New BLOG

I thought I might separate my recent rantings about the Church from the main body of the work... so there's now a Pope Joan blog available at http://criticalcatholic.blogspot.co.uk/  so if Catholicism is of interest - please read about there.   I expect most of the opinions expressed are heretical - but probably not defamatory.   Actually, the Church doesn't seem to bother with libel actions much - so one has to say that in its favour.

I've put all my old posts about the church there - all much the same; it was lovely when I was a child - now everyone's so horrid and illiberal...  Of course that can't be true, if it was so damn lovely, why did I ever leave it?   Probably because I stopped believing in it.  And a very poor level of tolerance towards authoritarian regimes, still if a Catholic parish is the nearest one ever comes to an authoritarian regime in one's life, then perhaps one is blessed.

the Pope, the Pharisees and Ossification

I woke up in the middle of the night, from another dream in which I was organising a funeral.  I had to take the claws off the corpse.  The corpse was an old man - very important, some sort of leader.  He had hands which ended in cylindrical claws which grew out of flesh covered with grey parrot down... at the base of the claws was a white band of dry skin? and I had to pull the claws out.  I had taken hold of the first claw when I was woken by a lamp falling down.  I had the impression that beneath the claws were gold claws.  I wish I could illustrate this dream... but nothing remotely available in Google images!

When I woke up I began thinking furiously about the Catholic church.  At the time I had a very forceful, cogent argument about it that kept me awake for sometime.  The gist of it is that the Jewish religion had rather ossified by the time of Jesus - his attack on the Pharisees making yokes for other men's necks always strikes me as being full of relevance for religious people today.  To some extent the Jews had become ossified because of their opposition to the "modern world" - i.e the Graeco-Roman world that they were identifying themselves against.   Christianity, with its inclusion of gentiles moved out into that world and made converts.  Judaism stayed small although there have of course been many reforms in the faith since then - many of them necessitated by the Diaspora and the Sack of Jerusalem in 75 AD - which arguably, might not have happened if the Jews had been a bit less ossified. ("a stiff-necked people"  God's words, not mine!).

St. Stephen - who told some Jews that they were "stiff-necked" - echoing God's words to Moses, about the same sort of people!

The Catholic church, by getting into the business of politics and ruling things, became a dominant world power for a while - it is now in decline in Europe and the "Western World".  It proclaims that it is some sort of unchanging force, and  many people believe this, because they are not aware of how much it has changed.  It has a mechanism which allows a pope to select cardinals, and he will select cardinals of his own stripe, ensuring a conservative legacy for decades - rather like the Supreme Court in the US - except that the US Supreme Court doesn't elect the president.

As a result of this conservatism it is under critique from the world, the intelligent media, and others are asking it to reform.  Conservative Catholics are saying "no, why?  We like it like this!" and after all, the media's critique is hardly equivalent to Jesus - but I am beginning to wonder whether the church will eventually collapse under the weight of its own contradictions.  I am sure Benedict is a good man - on the evidence of what S says about him, but he is not in a position to do much about it now.  Then again, one has to keep asking, what was he up to all those years in the Propaganda Fide ?  How did the growing weight of evidence about child abuse simply get ignored for such a long time?  Must we blame JP2 for all this?  He was in charge, did they keep it from him? - but if  he knew, why the hell have they beatified him?  Oh, I forgot, he single-handedly freed Poland from Communism.  It seems to me quite difficult to make the case that Benedict was good without implying that JP2 was not... or vice versa.  But probably this is only because I have a very simplistic understanding of the church's bureaucracy and how it works, or fails to. Perhaps neither of them had any idea..... but I'm afraid that's hard to believe.

Book of the Month

And the winner is.....

Well, I have as usual read mangled extracts from a number of books (including the dreadful Harold Fry), and  I finally finished Parade's End which was impressive, but occasionally confusing.  I started reading Ragnarok by AS Byatt which I found horrific.  Her incredibly irritating babyish style, describing herself in the third person as the thin child is pretty nauseating - and oh yes, how very much superior the Norse Gods are to any other kind of mythology... I am hoping for some sort of revelation, but doubt it I can finish it.
Kiran Desai's Inheritance of Loss, - too depressing, not in the mood for reading about lonely people, living subdued low-key lives in the sub-Continent.   I have read The God of Small Things - been there, done that... no, I'm being rude, I didn't give it the chance.  But I can see the concrete-floored kitchens and the low oil light and the cockroaches scampering away - and I have heard the tales of failed trips to Europe and so on, and I don't want to be stuck there hearing them again.  Perhaps I should try a bit more, but I'm not sure.   I also started Antonia Fraser's biog of Marie Antoinette, which I was beginning to enjoy enormously - but I cast it aside in favour of a re-read of Anna Karenina - prompted by the astonishing revelation that no one else in the book group (except perhaps Anne B) had read it - and I read it when I was 16.

