In a novel that is at once intense, beautiful, and fablelike, Lloyd Jones weaves a transcendent story that celebrates the resilience of the human spirit and the power of narrative to transform our lives.
On a copper-rich tropical island shattered by war, where the teachers have fled with most everyone else, only one white man chooses to stay behind: the eccentric Mr. Watts, object of much curiosity and scorn, who sweeps out the ruined schoolhouse and begins to read to the children each day from Charles Dickens’s classic Great Expectations.
So begins this rare, original story about the abiding strength that imagination, once ignited, can provide. As artillery echoes in the mountains, thirteen-year-old Matilda and her peers are riveted by the adventures of a young orphan named Pip in a city called London, a city whose contours soon become more real than their own blighted landscape. As Mr. Watts says, “A person entranced by a book simply forgets to breathe.” Soon come the rest of the villagers, initially threatened, finally inspired to share tales of their own that bring alive the rich mythology of their past. But in a ravaged place where even children are forced to live by their wits and daily survival is the only objective, imagination can be a dangerous thing.
Lloyd Jones' "Mr Pip" has all the good intentions in the right place, and this is the biggest problem of the novel. His subject is very interesting indeed. A simple girl's life being changed by her love for books. It has the heart one would expect to such a material, but it hasn't the profundity one would want. Jones' narrative is simple and predictable once you get where he is leading to. He also thrust in easy tears replacing wit sometimes, what is really sad, since he has so many good moments. As we all know, "Mr Pip" is one more brick in the road to hell.
I loved this book so much the first time I read it from the library, had to buy it to reread it and share with my family. The subject is one many Americans probably know little about, but as an expatriate Australia I remember the episodes and hearing about them growing up. The use of Dickens tale as a metaphor just made it all the more poignant. I heartily recommend this book to anyone who loves a good read, and wants to learn more about history of an area that is foreign to many Americans.
'Mister Pip' is a well thought-out and sympathetically-written story about a young girl, Matilda, caught up in civil war on the South Pacific tropical island where she has lived all her life.
War threatens the everyday lives of people from Matilda's village. The young men have already gone off to war, and the villagers live under constant threat of attack and other war atrocities. There is one white man left, Mr. Watts, who has been married to villager Grace for some years. Grace, however, doesn't seem to be quite of right mind and she and Mr. Watts have been mostly ignored or ostracised by the rest of the village. They live in a big house on the village outskirts and lead quite separate lives. As the war progresses Mr. Watts soon takes on the responsibility of Teacher at the little one-room school, using as his textbook Dickens's 'Great Expectations'. He reads the book aloud to the children, until the story takes on meaning and becomes something of an obsession, especially to Matilda, and Mr. Pip becomes a very real character in this war-torn community.
The book is lyrically written, often hinting at meaning rather than overtly stating it, with a simplicity that suits the story being told. Touching and heartbreaking; but I have given 4 stars instead of 5 as I didn't quite warm to the characters as much as I wanted to, especially Matilda and Mr. Watts. Winner of the 2007 Comonwealth Writers' Prize and shortlisted for the 2007 Man Booker, the book seems sure to become a modern classic and I wouldn't be surprised to see it one day as a school text. Reminiscent of, although quite different from, William Golding's 'Lord of the Flies'.
