Lloyd Jones - a brilliantly nuanced examination of the power of imagination, literature and reinvention as the themes of Dickens’s Great Expectations are woven into the story of Matilda’s loss of innocence

Lloyd Jones, Mister Pip, John Murray, 2008.


Excerpt


In a novel that is at once intense, beautiful, and fablelike, Lloyd Jones weaves a transcendent story that celebrates the resilience of the human spirit and the power of narrative to transform our lives.
On a copper-rich tropical island shattered by war, where the teachers have fled with most everyone else, only one white man chooses to stay behind: the eccentric Mr. Watts, object of much curiosity and scorn, who sweeps out the ruined schoolhouse and begins to read to the children each day from Charles Dickens’s classic Great Expectations.
So begins this rare, original story about the abiding strength that imagination, once ignited, can provide. As artillery echoes in the mountains, thirteen-year-old Matilda and her peers are riveted by the adventures of a young orphan named Pip in a city called London, a city whose contours soon become more real than their own blighted landscape. As Mr. Watts says, “A person entranced by a book simply forgets to breathe.” Soon come the rest of the villagers, initially threatened, finally inspired to share tales of their own that bring alive the rich mythology of their past. But in a ravaged place where even children are forced to live by their wits and daily survival is the only objective, imagination can be a dangerous thing.

You cannot pretend to read a book. Your eyes will give you away. So will your breathing. A person entranced by a book simply forgets to breathe. The house can catch alight and a reader deep in a book will not look up until the wallpaper is in flames.
After the trouble starts and the soldiers arrive on Matilda’s island, there comes a time when all the white people have left. Only Mr Watts remains, and he wears a red nose and pulls his wife around on a trolley; the kids call him Popeye behind his back. But there is no one else to teach them their lessons, and no books left to learn from—except for Mr Watts’s battered copy of Great Expectations, ‘by my friend Mr Dickens’.
As Mr Watts stands before the class and reads, Dickens’s hero, Pip, starts to come alive in Matilda’s imagination. Soon he has become as real to her as her own family, and the greatest friendship of her life has begun.
But Matilda is not the only one who believes in Pip. And on an island at war, the power of the imagination can be a dangerously provocative thing.
A dazzling achievement, Mister Pip is a love song to the power of storytelling. It is about belonging and losing one’s way, about love, grief and memory, and it shows how books can change our lives forever.

"It reads like the effortless soar and dip of a grand piece of music, thrilling singular voices, the darker, moving chorus, the blend of the light and shade, the thread of grief urgent in every beat and the occasional faint, lingering note of hope. However, unlike the orchestration of massed voices and instruments, the finale does not bring wonder but despair. And that's a wonder in itself, that such a grim subject can still carry something as luminous and as revealing to readers worlds away from a forgotten village on the pacific." - Helen Elliott

"Mister Pip's twists and turns, and use of Dickens's novel, are ingenious. But it is hard to know what to make of it. So much rests on Jones's tone, which is deceptively simple but accrues the uneasy ambiguity of Conrad's stories. On the one hand, Mister Pip seems to be a love song to the enduring power of great writing. On the other, it is as insistent as a cultural studies student about readers' powers to reinterpret texts. It invites sentiment yet gently mocks readers by exaggerating its own tropical colour. It teases us about the bona fides -- and ultimate effect -- of Mr Watts. Mister Pip is a post-colonial fable about reading that is as open-ended as a myth. It may be this very sinuousness, this insistent refusal of any fundamental meaning in a global age, that has caused Mister Pip to be snapped up by publishers across the world, earning Jones a lifetime of advances." - Delia Falconer, The Australian

"What follows is a brilliantly nuanced examination of the power of imagination, literature and reinvention as the themes of Dickens’s Great Expectations are woven into the story of Matilda’s loss of innocence. Mister Pip is a powerful and humane novel from one of New Zealand’s top writers." - Carl Wilkinson