I started it two days ago - and I remembered that when I read it before I read it in two days - because in that era I could sit and read for two days - and no one would ask me not to.  I was on hols at the time, just after O-levels.  So far I am loving it.  The writing is perfect, the characters are interesting, one wants to know more about them.  I am really quite excited, and I have the feeling I am reading a "proper book".  This is not because it is a major classic - but because it is so well-written and engaging and one has no feeling "oh dear, this is a bit tired, thin, old hat."  I wonder if I will feel that by the end.  At the moment I am not feeling much sympathy for Vronsky or Anna - although she has only just arrived, because Tolstoy's description of her is a bit too good to be true.

It's interesting about repeated motifs in books (railway accidents in AK) - sometimes they can be very effective, but Ford M Ford goes in for repeated phrases - "some do not" "a man could stand up" and bangs them into the text periodically to make damn sure one doesn't forget the book's title.  I am surprised he didn't call one of the four "pulling the cords on the shower curtains" since he repeats that phrase so often - I think it refers to an old style of shower - where all the water cascades down at once.  I found it a bit clumsy - but perhaps the constant repetition was designed for the hard of thinking/memory.  On the other hand there were lots of things I really liked (only because they are similar to some of the things I have done in TRF) and some amazingly experimental writing in places - not all of which worked, but at least the experiment was done.  Parts of the book were less than totally intelligible - and the language included lots of slang - helpful for my research - so it required full attention.

For some reason I have been reading a great deal this month - probably because I have not been doing enough writing - and it has been great, especially since none of it, apart from Parade's End has been for research.  Finally, I am also reading a book about geology - which is not to hand and which I cannot remember the name of  The Rocks Remain: An Autobiography of the Earth... the second half of the title, not the first I think - rocks don't exactly remain, as metamorphic rocks illustrate.  But it's by an American professor called Marcia Norwegianbrugen... and I probably understand only about 80% of it, but I am hoping what I read will integrate itself with my current sketchy outline of geology and create a more substantial structure.

A left hook - an upper cut - Nostalgia socks it to you

At about 10 this morning I was driving through Slough, the town I lived in for 10 years of my late childhood/adolescence.  I stopped at a traffic light and had the leisure to admire the row of shops I used to visit as a small child when I stayed the night at my grandmother's flat.  The cafe is still a cafe, the travel agent and the engineering office are gone, as is the newsagents (valuable source of sweets and comics), there's still a corner grocery - it used to be a "Mace" - the fish and chip shop had morphed into a Kebab Palace twice the size... and the old Salt Hill Hotel is now ugly flats.

As I sat there reminiscing, the CD in the car piped up with the Detroit Spinners' song Could it be I'm Falling in Love (witcha' Baby?) a song from early 1973, when I was 15-16 and in love and in Slough and it was as if every twitch of nostalgia I was feeling gathered itself together rolling everything into a ball and hurling itself at me so that I found myself thinking about the darn LO again.  I am not here for that, I am here to help my father with his tax affairs.  But the fact is that I have spent so little time here in my adult life, that the place becomes associated almost exclusively with one's early intense experiences of it - it has no afterlife for me - they've demolished half the buildings that were put up in the 1970s - it's a different place now.

I don't feel nostalgia for Slough - but it has the capacity to painfully force me to recall moments of extreme happiness, optimism, the youthful sense of the wide world ahead, fanning out like the headlights on a car, illuminating all the dreams and possibilities.  Ironic that a place I have always found rather dreary should do that.  On the other hand - the most recent experience I have had here was my mother's funeral - so I also have flashes of memory about that day/period.  

Why dull entries happen

I realised I published two especially dull entries over the weekend - who gives a stuff what I think about spring or which seeds I planted?  But this blog is called quotidiana to allow me to publish exactly such dull entries.

