Mister Pip is a modern-day fable in which a gentle human drama is sabotaged by the horror and brutality of war. Despite a shocking, and unnecessarily gruesome, finale, it is ultimately a compassionate story of hope.
The story is told from the perspective of Matilda, a black girl who is 13-years-old at the start of the novel. She lives on an unnamed pacific island cut off by war,
We learn little or nothing about the background to the conflict save that the natives live in constant fear of the Redskins whose level of danger rises in direct proportion to the amount of ‘jungle juice’ these ‘Rambos’ have consumed.
The real life backdrop is a ‘hidden’ civil war on Bougainville Island of Papua New Guinea in the 1990s which the New Zealand born author covered as a journalist.
Matilda’s father has narrowly escaped the blockade to look for work in Australia so she is left alone with her god-fearing and ,at times, overbearing mother, Dolores.
The window which shows that another world is possible comes from Mr Watt, the only white man on the island, who takes on the role of a teacher even though he doesn’t really have anything to teach apart from a deep love of literature and of Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations in particular.
He reads the novel in class in such a way that he is able to make the characters live and breathe. Matilda is entranced and transported: “It contained a world that was whole and made sense, unlike ours”.
She identifies most strongly with Pip seeing the fictional life as a mirror of the immigrant’s experience: “The idea that your life could change without warning was very appealing”.
Dickens’ novel also provides a way of bridging the gulf between her and the world of ‘grown-ups’ and frees her imagination to expand her otherwise narrow and seemingly hopeless world –“It gave me permission to change my life”.
Lloyd Jones
Watt is the key figure in the story although he remains something of an enigma throughout. He came to be on the island through the love of a black woman, Grace, who plays only a minor role in the story. It is unclear why he remains on the island when you imagine escape would be easier for him than for the natives. The suggestion is that he has nowhere else to go. He is old and not in the best of health (“his careful classroom manner concealed his frailty”)
As an outsider and non-believer he is , not surprisingly, regarded with suspicion by the mothers of the children, and by Dolores in particular. But he is an inspiring and resourceful teacher who diplomatically makes use of the experiences of the children’s mothers to supplement the lessons.
The representation of the white man as a source of civilisation and freedom is a familiar one in literature and is a problematic one in that it is all too often associated with a patriarchal and patronising attitude towards blacks.
In Mister Pip, Mr Watt may be a kindly and benevolent figure but one cannot pretend that white is just a feeling since it is so indelibly linked with abuses of power through slavery, discrimination and oppression.
Lloyd Jones admits that plots are not his strong point and has said that he was looking to Matilda to give the novel a “persuasiveness voice”. He succeeds insofar that he captures a sense of her determination to transcend her desperate circumstances but he never quite gets to grips with any weightier subtext regarding colour and race.
He stays on safe territory of personal growth and the flowering of Matilda into a liberated scholar ultimately makes this a story of resilience in the face of evil and the power of fiction to transform lives
Watch out for a movie of the book directed by Andrew Adams and starring Hugh (House) Laurie as Mr Watt . Coming soon.