"Although written by a 50-year-old white male New Zealander in the voice of a teenage Papuan girl, Mister Pip is thoroughly believable and compelling (it would be even stronger, had Jones resisted the urge to use the last three chapters for a long and unnecessary analysis of Matilda's experiences from her perspective as an adult). That aside, as a snapshot into the horrors of Bougainville and how white culture has affected the lives of indigenous peoples in every imaginable way while turning its face away from the consequences, Mister Pip is convincing; it is easy to forget this is a novel, and not a personal memoir of a real and horrifying story." - Katherine Gordon

"If Mister Pip has one faint blemish, it is that some of its imaginative connections are overstated. We know what Matilda has gained from an exposure to Dickens: further comment can be superfluous. Rarely, though, can any novel have combined charm, horror and uplift in quite such superabundance." - D.J.Taylor, The Independent

"There are some harrowing, scenes, but Jones avoids being overly sentimental. Much is being made of Mister Pip in the southern hemisphere, and with good reason: it is an intelligent novel that says as much about the power of reading as it does about bloodshed and loss." - Anthony Byrt

"Mr. Jones's attempt to enliven this theme of the influence of literature founders, and he weighs down his promising premise with literary clichés. (...) There are some nice riffs on Dickens's novel (.....) But devotees of Dickens will be let down by Mr. Jones's tribute -- any great expectations for Mister Pip will be disappointed by its saccharine sentimentality." - Chloë Schama,

"Mr. Jones's book seriously flirts with Pip Fatigue. (...) But Mister Pip moves easily, even comically, into its Great Expectations fetish. (...) Once Mr. Jones has exhausted the direct opportunity to instruct, his story become much more manipulative." - Janet Maslin
 

"The fablelike simplicity of Matilda’s telling belies the complexity of the novel, which takes several subtle and unexpected turns." - The New Yorker

"The novel, a 2007 Commonwealth Writers' Prize winner, is redeemed by the quiet charm of Matilda's narrative, which loosens up in her vivid recollections of home, with its lazy dogs, 'blimmin' roosters' and the colourful wisdom of its elders, and which constricts in the moments of horror that assail the village in the later chapters. It does not have the substance, however, nor the consistency, to merit a surprise Booker win next month." - Killian Fox

"Here is a novel that, with amplitude and ease, affirms the acts of reading and writing as precious pursuits, as acts of survival, escape, renewal; as something wondrous, comforting -- dangerous. (...) The book is front-end heavy, yet it sticks; somehow it makes you just as tipsy as you need to be to love it -- just as tipsy as it is." - Tom Adair

"Jones’s strongest suit is fantasy, which dominates this book, and is its subject. (...) Once the wars are over -- the real one, and the one for the children’s minds -- Jones seems to lose interest. But for most of its short life this book achieves the rare aim of portraying goodness -- in Daniel’s grandmother, in Matilda’s mother, in Mister Pip himself. And we believe in it, because it is mysterious and flawed." - Carole Angier

"This novel about another novel is a skilful allegory of colonization (…...) Jones has done something very difficult with this novel: he has taken a recent and brutal piece of contemporary history and has told a story that not only reveals these events to the wider world but also shows what they mean in the larger and more abstract field of human behaviour. (…) It's also a novel about imagination and about the power and value of art as a potentially redemptive force in a nightmare situation. (…) For so brutal a reminder of atrocities so close to home, this is still an oddly satisfying book that goes on resonating long after you get to the end." - Kerryn Goldsworth

"(I)t is darker and more morally complex than it first appears. (...) Lloyd Jones gives the tired post-colonial themes of self-reinvention and the reinterpretation of classic texts a fresh, ingenious twist but his real achievement is in bringing life and depth to his characters." - Lindy Burleigh

"For all its gestures towards complexity, Mister Pip rarely moves beyond stereotypes: the wise but eccentric white man, the superstitious black woman, the gun-toting rebel. Matilda's journey is meant to be comparable to Pip's. Yet Jones turns Great Expectations into a sacred text -- an emblem of Western imaginative freedom as contrasted with simple island life." - Sameer Rahim