When I say in my blurb that this is "more like a diary really" this isn't true, there's a great deal of stuff I don't write down here.  Over the weekend I was internally mulling something over, something quite good - but I didn't want to talk about it.  And I won't be talking about it here, but I did desperately want to write - so instead of writing about the thing that was occupying me, I wrote about - quotidiana! There's obviously something very necessary to me about writing.  As I become less talkative, I turn my attention to prose.  I've had several nearly silent days recently, listening to people. So, apologies for the lack of trenchant opinionated guff - but I'm sure there'll be more to come.

Actually, perhaps I really do hate the Catholic Church

This thought keeps recurring.  Unfortunately it is all S's fault: because he and his wife and children and all their friends and relations keep posting stuff about the Church and the Pope on FB. The articles they approve and the comments they attract are causing me to wonder (a) just how typical are these people of intelligent Catholics? (b) is there any of the spirit of the Enlightenment in the church at all?

These reflections were sparked by an article in the Washington Post written by one Ashley E Maguire.  Here is the extract that annoyed me, and where I stopped...

"So while most Catholics worldwide heard the news of the pope stepping down and gave him a giant, global air-hug, a few dissenting groups used the news to get attention by banging their pans and loudly rejecting church teaching and disrespecting the head of their faith. It was unkind.

Mr. Kristof and friends are wringing their hands about what we call “irreformable, infallible moral teachings of the ordinary magisterium.”

He might want to look that up."

The writer then goes on to say that the magisterium is a jolly good thing and nothing's going to change. He rightly comments on some of the good things the church does - service to others, the poor, etc. but also says how it upholds marriage etc etc.  Also, he cites things about Catholics that are true of all followers of Christ - "be not conformed to the world" is fine, it's a good thing to try and live by, when the world is wrong - but conforming to an historical worldview that was wrong in its attitudes towards women, homosexuals etc. isn't quite so smart.  It is blatantly untrue to say that nothing has changed for 2,000 years - the Church has changed its mind a fair number of times since then.  Eunuchs for the Kingdom of God by Ute Ranke-Hellman is full of examples of that.   The magisterium is what ties the clergy into some of the more repressive teachings of the church, and effectively tries to deny Catholics freedom of conscience on many subjects.  

It may be because I was brought up in a parish run by a man whose early theological education was Protestant - but I always understood that examining your conscience was where you started... and no body ever discussed what you did if your conscience came into conflict with the magisterium - because there was a strict "don't mention the magisterium" policy in the parish and in RE lessons at school.  If everyone in the church thinks the magisterium is jolly good and everything it says is right, then really I have nothing in common with them, and my Catholic sentiments are purely an accident of birth and a cultural residue.  A pity, since Catholicism's been in my DNA since St Patrick converted Ireland.   The writer of the article cited seems to have that "Catholics are special" attitude which I've heard more of recently.... I am not a Catholic, I am not special, I do not wish to obey the ordinary magisterium.  It's a pity, but there it is.

More weekend

Today I actually did plant some seeds, sweet peas, basil, nicotiana suaveolens and cerinthe major.  Very pleasing to have made a start.

We then went out for a bit of culcha - to Margate - heard Jamie M playing some agreeable jazzy/poppy stuff - I didn't realise he sang as well... quite a funny version of "She's not there".

We left the bar and went to the Turner - it was foggy and bitterly cold, as though the air was full of ice (technically it is/was).  There was a rather mixed up exhibition: Rosa Barba's installations of projectors etc. was evocative, and there was an especially good film of aerial views of landscape, the Thames estuary, mud, the seaforts etc.   There was also Carl Andre on show in a single room.  At least I now understand what he was about - there is something quite attractive about Minimalism like that.  His poetry was - er, well,  I can't remember exactly what "concrete poetry" is, but CA's work seemed reminiscent of what I remember of it.   There was a poem called "Dithyramb" which the note beside it said was based on words found in "old stories " - it appeared that nearly all of the words were Biblical in fact and why this couldn't have been stated is a little odd.  Perhaps the curator had never read the Gospels.  There was also a novel called Shooting Script which I thought was quite interesting, in a BS Johnson sort of way.

I have spent a lot of time getting to grips with my smartphone, but am pleased to report I have now phoned, texted, read emails, FB and Twitter, and Googled, as well as taking some photos.  It won't replace the laptop - and I'm certainly not going to stuff it full of music.

M cycled home, and I drove Ned  back from his lunchtime bar work, we had tea and I made a spectacular supper.  Finn announced he did not want any.  Oscar was here, so Finn wants to be with him... not us.

