If you enjoyed The
Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, you must read its companion, The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy. If you haven't read either, two good novels await you.
Review of The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry
4 Stars
Harold Fry, a sad, lonely, 65-year-old recent retiree, is
caught in a stale life and a fractured marriage in which “language had no
significance.” He receives a good-bye note from a former colleague, Queenie
Hennessy, who is in a hospice dying of cancer. He writes a bland reply although
he feels his response is inadequate: “The knowledge of his helplessness pressed
down on him so heavily he felt weak. It wasn’t enough to send a letter. There
must be a way to make a difference.” When walking to mail his letter, he has a
chance conversation which has him believing that he can keep Queenie alive by
walking to her. Thus begins his trek.
Of course, what Harold actually embarks on is a journey of
self-discovery; he asks himself “Who am I?” and even his cellphone message has
a long pause as if “he was actually off looking for himself.” As he walks, he
reflects on his life; he frees “the past he had spent twenty years seeking to
avoid.” What he specifically feels burdened by is not revealed until near the
end, but Harold feels that he is walking “to atone for mistakes he had made.”
Among his discoveries are wonderful everyday things: “it was
as if everywhere he looked, the fields, gardens, trees, and hedgerows had
exploded with growth.” Another epiphany is that he is not alone because there
are many people like him just struggling to put one foot in front of the other:
“It was the same all over England. . . . And what no one else knew was the
appalling weight of the thing they were carrying inside. The inhuman effort it
took sometimes to be normal, and a part of things that appeared both easy and
everyday. The loneliness of that.”
While her husband is on his quixotic pilgrimage, Maureen
waits at home and also does some reflecting. She too examines their marriage:
“She sat . . . and stared into the air, seeing not net curtains but only the
past.” As she has insights, her transformation is wonderfully developed through
the symbolism of net curtains. At the beginning the curtains “hung between
herself and the outside world, robbing it of color and texture, and she was
glad of that.” Eventually she removes and discards the curtains and “Light, color,
and texture fell over the room.”
This novel takes the reader through a whole spectrum of
emotions; parts are heartbreakingly sad while others are funny. It encourages
us to examine our own lives to find instances of misplaced anger and resentment
and to rediscover “all the things in life [we’ve] let go.” Despite its
bleakness in sections, the novel is hopeful and uplifting because it suggests
it’s okay “to go mad once in a while” and because “Beginnings could happen more
than once, or in different ways.”
The book is a meditation on life but it is also a quirky and
charming novel. It is not surprising that it was long-listed for the Man Booker
Prize.
Review of The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy
4 Stars
The novel succeeds in being both comic and poignant.
Queenie’s fellow patients in the hospice are a quirky crew; the exchanges
between them are often hilarious. One of the patients tells a volunteer, “One
of the pluses of chemotherapy . . . is that all her facial and body hair has
gone. It’s like a permanent Brazilian for free.” A young naïve nun (who gives
haircuts to the patients) doesn’t understand the term so she is told that a
Brazilian is “a sort of haircut . . . Quite short.” Later Sister Lucy offers a
patient a short haircut: “’If you like, you can have a Brazilian.’”
The poignancy arises because the end is inevitable for these
patients. There are repeated references to the undertaker’s van coming up the
drive: “He was not there this afternoon. The undertaker’s van - Well, you know
the rest.”
As Queenie reminisces, she makes observations about life:
“it is harder to argue with another person . . . than it is to argue with the
darker recesses of oneself” and “sometimes you cannot clear the past
completely. You must live alongside your sorrow.” What she emphasizes over and
over again is the importance of stopping and finding happiness in small
pleasures. In the past, she realizes that she was blind: “it was such a small,
plain thing that I mistook it for something ordinary and failed to see.” As she
nears death, she understands that “You don’t get to a place by constantly
moving, even if your journey is one of sitting still and waiting. Every once in
a while you have to stop in your tracks and admire the view, a small cloud and
a tree outside your window. You have to see what you did not see before. And
then you have to sleep.” Queenie’s philosophical musings are not original, but
they bear repetition.
I loved the allusions to The
Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock: “we would grow old. You would wear the
bottoms of your trousers rolled” and “I have measured out my life in ladies’
shoes.” Queenie even dares to eat a peach. Those who are familiar with T. S.
Eliot’s poem will find additional layers of meaning in the book.
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