The Book Club
Sweden
Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones
Thursday/Sep/00:31 2012Lloyd Jones
Men who like Dickens are not always to be trusted. In the nightmarish conclusion to Waugh's A Handful of Dust, the civilised Tony Last finds himself imprisoned in a jungle village, forced to spend his days reading Little Dorrit to the illiterate Mr Todd. In the world of Mister Pip, however, reading Dickens represents salvation for a community ravaged by conflict.
The winner of the 2007 Commonwealth Prize, Lloyd Jones's novel is set in a village on the Papua New Guinea island of Bougainville during a brutal civil war there in the 1990s. Jones covered it as a journalist, and this delicate fable never shies away from the realities of daily life shadowed by violence. As Matilda, the 13-year-old narrator, begins her story, a blockade has begun. Helicopters circle, the generators are empty and all the teachers have fled. Apart from the presence of pidgin Bibles, civilisation might never have touched the village.
One white man remains. Like Waugh's Mr Todd, Mr Watts has a home in the jungle and an abiding love for Dickens; unlike him he believes in the power of literature to set minds free. Assuming the responsibilities of teaching, he dreams of making the classroom "a place of light". Though the children hope the promised introduction to "Mr Dickens" will provide anti-malaria tablets, aspirins and kerosene, in Great Expectations they discover something just as vital as medicine and fuel: "a bigger piece of the world" that they can enter at will. In the fertile soil of Bougainville, Mr Watts's cultural seed has taken root and flourished.
At first, Jones focuses on the escapist pleasures of reading. The sheer foreignness of Dickens's world, with its rimy mornings, marshes and blacksmith's forges, captivates the class. Like many a reader before her, Matilda falls in love with the orphan Pip, building him a beachfront shrine. But as the war draws closer, the subversive nature of stories is highlighted. When Pip is mistakenly assumed by "redskin" soldiers to be a rebel fighter, the boundary between fiction and reality dissolves. "The problem with Great Expectations," a frustrated Matilda at one point declares, "is it's a one-way conversation." She couldn't be more wrong.
Just as Great Expectations changes Matilda, instilling in her a moral code, so the environment in which it is read changes the book. Faced with malarial government soldiers and rebel "Rambos" drunk on jungle juice, Mr Watts becomes a latter-day Sheherazade, recounting Pip's tale in nightly instalments designed to avert disaster. The yarn he spins combines elements from many lives: his own, Pip's and those of the beleaguered islanders. In this dazzling story-within-a-story, Jones has created a microcosm of post-colonial literature, hybridising the narratives of black and white races to create a new and resonant fable. On an island split by war, it is a story that unites.
There is a fittingly dreamy, lyrical quality to Jones's writing, along with an acute ear for the earthy harmonies of village speech. People are "silly as bats" and "argue like roosters"; big bums are mentioned frequently. While his characters embellish their stories readily, his own approach is more controlled. The simplicity with which he describes the atrocities that take place is devastating. But it is the great faith that Jones has in literature, to effect change no less than to offer solace, that gives this extraordinary book its charge. Mister Pip is the first of Jones's six novels to have travelled from his native New Zealand to the UK. It is to be hoped that it won't be the last.
The winner of the 2007 Commonwealth Prize, Lloyd Jones's novel is set in a village on the Papua New Guinea island of Bougainville during a brutal civil war there in the 1990s. Jones covered it as a journalist, and this delicate fable never shies away from the realities of daily life shadowed by violence. As Matilda, the 13-year-old narrator, begins her story, a blockade has begun. Helicopters circle, the generators are empty and all the teachers have fled. Apart from the presence of pidgin Bibles, civilisation might never have touched the village.
One white man remains. Like Waugh's Mr Todd, Mr Watts has a home in the jungle and an abiding love for Dickens; unlike him he believes in the power of literature to set minds free. Assuming the responsibilities of teaching, he dreams of making the classroom "a place of light". Though the children hope the promised introduction to "Mr Dickens" will provide anti-malaria tablets, aspirins and kerosene, in Great Expectations they discover something just as vital as medicine and fuel: "a bigger piece of the world" that they can enter at will. In the fertile soil of Bougainville, Mr Watts's cultural seed has taken root and flourished.
At first, Jones focuses on the escapist pleasures of reading. The sheer foreignness of Dickens's world, with its rimy mornings, marshes and blacksmith's forges, captivates the class. Like many a reader before her, Matilda falls in love with the orphan Pip, building him a beachfront shrine. But as the war draws closer, the subversive nature of stories is highlighted. When Pip is mistakenly assumed by "redskin" soldiers to be a rebel fighter, the boundary between fiction and reality dissolves. "The problem with Great Expectations," a frustrated Matilda at one point declares, "is it's a one-way conversation." She couldn't be more wrong.
Just as Great Expectations changes Matilda, instilling in her a moral code, so the environment in which it is read changes the book. Faced with malarial government soldiers and rebel "Rambos" drunk on jungle juice, Mr Watts becomes a latter-day Sheherazade, recounting Pip's tale in nightly instalments designed to avert disaster. The yarn he spins combines elements from many lives: his own, Pip's and those of the beleaguered islanders. In this dazzling story-within-a-story, Jones has created a microcosm of post-colonial literature, hybridising the narratives of black and white races to create a new and resonant fable. On an island split by war, it is a story that unites.
There is a fittingly dreamy, lyrical quality to Jones's writing, along with an acute ear for the earthy harmonies of village speech. People are "silly as bats" and "argue like roosters"; big bums are mentioned frequently. While his characters embellish their stories readily, his own approach is more controlled. The simplicity with which he describes the atrocities that take place is devastating. But it is the great faith that Jones has in literature, to effect change no less than to offer solace, that gives this extraordinary book its charge. Mister Pip is the first of Jones's six novels to have travelled from his native New Zealand to the UK. It is to be hoped that it won't be the last.