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. Continue reading
