Thursday 26 April 2012

Rachel Joyce in conversation about The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry is one of those special books that only comes along once in a while. Male or female, young or old, I can’t think of anyone who wouldn’t love it.

Rachel Joyce’s debut novel has inspired such devotion that on a drizzly Monday night (World Book Night, in fact) scores of us grabbed our umbrellas and dashed off to Abingdon Library in Oxfordshire to hear more about her writing.

Rachel was introduced by Alison Barrow, director of media relations at publishing house Transworld, who confided that during the course of her 25-year publishing career she has never experienced “such love for a book” from readers.

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry is the touching, uplifting story of a man in his sixties who leaves home one morning to post a letter to Queenie Hennessy, a friend he hasn't seen for 20 years. She's dying, and on the spur of the moment he resolves to walk from one end of the country to the other to see her. He has no walking boots, no map, no compass and no mobile phone, but he’s adamant that he’s going to keep on walking till he gets there.

Rachel, a tiny figure with a mass of dark hair, started her career as an actress. Over the past 16 years she’s written more than 20 original afternoon plays for BBC Radio 4 and, as she told us this week, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry began life as a radio play. She starting writing it for her father when he was dying of cancer - "but I'm not sure he knew." After it was broadcast she realised that there was a lot she hadn’t said in the play “that I wanted to say” and decided to turn the 7,000-word drama into a 100,000-word novel. Best of all, it meant she could write about what was going on in her characters’ heads, which she couldn’t do in a play.

It took her a year to write the book and she had no idea if anyone would ever read it. As she explained: “Just as Harold’s walk was a leap of blind faith, so writing the book was for me.” She'd throw herself into writing the moment her four children left for school each morning and was completely taken over by it. Sometimes, when she got ideas while she was driving, she’d ask her children to jot them down for her. “I couldn’t stop thinking about it,” she said. “It was like having knitting in my head. You know you won’t have any peace till it’s done. I felt I had to write a book with my heart in it – true to what I feel, true to what I see, true to what I love.”

Rachel is ultra-disciplined when she’s writing. She works in a shed (now painted “an aesthetically pleasing pale blue”) in the garden of her Gloucestershire home. “But sometimes I have to be at the kitchen table,” she said. “And I have sometimes been known to write at the cinema while my children are watching a film.”

From Harold Fry’s starting point in Devon to his Berwick-upon-Tweed destination, Rachel writes beautifully about the English countryside.  A Londoner by background, she moved out of the city when, pregnant with her third child, she suddenly found herself pushing a buggy across the South Circular to get to “a tiny green patch.” Now she and her husband live on a farm in a peaceful valley - she’d left her children at home that evening feeding four orphan lambs. “When I was writing the book I was writing about my feelings about the land and the sky,” she said. “I increasingly don’t want to be inside.”

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce (Doubleday, £12.99)

PS. A huge thank you to the lovely staff at Abingdon Library for saving me a ticket.

9 comments:

  1. It sounds a lovely book, and a moving one.

    To be honest, I hadn't heard about it until you mentioned it at the beginning of the week, but I shall make a point of adding it to my To Be Read pile.

    Liz X

    ReplyDelete
  2. Great and fitting review, Emma. I loved Rachel Joyce's book, too, and was going to write a review when all I could think of to say was: "Buy it. Read it. Enjoy it."

    The characterisation was a joy from the very first scene and I felt as though I, too, was taking this physical and emotional walk alongside Harold, my new friend. At the end, I enjoyed a great feeling of hope and a sense of not taking the small details, of life and of nature, for granted.

    I wished I could have heard her talk at Abingdon but I'll look out for Rachel Joyce's appearances.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks so much, Tessa. I completely agree with you. It's one of those books that is so good that all you need to do really is tell everyone to read it.

      Delete
  3. Another tip top recommendation! Thank you Emma - it is now on my Amazon wish list.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thank you for commenting, Cari-Jane. As you can probably tell, I loved this book. Let me know what you think when you have read it.

      Delete
  4. thanks for the link up - I have put in the title of the book for you.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Thanks for a lovely write-up of the event, Rachel was totally enchanting, and we have received some lovely reviews of this book from our customers...I've linked your review from our blog.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks very much, Nicki. It was a wonderful evening and I adore Rachel's book (as you can tell from the blog!) Do let me know about any future events!

      Delete

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...