We made a fairly momentous decision that we would risk booking a gite in the Ile de France for the last week in August - so that we can have day trips to Paris and see Fontainbleau and Versailles again (I'd like to see the Petit Trianon and the Potager du Roi).  If M does get the Hammill brickwork job, then it should be manageable... I have enough birthday money to rent a gite for a week, and the cross-channel ferry or whatever, a few meals out and some shopping shouldn't be too much (famous last words).  It is a bit sad that we are finding it so difficult, but this may be Ned's last trip with us (although nowadays people seem to go on hols with their parents into adulthood).  Finn predictably said "Why can't we go to a beach?"
"We have a beach here!" we howled...and M and I spend quite a bit of time on it in summer.  

My father rang - he sounded dreadful - very tired, had been crying I think?  Apparently had watched an episode of Call the Midwife and found it very moving.  The East End setting reminded him of his cousins, Muriel and Doris (?) Lester - who did good works in the East End and were chummy with Ghandi... but he really did seem not himself.  I was a bit loth to get off the phone, but I had just begun watching Michael Handke's White Ribbon and needed to concentrate on the subtitles.  Now I feel rather mean, but I'm not sure if a long conversation was quite what he wanted.  He had had a lovely day with Ben and Sarah (and Coellie I think) at Kew, so perhaps it was just that Sunday evening thing.  I always mean to phone him more, why don't I?

Spring!

I am declaring spring - because yesterday there were 19 different flowering plants in the garden (I will try to recall them all:  lonicera perfusa, euphorbia griffithii, hellebores, crocus, snowdrops, aconite, primrose, iris unguicularis, clematis armandii, the two other white winter clematis, winter jasmine, veronica gentiana, symphytum iberica, vinca alba, violets, the yellow flowering shrub whose name I have forgotten, what on earth were the others? ) and, more significantly, I saw the first bumblebee trolling about in the lonicera.  Then we went out to the vole sanctuary in Sandwich - the path there was astonishingly muddy and most of the paths in the reserve were closed, so we went and stared at the rather grim khaki pond and watched the mallards shovelling their beaks through the wet mud on the banks...

On our way there I saw a magpie carrying a huge stick for nest building, and we stopped at a nursery and bought some plants and some seed compost.  Today I am thinking of planting a few seeds in the propagator (I could kill Mark for selling my electric propagator at the boot sale - by accident). Perhaps this year I can get back into gardening properly.

We also collected a new old fridge from John Brogan - so we have a spare for storing bottles and extra food when we have parties and large gatherings. Life goes on.

A New Year

So, day one of my personal New Year, I am not taking any notice of the number attached to it.   Sadly despite the amazing excitement of the Sun being conjunct my natal sun and it being a time for new initiatives, my only new initiative has been to start reading a book about geology.  This tends to put one's miserable human life in perspective.  So far I have learned a great deal - chiefly that diamonds are not forever, but degrade into graphite over time, and that there was plenty of life before the "Cambrian Explosion" but it didn't leave fossils - however, traces can be found of these diverse things.  Still one wonders why there was this vast evolutionary leap in the Cambrian period?  But perhaps it was just as Dawkins explains it in The Blind Watchmaker.

My birthday was really nice - I went out to WeightWatchers in the morning, was given permission to eat what I liked on the day, then to get back in there the following day.  I then visited Waitrose and bought some nice lunch, bread, prawns, ham and salami, houmous and taramasalata, etc. and we ate those (well, I ate the prawns and the taramasalata - but they ate the other stuff).  We were all at home, since Finn had a cold.  In the afternoon I amused myself with my smartphone - I am getting used to it, but it's annoying...  I also did a certain amount of washing up and kitchen tidying, but didn't mind much, and there was a good play about Dusty Springfield in S. Africa on the radio.  Then we had the fantastic cake the boys had made for me - an almond cake - at my request, with plain butter icing (should have been orange, but no matter) my original suggestion of chocolate butter icing had been forgotten.  It was a surprising cake - rather flat and dense, a bit like eating marzipan - but the only almond in it was essence.  I might do it again one day but with an orange glaze and some roasted almonds on top.

We then had a lovely fire in the dining room - Finn and I made cocktails (Negronis) and we drank those and ate cheese footballs... and then we had fish and chips, accompanied by some of our Christmas Sancerre, followed by pancakes which I made for them earlier.  I made some with grated apple and mixed spice, which were quite nice.  I think I may finally have got the hang of pancakes... it was quite stress free making them.

