The unlikely pilgrimage of Harold Fry

Rachel Joyce has created a real winner here - especially for Kate and I who found walking the perfect retirement activity around Lake Superior.  Harold would not have been any competition, in fact as the walk from south to north across England unfolds it is obvious Harold would take years to go around the lake, but that is not the story.  It is not an athlete, it is not a person who has a real goal.

This is a 65 year old man who has never done anything of any significance, a man who blended in as his best asset,  and in retirement, he probably would have filled a space and then died without notice.

But one day a letter comes from an old friend - a woman who had once did him a great favor.  She is dying and he must post a letter to her.  But he cannot find it in himself to post that letter.  Instead he walks from post to post until he meets a young woman at a gas station who inadvertently sends him on a quest.

If he walks, Queenie will not die!  So he writes her, he writes his abandoned wife and he begins a quest that becomes noticed - publicized and then gains life and stature even as it centers on the people who choose to join his pilgrimage and not on him.

He is truly a lost person and through the walk keeps Queenie alive, but more importantly finds life again in his marriage and retirement.  It is a story of personal discovery and is one of the best told tales I have read in years.  

A definite 10 for my book ratings. 

Settler's Creek

Carl Nixon is a New Zealand author and a very good one based on this book.   It is a book that has its own controversy as the subplot tries to state that the white settlers have as much history and relation to the land as the Maori. This is sure to be controversial and could provide debate in a country where there is already tension between the two majority races, but as a story it is the basis for a wonderful tension.

A boy commits suicide and we never really learn about who is is and why he did it, but we do learn about the parents - the biological father - Maori and the father who raised him - white settler family.  It is the tension between the fathers that leads the reader through the story, the country and the cultures.

It is the burial that becomes the source of friction - the desire to have the boy buried in the land of his ancestors and in a funeral that reflects that ancestry.  But which is the right ancestry?  Who will get their way?  The body is stolen, the body is carted around the country.  The boy gets more attention than he ever did when he was alive (we assume) and the two fathers must resort to every means that they can conceive to put their son in the ground of their choosing.

It would be a shame if this book took on racist overtones but it can.  My warning to the reader is to avoid going there and just enjoy the implausibility and the angst that carries you along with the white father - Box, and realize that we never get a complete connection with the Maori - Tipene.

Where White Horses Gallup

This wonderful novel by by Beatrice MacNeil is a multi-layered look at the impact of WWII on the small town of Beinn Barra in Cape Breton.  US readers do not give enough attention to Canada and the stories of their war heroes and lives.  This would be a good place to begin.

Four young men are the centerpiece of the story - three who enlist with all the false expectations of youth and one who determines to avoid the war and hide from the authorities.  None of the four escapes the price of war, the destruction of family, the sense of loss, the price of conscience.

It is a story without a hero.  It is a novel of brave youth, the waste of war, the devastation of family.  The four young men suffer different fates, but each is left with a hollow sense of what the world and life is all about.

Set in a basic fishing village where life has simple rules and tough demands allows the narrative to explore the journey of each of the four young men and to care about each one as well.  It also lets us feel the sadness of different kinds of losses and the confusion of victory when the victors can never be the same.

Great writing, wonderful sense of place, and excellent pace to this novel.