred to him before, and was so alarming he was already on his feet and heading for the door. The couple didn’t seem to notice that Harold had gone [Joyce 2014: 88].

Harold Fry is a good listener, he learns a lot from the stories told by other people, but he does not want his own private life and sorrows to become known to others. The only thing he shares and seeks the approval of is his pilgrimage for the good of Queenie, and gradually we understand how many other meanings are hidden behind this simple plot.

The pilgrimage of Harold Fry is not religious, though some religious reminiscences can be traced, as, for example, ‘taking weight of others’, mentioned above, and attracting some ‘disciples’, people, who joined Harold in his pilgrimage being driven by different reasons, all of which had one thing in common – all those people were unhappy and overloaded with problems they were seeking to resolve. The only religious person Harold tolerates despite all the prayers and religious talks is Wilf, a young man, almost a boy, with gaunt and sickly face, who is one of the first people to join Harrold closer to the end of his pilgrimage. Wilf seems to be guilty of drinking and stealing, but Harold protects him because the boy resembles his son David.

By the end of his journey, being surrounded by a crowd of people with their own troubles, desires and ambitions, he suddenly realizes that he does not need them, that you cannot love everyone (which again puts a gap between the protagonist and religion), that he needs only Queenie and his wife Maureen.

The others taught him a lot, but the main understanding he achieved was that you could not love everybody, that loving everybody in fact means loving nobody and no one, only the dearest matter.

Throughout the book, the reader learns some facts from the life of Harold Fry only as the protagonist himself decides to deliver the information. He is honest with the reader and with himself, but the most difficult truths we discover only by the end of the novel, having come across different hints before – these are the two most painful episodes of Fry’s life, suicide of their only son and Queenie’s disappearance after she was fired having taken Harold’s fault. There is his fault in both cases, and it takes him time to be able to be honest about them. He demonstrated weak-will and cowardice and never told the boss that it had been he who smashed some glass clowns, which belonged to his boss’s mother. Revealing these facts became an important step in Fry’s coming to terms with himself and with the world and even here he was partially encouraged by other people and their stories. It is symbolic that the story of his son’s death is completely told for the first time in his letter to the garage girl. David and Queenie have been the two things driving Harold and Maureen further apart, and through his pilgrimage both of them learn how to forgive themselves, each other and the past, and this accepting things brings certain peace into their hearts. Maureen takes away the curtains she put after David’s suicide to keep the neighbors out of their lives; she is also ready to reenter the world hand in hand with her husband.

Like Childe Harold, Harold Fry continues his way driven by disillusionment and necessity to retrieve his own self. The idea that one day he can lose all the memories, even the hard ones, makes the title hero really desperate and scared. While walking, he collects the tiles of the mosaic, represented by people he comes across, so that finally he manages to complete the picture and achieve relative wholeness, with his wife Maureen becoming an integral part of it.

In one of his essays Boris M. Proskurnin argues that ‘one of the general themes of English literature from Shakespeare up to nowadays has been self-knowledge and self-understanding’ [Proskurnin 2012: 27], and the novel under consideration is a bright example of this English tradition of self-knowledge, suggesting a whole complex of circumstances and conditions which make the achievement of selfunderstanding possible. In this touching novel, Rachel Joyce gives a collective portrait of a modern human, desperate, estranged and deeply unhappy, showing at the same time the ways to overcome these frustrations and to regain wholeness, which means coming to terms not only with one’s inner self, but with the Other and the outside world with its complexities and trials.