The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

This is a delightful book, wittily and sharply written, and also full of humanity. It's the story of a retired man who, while at breakfast one morning, receives an unexpected letter from an old friend. Before the day is over he has decided to walk from the South of England to the North, in order to 'save' her from the cancer she has. His harridan of a wife is naturally puzzled by his sudden change of character, and is angrier at him than ever.  However, nothing in this book is as it seems at first, and gradually we discover that there are secrets we've not been party to early in the story that change our views of the two main characters, Harold and Maureen.  
 This could have been just a 'road' story, but Rachel Joyce makes it much more than that by gradually unpeeling the backgrounds of her characters' story. It's also a novel full of faith and hope and charity and forgiveness, even though the two main characters more than once claim not to be ‘religious.’ I’m not sure why this needs to be said: at the end of the book, Harold, who has by then walked hundreds of miles to ‘save’ his old - and long-lost - friend, Queenie, finds her dying in a hospice run by nuns, and the nuns are presented as warm and loving, not as caricatures as is so often the case in modern novels.
The book is perhaps more humanist in tone than religious: it has a basic feeling of the good that’s in humanity, even though some characters are either well off the rails (certainly at the beginning) or get right for a while and then go off again.  But the people Harold meets on pilgrimage, for the most part, are helpful and giving, without requiring anything of him.  And he learns to live with less and less as he goes on, because he knows that there will be people willing to provide for him.
It’s a complicated book – Joyce isn't however trying to say that everyone is good, and the world is all as it should be. Harold only proceeds with his journey because of an exaggeration a young and somewhat disinterested woman in the local garage tells him. Perhaps it's even a lie. We learn over time that neither Harold nor Maureen are entirely truth-tellers; their lies are hidden from us, the readers, and only gradually revealed. Furthermore, they haven’t acknowledged these lies to each other over more than twenty years, nor asked for forgiveness.  Neither of these characters are ‘saints’ so it’s not surprising they don’t call themselves ‘religious’, but the reader is certainly in sympathy with them. As we learn more and more about the crisis that precipitated the downfall of their marriage, we realise that Maureen, who starts out in the story as an absolute horror to live with, has never acknowledged that it’s not her husband’s fault that she’s the way she is, even though she’s blamed him. When she starts admitting the truth she begins to change, though not overnight.  
 Is ‘Queenie’ a saint, like those saints of old whose shrines people made pilgrimages to?  We never learn more than what Harold tells us. Given the nature of the other characters, it’s probably unlikely that she's a saint in any sense, but we do learn that she's had courage to stand up in the past to the only real 'villain' in the story. 
There's a sense of 'cleanliness' about this book.  In spite of the behaviour of the main characters towards each other, neither has ever been unfaithful in their marriage. This may be surprising given what we learn about the nature of Harold's upbringing, and the seeming designs the widower next door might have on Maureen.  But it makes a refreshing change: so many novels rely on characters committing adultery as an excuse for crisis or action.
Joyce is about to publish her second novel.  I'm pretty sure I'll be reading it!

North by Northwest

I watched Hitchcock’s North by Northwest again the other night. I don’t think I’d actually seen most of it since it was first shown; some of it I caught up with on television a few years ago, but obviously not all of it as there were many scenes that I’d forgotten.
It’s the sort of Hitchcock movie where the plot is irrelevant; the set-pieces are what make it: the climax on the Mt Rushmore faces (very little of which was actually shot there); the wonderful sequence where the crop-dusting plane attacks Cary Grant in the middle of nowhere; the nonsense Grant makes of a very dignified auction. The film was virtually written around these sequences – it’s one of the few Hitchcock movies that isn’t based on a book. (Not that he ever stuck to the books: in most cases he took a few key ideas and made his own film.)
North by Northwest epitomises Hitchcock’s style. The suspense, you say. Well, yes, up to a point, but once you know what’s going to happen, the suspense goes out the window. No, I meant Hitchcock’s humour. Very few of his movies lack some aspect of humour (except perhaps I Confess, The Wrong Man and Psycho – and even Psycho has a few humorous moments early in the piece).
For instance, it was a nice surprise to find that in one of his earlier movies (Young and Strange, I think it was) there isn’t just the suspense, but some wonderful moments of humour – much of involving children, who often play a humorous role in his movies. Both the American and English movies have some glorious humorous sequences – North by Northwest is full of them (with Grant at his ironic best), but Stage Fright, which I caught up with again recently too, has some great moments, particularly those featuring Alistair Sim, whom apparently Hitchcock didn’t take to and objected to his ‘mugging’ – in spite of that, there’s a great deal of Sim in the movie, along with a marvellous scene he shares with the inimitable Joyce Grenfell. I still remember how delighted I was to find her in a Hitchcock movie when I first saw Stage Fright years ago.
Back to NBN. The cast is great. Eva Marie Saint – who never appeared in another Hitchcock movie – is wonderful: elusive, persuasive, romantic; a quiet surface hinting at considerable passion beneath. Why he chose to use Tippi Hendren, for instance, in later blonde roles remains a mystery, when Saint was available. James Mason does a subtle villain, and Jessie Royce Landis (only a couple of years Cary Grant’s senior) plays his mother with considerable aplomb. Cary Grant (who mugs almost as well as Alistair Sim at times) thoroughly enjoys his role, even though he was far too old for the part – but Hitchcock delighted in using him, in spite of that.
And the crop-dusting scene remains a triumph of crafty filmmaking: Grant is actually more in the studio than out of it during the sequence, even when he’s being chased by the plane; and an analysis of the scene, shot by shot, would reveal just how well planned the whole thing is – and how economically.