So now, back to real life.  I wish I felt more inspired and clear about what I was doing and where I was going, but I do actually feel quite positive about it - despite my cold.

Pope fun

Lots of jolly internet postings about the pope - which provides some light relief and a welcome distraction from the horrors of the economy etc. - rather like the Costa Concordia sinking last year.

I suggested that the Pope was retiring to a life of prayer "to spend more time with his rosary" - others have been less charitable.  It is wonderful to see someone following the glorious example of Celestine V - I can think of a number of popes whose retirement would have been even more welcome...

The media speculation cannot possibly last for 3 weeks or more (oh yes it can!).  First speculation (inevitably) "Isn't it time we had an African or Latin American pope?" - this might not be the breath of fresh air/new broom/tired cliche of your choice that the church needs - Anglican African bishops are notoriously conservative and fundamentalist - and I don't suppose the "liberation theology" strand has been very strong in Latin America since Oscar Romero - but then again, I ceased to take an interest in these things, so I may be wrong.  No doubt I will discover interesting opinions (and even a few facts) in the media in the next few weeks.

Second speculation (new broom theme contd.) "Isn't it time we had someone much younger?" - Oh yes, a youthful 55 year old who would then run the church into the rocks for 30 years - great.  Another JP2 perhaps?

Third speculation  "Isn't it time we looked outside the normal candidates to find someone with a different skill set?"  Of course, no one would have imagined that a divorced female lapsed Catholic blogger could become pope - but as she had been elected a cardinal she was technically eligible - and so began the rule of Hadriana VIII.... (with apologies to Fr. Rolfe).

I am pretty sure there is no sinister reason for the Pope to resign - although I await conspiracy theories with some interest.  Already someone has mentioned Alzheimers - although it doesn't seem to have affected his Latin (judging by the extract I heard).

Theological question: can the phrase "Long live the Holy Spirit" actually mean anything? I don't know whether it is a misguided Catholic slogan - a mistranslation - perhaps Viva il Spirito Santo? Or just a slip of the tongue... the HS being an aspect of God  is presumably eternal ... and doesn't exactly live...but I suppose "Hurray for the Paraclete and long may it continue to inspire our lives" is a bit turgid.

It is cold, I am tired, and I am going to bed.  

You can't read this book! Nick Cohen

I've been reading this book intermittently for about 4 months - which is why I don't really have a very coherent argument to make about it.   I came away with the following impressions:

1.  Do not defame anyone in your blog
2.  We do not really have freedom of speech in England because of the libel laws
3.  If your opinion is defamatory you can be sued for it.
4.  Religious groups, chiropractors, businesses and other shady characters will use the libel laws in an horrendous manner.
5.  JS Mill's principle that people should be allowed to do what they want as long as they do not harm anyone else is basically a sound one.
6.  Offending someone is not actually "harming" them.  Religious groups asking for "respect" is a bit unreasonable, and leads towards ludicrous laws.
7.  Britain is actually a remarkably free country and has been for a long time,. but our libel laws are making a mockery of this.

I expect there's more, but these were the things that most struck me.  I was shocked by the way the system makes it almost impossible for whistle-blowers to function in the public and private sectors, and I was pleased with his attack on Wiki-leaks.  He recognises, as I do, that there are certain things that need to be kept secret - a list of the Afghans who have supported the West against the Taliban was an example of something that should not have been released unredacted, as it was. As I have had long had feelings and opinions about Julian Assange, I was quite pleased to read the rather discreditable story about JA having said "Well, they were informers, they deserved to be killed" at a lunch with some journalist. (JA later denied this, but there were several witnesses).  It supports my thesis that JA is either aspergic, or some sort of psychopath whose entire function in the Wikileaks saga has been self-aggrandisement.

I learned a lot from this book - I am not sure how much of it will stick, but it's very much worth reading and I'm glad I did.

Curiously, at present I am more drawn to non-fiction than fiction but....need to read more novels.

No good deed goes unpunished!

