Mister Pip

Emily Dickinson's famous lines "there is no frigate like a book to take us miles away" could not be more apropros of Lloyd Jones' magical MISTER PIP. Matilda, the narrator, is a black child entering puberty living in New Guinea when we first meet her. Her beloved father has left her and her mother to seek his fortune in Australia and try to, in the words of her mum, "turn into a white man." Matilda becomes fascinated, as does the reader, with the only white man on her island, Mr. Watts (some days he wore a red clown's nose), nicknamed by the children of the village "Pop Eye." His wife is a black woman named Grace whom he often pulls around on a trolley. When war breaks out and many people flee the settlement, Mr. Watts teaches the remaining island children. He reads aloud to his spellbound students Charles Dickens' GREAT EXPECTATIONS, which he describes as the greatest novel by the greatest English writer of the nineteenth century. Dickens' character Pip makes an indelible impression on the young Matilda and becomes much more real to her than dead relatives. Much of the conflict in this beautifully crafted story has to do with the tension between Mr. Watts, who does not believe in a god, and Matilda's mother Dolores, a devout believer in the Good Book. Matilda sees many parallels between her life and that of the fictional Pip. As an adult she remembers his confession,"it is a most miserable thing to feel ashamed of home" and thinks of her island. That passage and many others she sees as "personal touchstones."Mr. Jones' narrative will hold you in its spell, and you will long remember Mr. Watts. Like many teachers, he is part charlatan, part magician, but also a kind and loving mentor. He is more alive than many of the people on the nightly news-- and certainly more decent-- and as real as William Styron's Sophie, John Updike's Rabbit or Thomas Hardy's Tess.MISTER PIP says wondrous things about the power of the imagination, the permanence of storytelling-- when the novel is lost, Mr. Watts and his students remember fragments from it and write them down-- kindness and courage. The author is a wizard with words, but he also lets his characters make profound statements about life as well. For example, the Jones' ocean shuffles up the beach and draws out; Matilda hears "the lazy flip-flop of the sea--so much louder at night than during the day" and Mr. Watts defines the word "opportunity" to his students: "'The window opens and the bird flies out.'" Matilda, from reading this one book of Dickens, finds out that "you can slip under the skin of another just as easily as your own, even when that skin is white and belongs to a boy alive in Dickens' England. Now, is that isn't an act of magic I don't know what is." Another character muses on youth and age: "' Everyone was young in those days. That's the main complaint you hear from people who are getting old. You stop seeing young people. You begin to wonder if there are any left and whether there were only young people when you were young.'"When you finish this haunting and intense story, you very well may want to reread the Dickens' account of the young Pip and his journey to becoming a gentleman. I know I do.

Mr Pip ,by LLoyd Jones, is an onion of a novel. By that I mean it is layered in an intricately woven manner to encompass a myriad of themes. At first it is a deceptively simple tale set on the lush tropical island of Bouganville where the native population,isolated and blockaded, are facing a civil war of deprivation and horror.Into the mix comes the only white inhabitant who remained after others fled,Mr Watts. He steps up to take over the abandoned schoolhouse and thus becomes the Pied Piper of Bouganville. Through his storytelling of Dicken's Great Expectations he provides a safe haven for the war stricken children . They immediately succomb to the power of the written word and are transported to Victorian England where they meet Pip who in some ways is like each one of them. Imagination takes them away from the immediate horror of civil war. Mr Pip becomes a savior of sorts especially to Matilda, the young Narrator. But Mr Watt's hold on the children causes issues with the parents who see his approach as a threat to religious beliefs and cultural allegiance. These differences of culture and dogmatic approach lead to a stand off between Mr Watts and Dolores, Matilda's mother. This clash will create unlikely heroes as the war encroaches and moral decisions must be made. There is great symbolism here for a world where races and cultures face major changes in an ever more global world. When the only copy of Great Expectations disappears and the soldiers demand to see a fictional Mr Pip,(who they believe to be a real spy) there are terrible reprecussions. Storytelling becomes the weapon of choice at first, as it soothes the savage rambos who are really just misguided school children at heart.The seven nights of Mr Watts' storytelling are a heroic vehicle to stall until an escape plan is put into effect. But storytelling has created a great dilemma too, as there is no real Mr. Pip to offer up to the demanding redskins who appear savagely and without warning. I will not divulge any more of the plot but suffice it to say that Great Expectations causes major life changing effects as Matilda moves into a future off the island. The novel is a homage to literature, to teachers who change destinies, to clashes of cultures and racial divides, to the horrors of war ,to the power of the written word , to the empowering value of imagination and to the religious and moral values that sometimes must collide and clash before there can be compromises. This small novel offers huge issues to ponder . Mr Jones has exceeded many expectations with this novel.

