The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce

     The book is a “journey” book – Harold discovers more and more about himself as he walks from Devon to Berwick-on-Tweed, and the reader gradually finds out about the secrets in his life. It is certainly formulaic, but still very fresh. A good read, absorbing and lively: people who would not have chosen to read it themselves were surprised to find how they enjoyed it. One, in her 20s, was surprised to find herself relating to someone more than forty years older than herself. Some found Harold painfully awkward, and annoyingly so – he could not even take the step of buying proper walking-shoes. Some readers asked if this was realistic or unbelievably exaggerated, but one said she knows someone who is in fact exactly like that. As for buying walking-shoes, it underlines the fact that people have familiar, comfortable things that they will always refuse to change for something new even if it would be much better.

     Harold and Maureen both lacked the capacity for self-reflection. They actually loved each other but had no idea how to express their love, let alone develop it, and as a result each felt unloved by the other. Their love was embryonic. Interestingly enough, at the very end of the book they revert to, and replay, their first meeting; their love appears to be adolescent again, unmatured, almost reduced to the mere “chemistry” of their first attraction. But before this they have gone through the explanations and confessions that they needed to make to each other.

     Obviously, Harold’s disastrous non-relationship with his appalling parents was the reason why he could not manage his relationship with Maureen – or David. After his mother had left, his father had introduced a succession of “aunts” into the house. Then “his father had presented him with an overcoat on his sixteenth birthday and shown him the door.” (p. 158), which was why he had never even had a proper education.

**SPOILER ALERT**     David’s suicide was his attempt to destroy not only himself, but both his parents too. He was manipulative, playing each parent off against the other; he was more intelligent than either of them, but this only made him despise them. This left him deeply unhappy and led him to ruin himself with drink and drugs. Yet Harold loved David just as much as Maureen did and, twenty years on, still agonises over his loss.

      Harold blames himself for David’s suicide, and for the apparent failure of his marriage with Maureen, and for Queenie’s departure from the brewery. He is tormented by these things but, perhaps surprisingly, his self-blame does not produce bitterness in him.

     Harold’s and Maureen’s lives are extremely small, extremely narrow, but also extraordinary. “... a life might appear ordinary simply because the person living it had done so for a long time” (p.180).

The amount of detail is satisfying and not over-done. Especially, of course, the descriptions of the sky, the plants, that Harold gets more and more involved in as he walks.

     Then comes the existential question: if Maureen has lived Harold’s life for him for most of their marriage, “Then who am I?” By getting away from her, he found out. He had not had any early relationships in order to be able to work out his own self.

     It is through some of the different people Harold meets and talks to that Harold – and the reader – discover more and more about Queenie’s cancer. **SPOILER ALERT** This prepares to some extent for Harold’s actual arrival and seeing Queenie, but it is still a shock, and the reader has to ask why it has to be such a horrible one – her tongue cut out, half her throat gone, and her face ballooned with a tumour?

     Harold is non-judgemental throughout: he helped the people who confided in him by being honest and not opinionated. He has an unexpressed well of compassion within, and suffers with people’s sufferings. “... he knew that in meeting her, and listening, he was carrying another weight in his heart and he wasn’t sure how much more of that he could take” (p. 148).

     His compassion grows as he walks on: “He had learned that it was the smallness of people that filled him with wonder and tenderness, and the loneliness of that too. The world was made up of people putting one foot in front of the other” (p. 180).
     The journey is a pilgrimage in many senses, and Harold learns the meaning of freedom of spirit, firstly in his need to be in the open, and then in his realisation that he has to get rid of all the things he is carrying with him, all the props that he has been relying on. In the end, significantly, he loses his precious compass.

     The question of religious faith runs through the book, and is never resolved, although the nuns praying for Queenie do point to the affirmative at the end of the book. “If we can’t be open, Maureen thought, if we can’t accept what we don’t know, then there really is no hope.”

The Olive Grove by Deborah Rohan

The Olive Grove – a Palestinian Story, by Deborah Rohan. London: Saqi, 2008.

This book will leave the reader wanting to do some research and find out more about Israel/Palestine, to get a larger picture of the rights and wrongs. It is hard to be sure which parts of the book are historically accurate, and which are fiction; a lot of background knowledge would be needed to be able to sort it out. The book does not actually claim to be history, but a fictionalised account of one family’s story – though my library, interestingly, has it firmly in the “History” section, and large parts of the book are devoted to people explaining Palestine’s situation, and its causes, to one another at length.