I love that phrase, I don't believe in it, but it makes me laugh.  What I planned today was a bit of a re-write - and I started early, before breakfast - but then things slowed down, which is not a bad thing.  Often when I am at my most impatient I am also at my most confused.   So I had an interesting and leisurely chat with Susan our Air BnB visitor - and then offered to take her to the station. It is a beautiful sunny morning, the snowdrops, hellebores, primroses and iris unguicularis are all looking great - and the clematis armandii is beginning to flower already.   So I was full of the joys of spring and stopped to pat one of the anti-Bernards (identical black cats who live in the street) - this particular one is usually very friendly, and was rolling around on our front window sill and enjoying itself, I thought, when it suddenly turned its head and without warning sunk its fangs into my thumb.  It was agony, I could have sworn I heard a crunch... I went into shock - but got in, and with M's help cleaned and bandaged the thumb, which is now, about 45 minutes later, throbbing and painful.  I feel slightly nauseous, the area is red and warm and there is a pain in the base of my hand/wrist - probably the deep-seated infection that will give me encardiitis spreading! (Hypochondriac - moi?  No, just the result of reading the NHS website to tell me what to do). I am waiting for my GP to call me back with advice on antibiotics - tetanus etc.  The pain is probably because I am typing awkwardly because of the bandage.

What annoys me is that I was being nice to the cat - a cat which has previously allowed me to pick it up quite happily...I have had cats all my life, and never, ever have I had a bite like this.  It was just vicious, uncalled for.  Perhaps I accidentally touched a sensitive spot, I don't know.  It is quite shocking - I now feel astonishingly vindictive and feel like throwing tiny stones at the cat in future and driving it off our property.  As M said, "imagine if it did that to a child!", but what can you do?  If a dog had bitten me like that it might be in danger of being put down as vicious - but a cat's a different matter.

Extraordinarily ordinary book

Sometimes you read a highly praised book and you wonder, "Is it me? Did I just not get it?"  This book's cover is decorated with tremulous, ecstatic quotes from critics: "one of the best books you'll read this year" (if this is the year you're not planning to read much),  "at times almost unbearably moving" (not for me, perhaps I should change my medication) "full of comic panache" (laugh? I thought I'd never start - and I didn't).

The most extraordinary thing about this UK bestseller is how utterly ordinary it is.  The style is ordinary, the characters are ordinary, their insights are ordinary, the settings are ordinary. The main character is an astonishingly ordinary man, a retired manager, probably a Daily Mail reader, the epitome of a sort of Middle England dullness.  He seems to have ignored his emotions for years - and, once he has been given his MacGuffin and set out on his journey,  he gradually unbottles them and begins to experience them.  This isn't a bad premise - it worked well in Silas Marner (other novels are available). He decides to do something completely uncharacteristic - to walk across England. This trip results in the re-introduction of love into his life. There are some vaguely mysterious, but easily guessed at, things which are hinted at in the main character's background - but no-one who reads novels regularly could be remotely surprised when these matters are clarified towards the end of the book.

I enjoyed the book at first, the style is readable. Rachel Joyce describes everyday minutiae satisfactorily and she drizzles a few more interesting characters over the text. Most of the events in the book are fairly predictable (blisters, brief conversations with strangers), so much depends on whether one engages with the protagonist. A likable main character, while not a guarantee of literary quality, is an important factor in a book's popularity, evidently Harold Fry strikes a chord with a lot of people, however, while there is pathos in his story, I didn't find it engaging, his determination is admirable, but it seems out of character.. The parallel story of his wife's inner journey seemed more coherent and better observed.  There was a sprinkling of religious sentiment dusting the story - but without depth, perhaps reflecting the idea of religious faith being an optional extra in contemporary British life - so don't let the word Pilgrimage in the title put you off - no Bunyanesque heroics here!

Rachel Joyce, the author, regularly writes 45-minute long plays for the BBC. The daily BBC Radio 4 Afternoon Play, sometimes based on detective, historical or biographical fiction often features a "gently comic" strand of works about ordinary characters doing something "quirky" and ultimately "heartwarming". I cringe when I hear anything described as "gently comic": this is a British euphemism for "lacking in wit". This book began as a radio play. One should praise Rachel Joyce for having taken such an utterly ordinary character as Harold Fry and making him the unlikely protagonist of a best-selling novel.  Perhaps it suggests a new direction for other writers; perhaps there is an immense pent-up demand for novels about  the travails of the very ordinary. Ultimately, there is some sort of moral juice to be sucked out of this book: in making an utterly futile, almost capricious, commitment, Harold changes the balance of his life for the better. This might not work out for everyone though: Do not try this at home!  warning stickers should appear on the cover.

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce