What the Dickens?

MISTER PIP
By Lloyd Jones
John Murray. 240 pages. £6.99
ISBN 978 0 719 569 944

This is a book I have long meant to read.

It was shortlisted for the Booker six years ago. But I didn’t get round to reading it until I found a secondhand copy in a charity shop this year. The cover gives an indication of the setting with its bright turquoise blue background and stylised tropical foliage. It is not, however, a sunny read.

The story is located in a recent conflict which I had never heard of — a civil struggle on the island of Bougainville, near the Solomon Islands and belonging to Papua New Guinea. The author, Lloyd Jones, covered this war as a journalist for his New Zealand paper, and uses its shocking brutalities to frame and shape his (very postcolonial, very post-(post?)-modern!) narrative about the ways in which stories take on new lives of their own. His narrator is Matilda, a teenager who, with the other village children, returns to school after the electricity has stopped and the teachers left. The last white man in the village offers to teach and his only text is Great Expectations. As day by day her fascination with the foreign world of Pip grows, so Matilda grows estranged from her mother whose book is her pidgin Bible. The story of Pip’s struggle for identity becomes a wonderful escape from the growing fear in the village, but this takes a dangerous turn when government soldiers enter the village, and counting up the men declare that one is missing, a Mister Pip.

A lot more happens, some of it uplifting, some distressing. Perhaps Lloyd Jones tries to fit a little too much in, or to touch on too many themes, but through it all Matilda’s clear and uncluttered narrative voice directs the reader. And while initially the sophistication of the teacher seems to trump Matilda’s mother’s syncretistic faith, the reader, along with Matilda, comes to see a more complex reality.

So it is not sunny, but it is satisfying and enjoyable. And perhaps we need to be reading those books which will push us to think about how stories are reinvented, so that we can answer critics of the story of stories with grace and courage.