To start on a positive note, this book is a good read: the story is engaging and claims one's interest. However, it is not good literature. Some of the incidents, and many of the characters’ reactions, seem stilted and contrived. The prose is patchy at best, often hopelessly awkward, and sometimes the author simply can’t work out the structure of her own sentences, as on p. 97: “He had repeatedly blamed himself for Hagop’s departure on his own need to have tobacco.” Rohan also has the widespread American habit of using the first word that comes to mind, without checking what it really means. E.g. “languish” when she really meant “pause” or simply “lie”: again and again, “Haniya languished in the doorway”, “olives languished on a plate”. Or “donned”: “Raji spotted the soldiers donned in red and white headdresses”. There are plenty of other examples.

It does not convey the reality of Palestinian life and culture, or make the Palestinian character come alive – rather than being a “Palestinian Story”, as its subtitle claims, it’s a family story, and the family is an American one with Palestinian bits added on for decoration. All the characters are drawn as Americans, which comes across as completely out of place – e.g., on p. 66, Hagop the Armenian says to Kamel who is reproaching himself for leaving Hagop to be attacked by two Turks, “Don’t do that to yourself, Kamel. Things happen. You were there for me.” This is a late-twentieth-century American talking, not an early-twentieth-century Armenian. The whole atmosphere of the book is very Western. There is scene after scene of the Moghrabi children playing, which can end up being merely tedious; the author was presumably trying to build up a picture of family life in Palestine, but lacked the skill to do it successfully. A much better picture of another culture is achieved in Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson, poorly written though it is.

The action in The Olive Grove is slow and often plodding. Even when Kamel is in prison, there is not much of a feel of what it is like because only the most obvious and superficial, almost clichéd, details are given. Fair enough, the author was re-working what she had been told by Hamzi, and maybe didn’t have very much to go on – but did she try to find out? The reader repeatedly wonders whether Rohan had done any investigation or information-gathering at all – did she have any idea of the real scene in a Palestinian refugee camp? She talks about the stench – but then Hamzi got used to it, and that is all. She doesn’t explain how these destitute people could find money to buy his cigarettes, yet he seems to have supported himself by selling them.

A question about the Moghrabi family which does not seem to be explained in the book is why they were not practising Muslims. The reader also notices that the Moghrabis do not represent the majority of Palestinians, in that they are a rich family, and even in exile in Lebanon, after their money has run out, they are still only relatively poor – they never live in the refugee camp themselves.

The Palestinian people in the book appear too perfect, and the Jewish people and others are demonized.  It could be a good book for softening attitudes towards Islam, but leads one to dislike the Jews intensely – though it does distinguish between (bad) Zionists and “good Jews”, in the person of Rabbi Moussa.

Other “good” characters in the book are the Arab Christians who hid and protected their Jewish or Palestinian neighbours at the risk of their own lives.  Dr White, the American director of Hamzi’s school in Lebanon, championed Hamzi and tried to help his Palestinian pupils react positively instead of going for retaliation and revenge.

The book raises the whole question of Jewish identity, how it comes to be wrapped up with that particular piece of land – the Promised Land – and the question of anti-Semitism and the results of the Second World War. If the Palestinians are actually Philistines, then their claim to that land goes back even further than the claim of the Jews does – though the Jews’ claim is not based on antiquity so much as a God-given promise. However, the Jews in Israel appear to be Zionists first and worshippers of God only a very poor second, if that. The book does not mention the fact that Jews and Palestinians are, by all accounts, very closely related, but this is a fact that it is important to bear in mind.

Readers who come to this book knowing nothing about the British in Palestine will be shocked at how they behaved, not only on the large scale, but also in the story of Lieutenant Bainbridge and Mahmoud’s and Kamel’s rifle (which ends on pp. 280-1). The picture is of arrogant British supremacy: “I want your property and I am stronger than you, so I’m going to have it.” In dealing with the situation in Palestine after the Second World War, the British clearly did not know what they were dealing with. They were seriously to blame for this, because they should have taken pains to find out since they had assumed responsibility for the country. They made and broke promises to both sides, both the Jews and the Palestinians.

It is also clear that the UN is at least as much to blame for the situation of Israel/Palestine as the British.

