required reading

Mister Pip is my second Booker shortlisted read, and it's the novel, yes apart from the McEwan, that everyone is talking about.

It tells the story of Matilda, then a young girl, now the narrator of this novel, and an episode in her childhood in Bougainville, during the time of the blockade by Papua New Guinea. At that time, almost all the white people left the island, leaving only Mr Watts. Mr Watts, or Pop Eye, as he was known to the children, took over the teaching at Matilda's school, blending the wisdom of his pupil's parents with recitations from Great Expectations. The children listen to Great Expectations from cover to cover, and Matilda is spellbound, fascinated by her ability to slip inside the skin of a white boy named Pip, from Victorian England.

But the presence of Pip in the village community causes problems, first between Matilda and her mother, and then as a source of confusion for the redskin fighters, with disastrous consequences.

The novel's turn to scenes of violence is expected, by the time it arrives, but it came as a horrible, sickening shock all the same. Matilda's narrative withholds the worst from us, until the moment comes, just as she, as a child, was protected from full knowledge by her mother and the other adults around her. As readers, we are plunged from a quaint, twee story of some villagers in an island paradise, into the story of a civil war. The sudden bursts of horror reminded me of The Road, yet were all the more forceful for the knowledge that this events are drawn from recent history. Being written by a middle aged, white, outsider, Lloyd Jones is playing with fire as he attempts to represent this history to a white, middle class audience, yet his novel is all about ignorance and storytelling. Just as Matilda and her classmates are kept ignorant of the worst of the warring factions in Bougainville, she is also unaware of the fact that Mr Watts has been reading an abridged version of Great Expectations to her class, with the hard bits, and the hard-to-swallow bits, neatly excised. And so we, as readers, are challenged to question our attitude to literature, as we tumble into the awfulness of the later part of the novel. Does it neatly protect us from reality, or does it perform the task of informing and transforming us?

The prose is clear and charming, the story is fascinating, and I particulalrly enjoyed the thorny relationship between Maltilda and her mother. However, I felt too manipulated by Jones to really love this novel. The depiction of village life was deliberately sentimental, in order to make the horrors of war stand out more starkly. The reading of Charles Dickens was oh so clever a device to illustrate the idea of leaving, and improvement. The dichotomy between traditional values and western intellectual 'freedom' a little too simply rendered. The unravelling of mysteries at the end, and the destiny of Matilda a little too neatly satisfying. Despite the tropical setting, Mister Pip left me a little cold.