Review of MAUREEN by Rachel Joyce (New Release)

 3.5 Stars

This novella is for readers of The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry and The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy.  The first is about Harold Fry’s journey to see his friend Queenie who is dying, and the second is Queenie’s backstory.  This third book, Maureen, focuses on Harold’s wife.

Ten years after Harold’s pilgrimage, Maureen sets off on her own journey.  After Harold’s encouragement, Maureen decides to drive north to see a garden Queenie had created; it includes a memorial to David, Maureen and Harold’s son who died 30 years earlier.  Like her husband’s before her, her trip becomes a journey of self-discovery.

Prickly and intractable, Maureen is not an immediately likeable person.  In many ways, she is Harold’s foil:  “Maureen was not an easy person.  She knew this.  She was not an easy person to like and she wasn’t good at making friends.”  She tries to control her world by compulsively cleaning.  She is angry and bitter and that comes across in the way she treats people.  She is judgmental and tactless.  For instance, when she has a disagreement with a large woman, she replies “that if the woman ate a better diet, she might not be so unhappy.”  She has closed herself off from the world and people, in essence, closing herself off from living. 

In the course of the novel, the reader gets to understand why she is the way she is.  She was raised to believe that she was someone special and that “the real business of life would begin with Maureen at the center.”  Though she realizes, “she was not so special after all,” a haughtiness remains as demonstrated in her assumption that she will be treated as a special guest when she drops in to see Kate, one of Harold’s friends.  Broken and grieving the loss of her only child, she has no time for anyone else and their problems:  “she did not want to dwell on other people’s sadness” and “there was only so much you could see of another person’s trouble without getting lost yourself.”  Maureen is a broken woman who has become defined by grief.  Disappointed and angry, she lashes out at others.

I love dynamic characters, and Maureen does attain some self-knowledge:  “a person could be trapped in a version of themselves that was from another time, and completely miss the happiness that was staring them in the face.”  She realizes how “She had lived her life as if she was owed something extra because he had been taken away, and other women’s sons had not.”  Circumstances force her to rely on someone else and when she is treated with kindness and compassion, her heart opens and she becomes less self-centred:  others too have “losses that were too terrible to bear.”  She recognizes the importance of being the world’s guest.

One problem I had with the novel is that Maureen’s transformation seems to happen too quickly.  She is an inflexible 72-year-old consumed by grief for 30 years, but a brief journey results in her several epiphanies?  In fact, her change seems to take place overnight.  To be convincing, a character change requires a person be capable of change and be given a credible time span within which to change.

Nonetheless, this novel is a compassionate and thoughtful examination of grief and how it can shape lives.  I was not as charmed as I was with the first of the trilogy, but this is still a worthwhile read.

Note:  I received a digital galley from the publisher via NetGalley.