The same achingly desperate story of wrongs could be written and told by a Jewish family. Stories of atrocities by Palestinians are part of what every Jewish person knows. It is worth bearing in mind, however, that this book was written in America for Americans, who are used to Israel being “right” because the US supports it (not the other way round). Do we get a slightly more balanced picture in the UK? At least we hear a lot more from the Palestinian side. Neither side (taken as a whole) can ever see that two wrongs don’t make a right. However, Kamel and Hamzi are “enlightened” Palestinians and can see it more clearly than most. Although they don’t often make the international news, there are people on both sides who are working to unite the two communities at the local level, just as there were people doing the same in Northern Ireland throughout the Troubles.

Finally, there is an absolutely amazing episode on pp. 420-431. Fifty years on, Hamzi, with his adult daughter, goes back to Israel-Palestine on a brief visit from America. They go to his former family home and find it is a café, owned by a Palestinian. When he tells the owner, George, who he is,

George’s face grows ashen. He stands up, nods an ‘excuse me’ to Ruba, and leaves the room. Moments later he returns, holding a set of keys. ‘Please, sir, the restaurant is yours.’

‘What? I don’t understand.’

‘If you have returned to your home, after these many years, I will gladly turn over my business to you. I do not wish to prosper from anyone so hurt by the Israeli occupation. My family could not flee. For many years we suffered, but at least we had the good fortune to remain in our country. Now we are allowed to run our own businesses.’ He nods his head again. ‘Consider the restaurant yours.’

Hamzi has to refuse, of course, since he is only being allowed into Israel on a short tourist visa. Did the author (and did Hamzi himself) see that this episode was an astonishing mirror image of the whole miserable question that lies behind the book? After many years of bitter exile, the Jews came back to what had once been their homeland. The present inhabitants, the Palestinians, who had a perfect legal and historical right to the land, could either welcome them as long-lost brothers and hand over the land to them,… or resist them bitterly. The Jews could have treated the Palestinians as friends and neighbours, each side aiming to share generously and equably and treat the other with humanity, fairness, and compassion. But because each side saw the other from the start not as brothers but as enemies – invaders, occupiers – the story of Israel/Palestine has been tragic from the start and continues to be one of hatred and killing, with no real solution imaginable even now.

Tara Road by Maeve Binch

Maeve Binchy, Tara Road

The discussion about Tara Road focused mainly on four points: Characters; quality of writing; what value there might be in reading a well-told story with bad morals; and whether we would recommend it to other people. It’s only fair to say that opinions on all four points were very diverse! What follows is a bit of a summary, leaving out all the debating.

The characters provided plenty to talk about: everybody disliked and despised Danny Lynch for his all-round cheating – basically the person he was in love with was himself –, and Rosemary Ryan for pretending to be Ria’s friend while having an ongoing affair with her husband; it was hard to understand how anyone could be so steely and selfish.

Some people thought Ria was excellently drawn and others felt she was too naïve to be true; it was noticeable that the house-swap enabled her to change conclusively and face life in a way she had never done before.

For more than one reader, the catastrophically inappropriate schoolboy Brian was a favourite. Colm Barry was intended to be a sympathetic and attractive character, but there was too much missing that one would want to know about him, as though time or space constraints had forced the author to leave, or cut, parts of the story out.

At least one reader felt that all the older-generation Irishwomen – Nora Johnson, Danny’s mother, Martin Moran’s mother – were depicted as poor-spirited and bitter. We talked about that generation of Irish people – women – in Catholic parishes in England: a generation of talented women, hard workers, unbelievably generous with their time and efforts, who have found that there is no-one to take over from them because their children, the next generation, are totally different and have no intention of following in their footsteps in any way at all.

The question arose of why Danny turned out the way he did: was it because his parents seemed incapable of family relationships and had no “parenting skills” whatsoever, and so he had had no proper family upbringing?

It was felt by some that the characters were shallow stereotypes, a neatly-chosen range of stock figures with which to decorate the stage, and that there was simply not enough depth in them to make a satisfying read.

The quality of writing: like all Binchy novels it’s popular fiction. It makes exciting reading, and Binchy manages to keep all the characters before our eyes, with short episodes, conversations and events, moving rapidly from one to another all the time. 

The introduction of Marilyn, and her story, halfway through the book, is very well done indeed by means of the telephone conversation.

The mirroring between Ria and Marilyn is too obviously contrived for art: each simultaneously goes through a sense of anger towards the other, and then each simultaneously discovers a highly significant fact about the other’s life, which she realises she can never tell the other about; each then reacts by feeling protective and positive towards the other.

