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Even though there are obstacles to overcome, at its heart, Maureen is a character-driven story. Creating complex and quirky characters is what Rachel Joyce does best. Themes From the moment I met Harold Fry, I didn't want to leave him. Impossible to put down.' Erica Wagner, The Times Read more Look Inside Details I would like you to read out the directions from your phone and I will write them down on a piece of paper. I’ll take my route from that.’ ” Alvin Straight was played by Richard Farnsworth, a Western and stunt actor, then 79 and terminally ill with metastasised prostate cancer in his bones, the paralysis of his legs visible in the film being real (Farnsworth took his own life a year later). Lynch loves the Midwest landscapes and the good people Alvin meets, and the whole film feels at once both natural and utterly rich and strange – truly miraculous, that pilgrimage. A better trip. This story continues the story of Harold Fry, with the main character in this his wife Maureen. It is through Maureen we learn more of her story, but also more of their story. Their loss, the grief that follows, as well as a realization that, perhaps it is time that she faces her grief, and so Maureen is the one who takes a journey - although not on foot as Harold had done.
Maybe, because it was shorter, or maybe because I am so emotionally attached to Queenie, I didn’t quite connect to this one in the same way.
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EC: Yeah. You've talked about your radio career, and you were also an actress when you were younger. But I think you published your debut when you were in your 50s, if I've done my math correctly. Maureen has her own issues, the main one being the loss of her and Harold's son, David. Maureen has never been able to deal with the grief of losing their son. Maureen finds out about a memorial to David at Queenie's Sea Garden. Maureen decides to take her own journey to go to this memorial and see it for herself. She is not as good with people as Harold and has difficulty on her journey. But she meets some wonderful people along the way. Her journey was remarkable. After retirement, Queenie had settled in a small home in northern England. She liked gardening and poured all of her energies into forming a beautiful garden. After Queenie's death, it became a community memorial garden bearing homage to people's loved ones. Maureen is interested in visiting it to see a driftwood marker dedicated to David, Maureen and Harold's son. This was David. This was him. This was angry; It was violent... Too fragile for the world and yet full of youth and complication and pomp and arrogance. She did not know how such a piece of wood could have survived the wind and rain and yet, secure in Queenie's Garden, it had held fast." RJ: And there are people who write to me and go, "Why does he not wear boots? I can't bear the fact he doesn't have proper boots." And then I have to say to people, "Well, it's a story and this is a little bit metaphorical." He wears his shoes, that's the whole point. He has to do it his way. He can't do the walk with walking boots because then he would be not being true to himself. Anyway, that's always my answer to the walking boot people.
But I do think a lot about those things, and I love being surprised by the writing process, which I constantly am. I mean, I attempt to plot and plan, but I'm a terrible planner. I can give you a really brilliant plotline once I've written the book. But I have to write the book to find out what works. And that means that for me, approaching the story from the outside and saying, "Well, this will happen, this will happen, this will happen because these are what's supposed to happen" doesn't really work for me because it's in the writing it that I get right in there and I work out what the characters would do. Rachel Joyce is deeply attuned to the complex rhythms of life and love and she sublimates this understanding, sentence by delicate, powerful, glistening sentence into an unforgettable story. It's beautiful all through, but the closing chapters are just astonishing, transcendent and hope-filled and life-affirming. I'll never forget this wonderful novel or the sunny, slightly teary day I spent reading it. Donal Ryan Rachel Joyce is so wise! She sees the 'essential loneliness of people' and digs into the causes of it. No matter what, they deserve respect. I am the richer for having read these books. Maureen is no tiptoe through the tulips, waving at butterflies type of woman. There has been too much hurt and embarrassment from her childhood belief that she was the center of the world and that she would be the one to conquer it every step of the way. As early as her first days in school she learned she wasn't all that after all and it was downhill from there. Once Harold and Maureen had their only son, she wanted to be the best parent to him but things did not work out at all. I think the term "difficult child" applied to both Maureen and David and that difficulty can lead to the term "difficult adult". But she’s trying to learn to be kind, make a nice comment even when unnecessary. She has seen herself (as well as her mother) and vows to do better.It’s been ten years of her trying to avoid facing this grief for what it is, all those years she’s been trying to hold it all inside, trying to reconcile how this came to be, and hoping that with changes to their surroundings she would find some peace. She changes everything in the bedroom, thinking that maybe new paint and storing the things that used to be in that room would take the pain away, only to realize that it is empty of the things that tied her to him. Her son, their son.
Maureen has never forgiven herself that she did not see how deeply troubled David was before he took his own life. She makes a journey by car to northern England to visit Queenie's garden which is now maintained by volunteers, and has no idea of how she will react emotionally. Maureen is a difficult woman who always found it challenging to relate to other people, but her journey is one of forgiveness and hope for the future. Rachel Joyce has done it again! She rounds of the trilogy perfectly in this novella. It’s beautifully written, it brings not only the journey alive but you feel as if you are travelling with Maureen. She is a somewhat spiky cactus, she finds friendship hard, she takes offence all too easily and has the ability to say completely the wrong thing. At the start you definitely hold her at arms length but the powerful writing allows us to glimpse beneath her armour and so you grow to understand her and her pain and I end up liking her much better at the end. She meets some lovely characters, a big shout out for Kate who features in Harold Fry who is a warm, wonderful, caring individual. Maureen learns much from her. This is a deceptively simple story of love, forgiveness, fulfilment and hope. I can't think of any other novelist quite as tender and compassionate as Rachel Joyce, who understands that miracle of transformation when human fragility becomes strength of spirit. Bel Mooney
But when he at last reaches the hospice where Queenie has been waiting, he decides not to go in, and the reader is told, by means of a confessional letter to the girl at the filling station, of another motive for the walk. His son David, unemployed after Cambridge and addicted to drink and drugs, committed suicide in the garden shed, where he was discovered by the father with whom he barely ever communicated, and whose life is now a protracted mourning. The same letter divulges that when he and Queenie were working as colleagues she had taken the blame for a misdemeanour committed by Harold. "I let her take the blame"(264).
Maureen Fry has settled into the quiet life she now shares with her husband Harold after his iconic walk across England. Now, ten years later, an unexpected message from the North disturbs her equilibrium again, and this time it is Maureen's turn to make her own journey. But Maureen, in terms of characters who kind of arrive, was definitely somebody who kind of marched into my imagination, I would say, and then kind of asked, "Well, what are you going to do about me?" This is a fitting and deeply moving end to the trilogy of Harold Fry. A portrait of a woman adrift in grief, it is as fragile as a songbird and just as beautiful. Sarah Winman This is touching, emotional, moving and sad as Maureen assesses herself, learns a lot and find the peace she craves in one really beautiful scene. She finds kindness and understanding in places she least expects it and the whole experience is heartwarming.Definitely recommend this to all who have read The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry and the Love Song of Queenie Hennessy as it completes Maureen’s story. The final novel in the Harold Fry trilogy, this is a heart-stopping story told from the view point of his wife Maureen as she takes her own journey and discovers how to reconnect with the world. Over the years I have been asked many times where he came from, just as I have been asked about Maureen, Queenie, and the young man, David, who is at the centre of their lives. The honest truth is that I don’t know. If they came from anywhere, I guess it was my unconscious. They started in a place of truth, or a place of private need, as many stories do, and grew from there into something that was half-known, and half-imagined. 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 had once joined a book club but she objected to the things they read, and gave up. There was always someone between her and everyone else and that was her son. This year he would have turned fifty.” Quiet Man Gets a Life and Also a Blister, review in The New York Times, 29 July 2012, retrieved 10 March 2014
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