The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce was one of my favorite books of 2024, and I’ve been meaning to read its sequel for some time now. I thought Read of England as appropriate an occasion as any. Love Song is a mirror book to Unlikely Pilgrimage: just as Harold’s unplanned walk across England to visit Queenie on her deathbed was a way for him to sojourn with his past, so too do the series of postcards from him force Queenie to face her own. It’s a past that is shared in part, and separate in part — and sometimes both at the same time. It’s a story told across time, as we follow Queenie’s life inside the nursing home as she waits for death or Harold — whichever arrives first — and her ruminations on the past that Harold’s trip is inspiring. Because her story is set in a home filled with the aging and those approaching death, reflections on death, dying, and meaning are a strong part of this story. As it happens, it’s been so long since I read Unlikely Pilgrimage that I’d forgotten their story aside from Harold making the journey to see her, so I was largely experiencing this afresh. I don’t want to go into too much detail because of spoilers, but let’s say that beyond their close friendship as former coworkers, Harold and Queenie shared a connection he wasn’t fully aware of—one that led to tragedy, remorse, and Queenie’s long retreat. Until being diagnosed with an aggressive and terminal cancer, in fact, Queenie had been living in a sea-cottage. Instead of being a recluse, though, she’d found meaning in trying to create beauty amid desolation, and in her connections to the people in the village nearby. This thread of her life is beautiful in its own right — though of course, having read Unlikely Pilgrimage, I was waiting for Harold’s arrival with breath just as bated as hers and her fellow residents of the care facility. This proved to be as wise and sweet as the original, but it adds a lot to the original because we’re seeing Harold from outside himself, and his intense grief over the parts of the past — a grief that expresses itself in rage as well as sobs — surfaces here in a way that it didn’t, quite, in the original, but now Queenie’s pain and love are added to it for a sad, but lovely, story.

Quotations

So I said to the bindweed, You want to be in my garden and I don’t want you. I can’t dig you out. If I poison you, I run the risk of poisoning the plants I want to keep. We have a problem that will not go away. Something needs to change. Beside every bindweed stem, I pushed in a hazel stake. About twenty in all. The bindweed shot up these supports and rewarded me with lilac trumpets of flowers striped with white. I wouldn’t say I loved the bindweed. I certainly didn’t trust it. It would have scrambled all over my pinks the moment I stopped offering new stakes. But sometimes you have to respect the fact that even though you don’t want bindweed you have it, and you’d better get along side by side. It was the same with Napier.

We write ourselves certain parts and then keep playing them as if we have no choice. But a tardy person can become a punctual one, if she chooses. You don’t have to keep being the thing you have become. It is never too late.

Now that I’d stopped my work, I noticed that the doctor of philosophy was dressed in sensible walking gear and a red spotted bow tie. It was as if the walking clothes were saying one thing about him and the tie was shouting another. I liked that.

“Don’t try to see ahead to the nice bits. Don’t try to see ahead to the end. Stay with the present, even if it is not so good. And consider how far you’ve already come.”

“What do you do with a thousand followers?” He settled in the chair beside mine. “I had a wife and a best friend. That was all I needed.”

I accepted that sometimes you cannot clear the past completely. You must live alongside your sorrow.