Book Club member Sam went along to see Rachel Joyce at the Yeovil Literary Festival held at the Octagon Theatre. A future book club read will be 'The Unlikely Pilgramage of Harold Fry' so it was fantastic that Joyce was at the festival and members could pop along to hear her thoughts:
I have yet to meet anybody who has read 'The
Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry' who was disappointed. I've already read
this future book club read and loved it. This book could quite possibly fall in
my top ten or so reads ever. In my journal, I summed it up as a lovely,
beautiful read that makes you think, laugh and cry. That's all I'll give you
now, I'll save my actual review for Jan/Feb of next year but obviously when I
heard the author, Rachel Joyce, was participating in Yeovil Literacy Festival,
I was there!!
Joyce was here promoting the companion novel to Harold Fry, ‘The Love Song of Queenie Hennessy’, a book I'm now desperate to read! Listening to Joyce talk so fondly of her novels and writing was so inspiring. Her passion was obvious and contagious. She explained how she never planned a sequel to Fry but as she promoted that original book, people kept asking about Queenie and Joyce realised that it would be an injustice to leave Queenie as a character merely defined by her cancer. There was a whole character that she'd left otherwise unexplored, a character who too had undertaken a journey. There is a lot of description of rural England as Harold Fry walks to the other end of the country, Joyce said that she keeps a daily journal which records the nature around her country home and she said this was such a help when it came to describing settings etc in Harold Fry. The reason she wrote of Queenie and cancer was because her own father was suffering a similar cancer at that time and she knew she wouldn't be able to save him. She wanted to write of a character with more hope who believed that just maybe they could save somebody and this is the basis of Harold Fry. In the companion book, Joyce is able to express a different side to Fry, the person he was before the defining event of his life. There are so many stories and so much life in Harold fry and I suspect, Queenie Hennessy that I can see why the host of the event suggested that Joyce was a modern Jane Austen because in two hundred years’ time, readers will be able to read the Harold Fry book and get a snapshot of how England is today. In fact, they may well be able to watch the film of Harold Fry which is due to go in to production next year. Joyce isn't really sure who she sees as Harold but says Jim Broadbent is commonly suggested by readers. I'll look forward to finding out if their suggestion was took up!
- Sam
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