Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones

I think I’m genetically programmed to be suspicious of books on the Man Booker Prize List. I’m sure that most, if not all of the books and authors who are honoured each year are wonderful examples of their craft, but sometimes I just find them hard going. With this in mind, I was a little apprehensive approaching Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones which was part of  the Man Booker Shortlist in 2007 as well as winning a slew of other prizes.

Despite my probably unfounded prejudices, I was interested in the premise of the book – you know when the flyleaf and back cover blurb is doing its job when it can make you buy a book despite your reservations.

On the South Pacific island of Bougainville, a young girl called Matilda narrates her experience living on what should be an island paradise but is being torn apart by rival factions in a devastating civil war. Many people including all the teachers have abandoned the island leaving only one white man in Matilda’s village – Mr Watts - who wears a red clown nose as he tows his wife Grace or possibly Sheba behind him in a small cart. Mr Watts fascinates the village kids, including Matilda, and when he steps up to become their teacher, he has no qualifications or aides apart from a battered copy of Great Expectations which he reads to the kids in serial form, just as Dickens himself disseminated it. None of the kids have been off their island, and the world of Pip, Magwitch, Miss Havisham and Estella is as alien as any world beyond their current shores.

There are many things that I thought worked terrifically about the book. The way Great Expectations is used to fire the imagination of the children, to make them ask questions about language, words, and other existences. It’s a lovely explanation of how we absorb stories and make them our own – Matilda feeling proprietorial about Pip and writing his name in stones on the beach to make him tangible is wonderful, as well as being an action that will come back to haunt her. It also has a lot to say about the divisiveness of imagination when one person cannot grasp something that someone else sees so clearly – Matilda’s mother despises Mr Watts and is suspicious of his influence on her daughter and the rest of the kids – a suspicion that will have major consequences for the village.

For me, the thing that really resonated is how we take stories and interpret them, we see them through the lens of our own experience, we weave them into our own life and weave our own life into them, and in doing so our perception of both the story and our life changes. That may sound pretentious, but it’s what I lay thinking about when I finished it in bed last night – about Matilda and her mum, and Mr Watts and Sheba and how their lives might have been different if Great Expectations and Pip hadn’t intruded on their worlds.

I really liked that the book is written very cleanly. There are no unnecessary language frills or flourishes because the story is enough. The fact that Matilda’s mum gets annoyed with Dickens' elaborate language – she rails against a sentence with unnecessary words that just get in the way – is a lovely contrast to the spare tone of Matilda’s narration. There are a couple of shocking pieces of violence, which is not in itself surprising given the background of civil war, but initially I was surprised how almost throw away these events are – referenced casually and moved on from – even though they are deeply traumatic events. But then I realised that in Matilda’s world, words are simple – elaborate constructs are for Mr Dickens, not for her, and to create great drama out of tragedy would be to remove the consequences of the violence from her reality. That’s my reading anyway, other views may vary.

I thought Mister Pip was a terrific book. It’s beautifully written, I empathised with the characters and both the narrative and the themes of book really got under my skin. It is definitely one I will come back to and who knows, maybe when the next Man Booker short list comes out, it may make me put aside my prejudices – stranger things have been known.

Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones was published in 2007 and my copy was published by Vintage Canada.