The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

Maureen Fry is Harold’s wife and, at first, a disagreeable character. While Harold processes the knowledge that his old friend is dying, Maureen continues eating her breakfast, hardly responding to the tragic news. She obsessively cleans the house, speaks to Harold in clipped, spiteful phrases, and appears to care little for her husband’s feelings. The reader is drawn to Harold as a sympathetic character immediately, whereas the acceptance of Maureen comes at a slower pace as the author reveals why she became so hard-hearted and insensitive. Once a lively wife and mother who enjoyed cooking and gardening, Maureen is now a recluse. She lives trapped in her home behind net curtains, taking her anger out on Harold and speaking to the spirit of her dead son as if he were still with her: “She had bleached and annihilated every waking moment of the last twenty years. Anything rather than feel. Anything, rather than meet Harold’s eye and say the unspeakable” (147). When she first learns of Harold’s decision to walk to Berwick, she resents his motivations, finding the notion ridiculous and pointless. Her anger quickly shifts to concern as she convinces herself Harold is mentally ill and needs to see a doctor. It is not until Maureen confesses the situation to her widower neighbor, Rex, that she sees Harold’s journey through a different lens. Once she accepts his need to take the journey, she embarks on her personal exploration of the past, which requires her to confront her misconstrued vision of key events in their life together. While Harold’s memories torture him with feelings of inadequacy and regret, Maureen’s wash over her in waves of shame as she realizes she unfairly punished Harold for 20 years. Maureen comes to understand David’s addiction and illness were the reason for their loss, not Harold’s lack of love or physical affection for his son. She transforms from Harold’s biggest critic to his most ardent cheerleader by physically and emotionally supporting him through the end of his journey.

With the aid of Rex’s friendship and a renewed hope for the future, Maureen guides Harold through the final punishing days of the pilgrimage and the acceptance of Queenie’s death. By the end of the novel, Maureen is transformed. Instead of compulsively cleaning their house, she tenderly washes Harold’s battered body. In place of harsh words, she offers him the gift of silence to process his grief. Though Maureen did not undergo the same drastic physical transformation as Harold, her emotional renovation is at least as dynamic as her husband’s, if not more so. As they stand united in the end, Harold and Maureen learn to choose unity over division and joy over melancholy in seeing what they endured and survived.

Queenie is at first a mysterious character. Her letter provokes a strong emotional response in Harold and one of contempt in Maureen. It is unclear whether Harold and Queenie once had a romantic connection. Her character develops only through Harold’s disjointed memories as he describes how their professional relationship developed into a genuine friendship. Though her name is not at all indicative of her plain appearance, as her character develops, the reader understands her to be a person of high moral character who is confident in herself and has a quirky personality: “[…] she had been an old-fashioned sort of person. Quiet, and always wearing a brown wool suit, even in the summer months” (44). Harold is at first drawn to her out of a sense of decency and pity when he finds her crying in the supply closet. However, as they become work partners, and Harold sees her perform her job confidently despite her coworkers’ bullying, he comes to admire and respect Queenie and enjoys her lively company. Queenie is the impetus for Harold’s pilgrimage, but as he walks the path to her hospice in Berwick, the journey becomes less about keeping his friend alive and more about saving himself.

As the narrative progresses, the reader learns that Maureen resented Harold’s relationship with Queenie because he let his guard down around her and gave her the attention he was not giving to his wife. Once Maureen reveals the secret that she kept hidden for 20 years, the true depth of Queenie’s character is clear. She recognized Harold was deeply depressed, so when Napier discovered his ruined clown collection, Queenie quickly jumped in to take the blame for her friend. She sacrificed the career she loved and worked so hard to attain to save Harold from self-destruction. As Harold walks, he thinks back on his friendship with Queenie, one of the first people in his life to see the good in him. She saw him as a gentleman and a good man, two traits he could never see in himself. Queenie, through simple acts of friendship like bringing him treats and singing songs backward to make him laugh, began to mend Harold’s broken heart long before he knew he needed rescue.

Queenie transforms from a silent tension running through the narrative to a heroic presence in Harold’s life, but the reader finally meets her in her final moments of life, paralyzed and mute in a hospice bed. Instead of Harold’s fantasy of finding Queenie in a chair gazing out at the sunny garden, he sees his once strong, courageous friend reduced to a shell of her former self with the smell of approaching death nearby. Harold makes his peace with his inability to save her and walks away having said little to the woman who gave up so much for him to survive. The novel is narrated in the close third person, focusing mostly on Harold’s and Maureen’s points of view for the duration of the story. In the end, the point of view shifts to Queenie briefly as she enters her final moments of life and reflects on who she was:

Once she had been a woman called Queenie Hennessy. She did sums, and wrote with an impeccable hand. She had loved a few times, and she had lost, and that was all as it should be. She had touched life, played with it a little, but it is a slippery bugger, and finally we must close the door, and leave it behind (313).

With her dying breaths, Queenie comes to terms with her small life, showing that an ordinary person’s self-sacrifice and willingness to open up to others can leave an extraordinary impact on the world. 

Rex is Harold and Maureen’s newly widowed neighbor whom Harold first describes as melancholy, anxious, and a bit annoying. It appears Harold and Maureen did little to reach out to the man in the wake of his wife’s death from a brain tumor, further highlighting how withdrawn the couple is: “Rex had been widowed six months ago, at about the time of Harold’s retirement. Since Elizabeth’s death, he liked to talk about how hard life was. He liked to talk about it at great length” (8). Rex and Harold speak of landscaping and little else as Rex witnesses the beginning of Harold’s epic journey when he walks out the door toward the mailbox. Noticing Harold never returned, in the days afterward, he calls Maureen daily to check on him. She finds his calls a nuisance but instantly feels guilty for lying to him. Maureen’s admission to Rex about the trouble in her marriage is the first step in her healing process as she learns to tell the truth to others and herself.

Rex teaches Maureen how to be a human in the world again. He takes her out to dinner and for long walks along the seashore and encourages her to return to her love of gardening. Rex allows Maureen space to be vulnerable and share her deepest fears and regrets. Like Queenie, Rex takes small actions that make a large impact on a person’s life. By simply offering his presence in friendship and a listening ear, he inspires great change in Maureen’s life. Through Rex, the author emphasizes the importance of community. In the wake of David’s death, Harold and Maureen shut out their community, and their isolation led to disastrous consequences for each of them individually and for them jointly as a couple. Platonic relationships between men and women can be rare in fiction. Through the friendships between Harold and Queenie and Maureen and Rex, the author displays the importance of the love and intimacy that can be found in kinship with those just outside the front door.