When an uprising on the small island of Bougainville, part of Papua New Guinea, leads to the school in Matilda’s village being left with no teacher, the one white man in the village, Mr Watts, takes on the role. Unqualified, he decides to inspire the children’s imaginations by reading them a chapter of Great Expectations each day. He also invites the mothers of the village to come to class and impart nuggets of local wisdom. But the uprising is coming ever nearer and soon violence will sweep into the village, changing life for some of the characters irrevocably...This book was nominated for the Booker Prize in 2007. Astonishing. I can only assume this was for the worthiness of the message rather than any literary merit. The message is simple: literature provides a means to interpret life and to escape from reality. Oh, and war is hell.I’ve said this before but clearly Mr Jones wasn’t paying attention. If, when you start to write your novel, you decide to constantly remind your readers of one of the greatest writers of all time, you’d better be sure your own writing will bear up to the inevitable comparisons. Jones not only reminds us of Great Expectations, he spends much of his book recounting large swathes of that one in grossly simplified terms. Even although Great Expectations is one of my least favourite Dickens’ novels, I spent most of my time wishing I was reading it rather than this. Where Dickens is marvellously imaginative, Jones is not. Where Dickens uses language with a lush extravagance, Jones does not. Where Dickens creates characters who, although exaggerated, contain an essential truth, Jones does not.Not content with reminding us of Dickens, Mister Pip has many of the elements of the Dead Poets Society running through it too – the teacher who opens his pupils’ minds to a new way of thinking through unconventional teaching methods. I always found that film mawkish, and Mr Watts comes over as no more credible than the Robin Williams’ character. Heart Of Darkness pops up too in a rather odd way – since the book is written from the perspective of Matilda, one of the native islanders, it struck me as clumsily colonial that the most important, most influential character should be the one white man.I’m really not a believer in the ‘write what you know’ school of thought. I believe all authors should be allowed to imagine themselves into different genders, races, cultures, ages, etc., if they choose. I prefer to say you should ‘know what you write’; that is, do your research, get beneath the skin of your characters, make them speak and think and act as they would rather than as you would. So in principle I have no problem with a middle-aged white man writing in the voice of a teenage black girl from an entirely different culture to his own. However, I never for one moment felt that the voice of Matilda rang true. In Great Expectations, Dickens writes as Pip, but tells us about his childhood in retrospect using an adult voice. Jones can’t seem to make up his mind – sometimes Matilda’s voice is clearly that of an educated adult looking back, but sometimes he tries to create a teenage voice for her and fails badly by allowing her to be aware of things her life experience would not have revealed to her at that time.There were so many things that annoyed me about this. Matilda mentions her blackness about a million times, leaving me to wonder if black people living in almost exclusively black communities with little or no contact with the outside world really talk about their black arms, black skin, black feet, all the time. As a white child growing up in an exclusively white community, I certainly have no recollection of ever thinking of myself as white. Every time Matilda reminded me that she was black, it had the odd effect of reminding me that the author was white – he seemed more fascinated by Matilda’s skin colour than I could believe she ever would have been. I remember reading somewhere Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie saying that she never thought of herself as black until she went to live in America.Then there’s the stuff Jones doesn’t explain, and the bits we’re presumably supposed to accept without thinking through how unrealistic they are. Matilda acts as interpreter at points between Mr Watts and various Papuans. How did this teenage girl who has never left her village and who has had a basic education at the local school acquire this ability? Why her, rather than any of the other kids who grew up alongside her? She finds it hard to explain the meaning of ‘black shoe polish’ to the villagers but oddly has no difficulty with the concept of ‘the coats of parking attendants’.Pah! Enough! The story itself is fine – a straightforward account of the devastating effects of living through a brutal war. It therefore has some graphically violent scenes which some readers may find disturbing although, given the context, I didn’t feel they were inappropriate or overdone. (If anything, I felt he copped out in the end, choosing to avoid the worst brutality at the expense of realism.) But overall, I found little to admire in this one and find it hard to recommend.

I found this to be a beautiful and engaging story with central characters that are easy to love. I won't tell you of all the details, that is what the blurb is for of course and was enough to sell me this book in the first place. Read it, get carried away with it. It will affect you but then all the best books do that don't they?

Male author writes from 14 year old female viewpoint in a different culture. Unfortunately this becomes obvious early on. A child narrator might not be expected to be sophisticated, but even so the characters are very simplified, one dimensional, and unconvincing. A man may write from his own daughters perspective, in his own culture, based on the many discussions and challenges one has with one's children as they grow up. But to know and describe the mind of a child, in these circumstances, in a different culture is just too ambitious. The child witnessing her mothers rape and the matter of fact descriptions of murder are shocking, but the presumably intended flatness of the tone at these moments, and the absence of emotion, comes across strongly as the authors interpretation of the child's perspective, rather than the child's actual perspective. At so many points I felt this is an adult was trying to speak, observe and describe like a child.

It is difficult to describe how such a gentle, intriguing book can at the same time describe such horrors. Set in war torn Papua New Guinea in the 90's, we see how the lives of the inhabitants of a remote village are affected by the ever-encroaching war. Mr Watts is an eccentric white man who chooses to stay on in the village when his compatriots have long since fled to safety. He takes it upon himself to restart the village school, but does so by using his favourite book in the English language, Great Expectations, as the stock text. In so doing, he is able to capture the imaginations of his charges, despite the alien environment of Victorian England in which the book is set.This should have been a five star book, but for me, was let down by the clunky last couple of chapters, which set out to explain some of the mysteries of the book's central character. But whilst that is a disappointment it is not a reason not to read this book.

I really liked this. It was small & easily written. The story flowed wonderfully & I read the whole thing in one day.I loved the part that was set on the island. I loved Mr Watts & the way he made the children remember parts of Great Expextations so they could rewrite the book after it was lost. I wished he was my teacher.I was confused once Matilda left the island. Her father was in Australis this whole time? But yet he didn't think to try & help her & her mother? He seemed not to be bothered that their house had been burnt down & all their posessions taken. I didn't understand why he stood back & did nothing, yet she went to live with him. It didn't add up. I was disappointed with the ending & found it a bit rushed & not really all there