On the other hand, there are sentences here and there throughout the book where the reader feels, “She just dashed this down meaning to go back and write it properly later, but then forgot…” Plus what we said about   the character of Colm Barry above.

Why read a book like this – easy reading, good story, about people with really bad morals? For people who read it uncritically, just for entertainment, there is a lot in it that would be really harmful, simply because it presents really wrong choices and situations as ordinary – the way everyone lives, the things everyone does. So people are helped to accept and do these things themselves and never see anything wrong with them. That is the way immoral literature, at the highbrow, middlebrow and lowbrow levels, has been working for the last century or so, and has done a huge amount of harm to society.

But if you read Maeve Binchy critically, it can, we thought, be very useful too. In the first place, it helps to put ourselves in the places of the many people we know who do live in that way and understand where they are at. Secondly, you can ask yourself, “At this point, this person made a really bad choice. What would have been a good choice for him or her to make? What could have helped him or her to make it? What would have been some likely results?” A very useful exercise indeed in many ways!

Would we recommend this book to anyone else, and if so, to whom and what for? It turned out that none of us would recommend it just as a good read. It would be an entertaining and relaxing book to read, for instance, while convalescing - but there are plenty of other books which are equally entertaining, more relaxing, better written, and without the unpleasantness of this one. It has its usefulness only as a critical teaching tool in the right hands.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, by Mark Haddon

Monday 11^th June 2012

Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, 2003

People found this book a very compelling read. Some were surprised that it is a children’s book as they were not sure what children would make of it. It certainly helps one to understand a bit better when people look odd or behave oddly.

Some days before the meeting, Ranmali sent round a link to an online questionnaire pointing to certain character features on the Asperger’s Syndrome / autistic spectrum. The website makes it clear that many people who do not actually suffer from those disorders can have plenty of these features. Sure enough, Helena, Ana and Irene all found they had scores of between 24 and 32 – relatively high! Introduction and link copied at the end of this post.

Notes and reflections stemming from our discussion:

Christopher needs to work by rules – loves mathematics and science; when Rhodri asks how he’s doing, ‘I said “I’m doing very well, thank you,” which is what you are supposed to say.’ He wants there to be rules for understanding human facial expressions, and cannot deal with metaphors – and so dislikes and despises them; dislikes novels.

No understanding of love at all. “I know Father loves me because...” and a check-list. When he becomes afraid of his father, he works out that he will have to go to his mother after discounting other possibilities on his list, not because he loves her; he cannot respond to her when she wants to hold his hand.

He sees people – his parents, Siobhan – in totally utilitarian terms, as people who are, or are not, useful to him. When he gets exam panic, “I wanted to hit somebody or stab them with my Swiss Army Knife, but there wasn’t anyone to hit or stab with my Swiss Army Knife except the Reverend Peters and he was very tall and if I hit him or stabbed him with my Swiss Army Knife he wouldn’t be my invigilator for the rest of the exam.”

His happiest dream is a world without any human being except himself, and possibly other people like him, where everyone else has died or been killed.

He wants to reduce everything to something that works by rules and is therefore intelligible – his mind, other people, and the universe; and concludes that belief in God is just stupidity.

Haddon is a professed atheist. He has said that Christopher isn’t meant to be autistic or Aspergers Syndrome, specifically. To a believer, it seems as though Christopher is a portrait of what happens to people who close their minds to the spirit.

Both his parents really love him. His father is determined to rebuild their relationship no matter how long it takes. His mother, although she walked out, is constant in writing to him even though she never gets a reply. The spelling mistakes in her letters make you feel you know her. She doesn’t handle Christopher well at all (and recognises this). His father handles him much better (and recognises it, because ‘we’re not that different, me and you’).

There is a lot of irony in the book in that Christopher describes his father’s reactions and behaviour without any understanding of what he is feeling, but the reader understands Ed and suffers with him.

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Take The AQ Test
Psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen and his colleagues at Cambridge's Autism Research Centre have created the Autism-Spectrum Quotient, or AQ, as a measure of the extent of autistic traits in adults. In the first major trial using the test, the average score in the control group was 16.4. Eighty percent of those diagnosed with autism or a related disorder scored 32 or higher. The test is not a means for making a diagnosis, however, and many who score above 32 and even meet the diagnostic criteria for mild autism or Asperger's report no difficulty functioning in their everyday lives.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/9.12/aqtest.html