"It’s clear from the first page that it is prize-winning stuff. (…) His is a bold inquiry into the way that we construct and repair our communities, and ourselves, with stories old and new." - Melissa Katsoulis

"Matilda is in the tradition of Holden Caulfield and Huck Finn, conjuring up an adult world before she can fully understand it; and Mister Pip is a poignant and impressive work which can take its place alongside the classic novels of adolescence." - Michelene Wandor

"Jones' creative story draws parallels between Pip's trials in 19th-century England and the harsh landscape of Matilda's deprived childhood. But the narrative is bogged down by stunted dialogue and unrealistic human behavior. The recounting of the horrendous murders of some key characters is told in the objective, stilted language of a world-weary journalist and doesn't evoke the shock it should." - Carol Memmott

"Lloyd Jones's spare, haunting fable explores the power and limitations of art as Matilda chronicles 21 increasingly desperate months. (...) Jones's tale would be bleak indeed were it not for the fact that in their ultimate moments Mr. Watts and her mother surmount their differences to affirm a shared moral code." - Wendy Smith

A promising though ultimately overwrought portrayal of the small rebellions and crises of disillusionment that constitute a young narrator's coming-of-age unfolds against an ominous backdrop of war in Jones's latest. When the conflict between the natives and the invading redskin soldiers erupts on an unnamed tropical island in the early 1990s, 13-year-old Matilda Laimo and her mother, Dolores, are unified with the rest of their village in their efforts for survival. Amid the chaos, Mr. Watts, the only white local (he is married to a native), offers to fill in as the children's schoolteacher and teaches from Dickens's Great Expectations. The precocious Matilda, who forms a strong attachment to the novel's hero, Pip, uses the teachings as escapism, which rankles Dolores, who considers her daughter's fixation blasphemous. With a mixture of thrill and unease, Matilda discovers independent thought, and Jones captures the intricate, emotionally loaded evolution of the mother-daughter relationship. Jones (The Book of Fame; Biografi) presents a carefully laid groundwork in the tense interactions between Matilda, Dolores and Mr. Watts, but the extreme violence toward the end of the novel doesn't quite work. Jones's prose is faultless, however, and the story is innovative enough to overcome the misplayed tragedy. - Publishers Weekly

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. - Olivia Laing

Most of Mister Pip is an account of a period in the early 1990s in blockaded Bougainville, during a time of what is essentially a civil war, narrated by Matilda, who was then in her early teens. (Bougainville is an island off Papua New Guinea, the local mining and then political troubles that loom so large here are historical fact.)
       Matilda's father, like many of the local men, went to work in Australia a few years earlier. Once war starts Matilda and her mother and the other islanders are entirely cut off from the world. Even before that, Bougainville was a remote place, and life very simple and basic there. The loss of contact and supplies causes some hardship -- "Then, one night, the lights went out for good. There was no more fuel for the generators." -- but the kids, especially, readily adapt to the circumstances, and life doesn't change all that much.
       For a while there's no school, either, but then the only white man left in town steps in. Mr.Watts -- called Pop Eye -- is married to one of the locals, Grace, but they live somewhat apart from the community. Their odd habits -- occasionally Pop Eye dons a red clown's nose and pulls his wife around in a trolley -- are mysterious, but, at least from Matilda's childish point of view, only so far out of the ordinary.
       Mr.Watts isn't ideally suited to be a teacher, as he acknowledges, but he tries his best -- and he does have one trick up his sleeve: Charles Dickens' Great Expectations, from which he reads a chapter a day to the children. Despite its foreignness and strangeness -- all the more difficult to comprehend in this environment, so different from 19th century England, and by kids who have been exposed to so little of any outside world -- the children (and especially Matilda) are captivated by the book. Indeed:
     It was always a relief to return to Great Expectations. It contained a world that was whole and made sense, unlike ours.

