Joyce alludes to a lack of family or friends but this, it feels, is only mentioned to add impetus to the protagonist’s pilgrimage. The walk, or pilgrimage, increasingly becomes interlinked with Harold’s own grief and spiritual pain as he becomes convinced that by undertaking such a walk he can not only keep his old friend alive, but also repent for the mistakes he has made in years gone by.Īlthough Harold’s friend Queenie is in a hospice with terminal cancer, the reader only gets brief glances at the physical, spiritual and social pain that she is experiencing. Harold is a retired Englishman who embarks on 600 mile walk from Devon to Berwick to visit an old friend who is dying of cancer.
Joyce’s heart-warming novel charts the unlikely story of Harold Fry. The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry hits UK cinemas on April 28.If ever a fictional book has illustrated the importance of ‘spiritual care’ as an integral part of palliative care, it is Rachel Joyce’s debut novel, ‘The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry’. As Harold says to himself while gazing alone at a beautiful sun-dappled view, ‘Who knew?’ Now and then on Harold’s journey, there are hints of something almost mythic and mystical about the landscape. British cinema may not be able to match the widescreen vistas offered by American movies, but Macdonald and cinematographer Kate McCullough shows that the English countryside can be no less striking. Along the way, its makers also disprove the notion that you can’t make a road movie on what DH Lawrence called "an island no bigger than a back garden". The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry shows that a film about someone walking doesn’t have to be pedestrian. Harold’s dogged resilience is the dramatic engine that drives the film, but Broadbent also conveys the less attractive sides of Harold’s character and history, while Wilton introduces notes of anger, bitterness and frustration to balance the film’s overall mood of uplift, with timely flashbacks slowly revealing that the couple’s highly strung son has been the cause of their estrangement. The filmmakers stumble a little when they attempt to satirize the temporary companions Harold picks up en route, and there are also times when they threaten to veer off into sentimentality, but the story has a darker edge that stops things becoming overly twee.
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