Mister Pip
Lloyd Jones
John Murray, Rs 725

Literary prizes and and shortlists may be arbitrary, and may even make mistakes — for example, what was Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach doing in this year’s Man Booker shortlist? — but every now and then they lead to the most wonderful new discoveries. It was this year’s Man Booker shortlist that led innumerable readers to discover Mister Pip, the first novel by New Zealand-based novelist Lloyd Jones to be published globally. (To recap, the prize eventually went to The Gathering by Anne Enright.)

At first, it seems like a rather slight work to make the shortlist: a novel written by a white man, about a white man reading out from a Dickens novel to a school class? But that’s exactly where the many surprises of Mister Pip begin. Matilda is a 14-year-old black girl growing up on the island of Bougainville in the South Pacific. It is 1991. Civil war, which has broken out on the other side of the island, is moving in inexorably to engulf Matilda’s village. Meanwhile, although 86 days have passed since the last day of school, Mr Watts gathers a raggedy class together to introduce them to “Mr Dickens”. It is a new experience for Matilda. “I had never been read to in English before. Nor had the others. We didn't have books in our homes…. It was a new sound in the world.”

On one level, drawing connections across a century and a half, Mister Pip is about the sustaining and redemptive power of fiction. It is equally about the dangers of literal readings — for the soldiers who come to destroy the village are looking for a man named “Mister Pip”. It is about the struggle between religion (symbolised by Matilda’s mother and her Bible) and the literary imagination (symbolised by Mr Watts and his reading of Dickens). It is about the search for a moral compass in times of conflict: Mr Watts caring for his dying wife; Matilda’s mother speaking up for what is right; and, at the end of the novel, Matilda herself, searching for the courage to adequately narrate the story that has now become her responsibility.

... contd.