It has been everywhere, my happiness – when my mother sang for me to dance, when my father took my hand to keep me safe – but it was such a small, plain thing that I mistook it for something ordinary and failed to see. We expect our happiness to come with a sign and bells, but it doesn’t.As soon as I finished The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, I was encouraged to immediately follow it up with The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessey. As it's considered a parallel story – rather than a sequel or a prequel – reading these books together makes some sense, but in a way, being too familiar with Harold's story seemed to detract from Queenie's for me.
As we read in Harold's tale, upon learning that Queenie is in hospice, Harold decides to walk the length of England to visit her; an act of faith meant to keep his old friend alive. When Queenie learns of Harold's intent, she begins to worry about facing the man that she harbours dark secrets about, and upon the advice of a kindly nun, Queenie decides to write Harold a letter that lays out her whole life and his place in it; intending for him to learn the entire truth right before their meeting. The Love Song is this letter, and Queenie intersperses her memoir with scenes from the present day in the hospice: as the volunteers and residents track Harold's progress through his postcards and eventual media reports, the somber setting becomes charged with hope and excitement; everyone vowing to stay alive to meet the remarkable Harold Fry. I was advised to have both books open so that I wouldn't miss all the “cool parallels” between them, but they would have been pretty hard to miss: I thought it was strange that Queenie observes an older man (who she mistook to be as solitary and lonely as herself) in Exeter Station leave with a young man when Harold witnesses a similar scene twenty years later (and as it can't possibly be the same older man, is Harold's older man Queenie's younger man grown up, or is it coincidence for coincidence's sake?); and I couldn't have missed that Queenie first had the writing-related blisters drained and bandaged on her fingers at the same time that Harold was first having his walking-related foot blisters tended to in the exact same manner at the exact same time; and I was annoyed by these literal parallels by the time Queenie was having her pencil taped between her fingers and Harold was duct-taping his shoes to his feet for the final push. So, yeah, the idea of “parallel stories” didn't really work for me; I was wary right from the beginning when Sister Mary Inconnue offers to type out Queenie's shorthand notes by saying:
"You see how it is? Harold Fry is walking, but in another way, even though you're here, even though you've done your travelling, you're starting a journey too. It's the same and not the same. You see?"Yeah, I see. So what was Queenie's secret history? The plot is hinted at by the title of this book. As The Washington Post informed me, author Rachel Joyce is referencing T. S. Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock with this title, and as Shmoop tells me, that's a poem about a man who puts off telling someone a very important secret for so long that he eventually grows old and dies by the seaside with the secret locked inside him. That's pretty much the plot of the book, too, with overt borrowings from the poem: from Queenie imagining growing old with Harold, who would wear the bottoms of his trousers rolled; to stating that she has measured out her life “in ladies' shoes”; to a nice scene about daring to eat a peach – which Queenie was afraid she might choke on – which is based on a direct quote from the poem. Literary borrowing of this sort doesn't really bother me, but with so much of the structure and the story laid out for her in advance, I'd expect Joyce to knock me out with the details; but she didn't really deliver.
Unlike with Harold Fry, I didn't connect with Miss Queenie Hennessey; didn't discover many honest human moments. Her secrets didn't make me gasp; her pain was not my pain. I enjoyed the other residents in the hospice – and especially the bawdy-mouthed Finty – and while they provided some comic relief, they were little more than caricatures. I was told to pay especial attention to Sister Mary Inconnue because she might have some secrets of her own, but right from her name I had an idea what her role would be. In the end, this book makes a poor followup but it does have value: I did very much enjoy The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry and this served to fill in and explain any small mysteries that that book left dangling. I don't regret reading about Queenie for that reason but am not crazy about it as a standalone work.