       Matilda's god-fearing mother is suspicious of Mr.Watts' book, making for some tension, but what goes on in the classroom remains largely something between the enthralled children and their teacher. Mr.Watts does, however, ask the mothers to come to class and share their knowledge, too. "I believe, with your parents' help, we can make a difference to our lives", he suggested early on, and though the mothers have only limited local knowledge or advice he welcomes it all (often to the embarrassment of the children).
       The ugly outside world and conflict cannot be kept entirely at bay. It isn't paradise that is ruined, but the few holds and hopes they have are vulnerable. Even Great Expectations is taken from them -- but only the book itself, and only after they have finished reading it (for the first time). So Mr.Watts has the inspired idea to try to recreate it, for everyone to share the bits they remember and try to piece it together again.
       The kids take it very seriously -- "Our duty was to save Mr.Dickens' finest work from extinction" is how they see it -- and, of course, in remembering it they gain new insight into the work as well. But it is more than just that: 
Of course I did not tell my mum about our project. She was liable to say, "That won't hook a fish or peel a banana." And she was right. But we weren't after fish or bananas. We were after something bigger. We were trying to get ourselves another life.
       Matilda takes to writing the fragments she recalls in the sand (she has no paper, of course), and: 
     In the morning, before my mum was up, before anyone could see it and steal it, or misunderstand it, I went down to the beach to get my words.
       An earlier misunderstanding about what was written in the sand contributed to the spiral of disaster that visits them. There's no escape from it, not even re-imagination or story-telling; indeed, the troubles are exacerbated by Mr.Watts' well-meaning transformation into Mr.Dickens and then Pip himself .....
       Mister Pip may appear, at first sight, to be yet another book about the redemptive power of literature and imagination, cleverly drawing parallels between an old classic and contemporary life, but it's far more than that. And, even just taken at its fundamental level as a story, it is, simply, wondrous.
       The reason the novel works particularly well lies in the tone. It is not the teen Matilda that writes the account, but rather the university student Matilda, now far removed from Bougainville. "I have tried not to embellish", she says, and it is this lack of embellishment, the (deceptive) simplicity of the presentation, that makes it so utterly compelling. The living conditions on the island are as basic as can be imagined (or, arguably, even more basic that most readers of this book likely can imagine) but Matilda doesn't dwell on this. It's just a given, like so much else -- just as the world often seems to children, who accept whatever the conditions are without a real sense of what alternatives there are. The Dickensian alternative they are presented with is, of course, beyond foreign and yet something they can also relate to -- but again, Jones doesn't force the issue.
       Mr.Watts eventually shares his own history -- and how he came to live there with Grace, the smart local girl who went abroad to study but came back as something of a baffling disappointment. The grown Matilda, for whom Dickens continues to be something of an anchor, also manages to fill in a few blanks, but here as elsewhere Jones doesn't try to do too much or offer explanations for everything; Matilda herself is still working through all these events and facts. The result is an impressive and affecting novel that covers an enormous amount of territory, from clashes of civilisations to the power and possibilities of literature. And it's a wonderful, if heart-breaking (shattering, really) story.
       A very fine achievement, highly recommended. - The Complete Review

The Adventures of an Intrepid Reader

The Age

Asylum

The Australian

TheBookbag.co.uk

Booklist

booklit

Boston Globe

CCLaP

dovegreyreader scribbles

Financial Times

Fluttering Butterflies

Giraffe Days

GoodReports.net

The Guardian

Kevin Holtsberry

The Independent

inside books

Jules' Book Reviews

LitLovers

Medieval Bookworm

molloy | notebook

The Monthly

My Book Affair

New Statesman

The New York Sun

The New Yorker

New Zealand Listener

npr

The Observer

The Onion

Open Letters Monthly

Opinionless

Paul's Writing Blog

Reading as Writers

Salient

Seattle Times

The Scotsman

The Spectator

Sydney Morning Herald

Tales from the Reading Room

The Telegraph

The Telegraph

3000 Books

26 Books

USA Today

The Washington Post

what sarah reads

Wit & Fancy

Words and Flavours

The Written World

Based on Lloyd Jones' seminal novel and adapted for the screen by Academy Award Nominated filmmaker Andrew Adamson: