Mister Pip

by Lloyd Jones

Book Overview

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...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0385341075
• ISBN13: 9780385341073
• Release Date: May 2008
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Length: 272 Pages
• Weight: 0.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.0" x 7.5"

Customer Reviews

Charming and shocking and very human

A story set on a tropical island which sounds idyllic until the fighting begins. As a civil war erupts around them the children of one village escape to nineteenth century London as they are introduced to "Mr Dickens" and the story of Pip through Mr Watts (or 'Popeye' as they were used to calling him before he became their teacher). I found it a really enjoyable read. The wisdom of not only Mr Watts but of the parents of the children who are invited into class to share their knowledge, which is more often than not based on an observation of nature. For all it's simplistic teachings it's also a comparison by Matilda, a young girl from the village, between her life and Pip's as she grows into adulthood. I was genuinely shocked by what happened toward the end of the book but as horrific as it was it still had me gripped and I really felt like I'd read a good story by the end.

Reviews by Dr. Thomas Moore, author with Alphar: August, 2007

In "Mister Pip", Lloyd Jones weaves a narrative that will transform lives... in a voice that lives on long after the final page. During the 1990 blockade of Bougainville, a south Pacific island rich in copper, only one white man chooses to stay behind: the eccentric Mr. Watts, 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 brilliant award-winning novel about the 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. A private, linen-suited figure with a native wife, Mr. Watts is a mystery to the children of the island But Matilda's fascination with the story of Pip begins to trouble her devout, practical-minded mother. She starts to wage a not-so-silent campaign against Mr. Watts and nineteenth-century England, and the distance between her and Matilda, who is immersed in the new world of Dickens, grows. Then the real war, which has been inching closer every day, arrives. The redskin soldiers visit the island and come to believe that Pip, the central character of Great Expectations, is a real, live man, being hidden by the villagers. Vengeance is extracted in increasingly terrible ways as the island fails to produce him. Yet as the villagers lose almost everything, for the children and Mr. Watts, the imaginary world exerts a stronger pull than ever. And for a moment, the power of story-telling seems as though it will save everyone. The narrator's voice is that of Matilda, a village girl. She was named by the Australians who opened up the world's richest copper mine in Bougainville, and her name stands throughout as ironic comment on responsibilities intimate and global. Lloyd Jones has a special insight into the intricacies of the human situation - intimate and global. Lloyd Jones, writing with the voice of an adolescent girl, is a middle-aged New Zealand author who has mastered a great novel: Wrought with the purity of grief, urgent in every cadence, and expanded by a faint lingering hope. But the end does not bring wonder but despair. And that's a wonder in itself, that such a grim subject can still carry something as luminous and as revealing to us readers worlds away from a forgotten village on the pacific. This book reminds me of the high;y acclaimed book Upland Road from AlpharPublish.com in that it explores the effects of a foreign civilization on children from a south pacific culture. Enjoy the book! Dr. Thomas Moore: tom.moore@xtra.co.nz. Author of The Progress Of Man, Hillary

Mister Pip

I have been reading avidly for over 40 years and this is the first book I have ever finished and turned immediately back to the beginning to start again. The other reviewers have covered plot and content - all of which are excellent, my enthusiasm is with the writing - if writing can be called 'gorgeous' this is. I want to eat this book. Thank you so much Mr Jones. A fantastic, intelligent, thought provoking, funny, treatise of our complicated humanity.

The Power of Storytelling

This novel is narrated by a black girl named Matilda who is reflecting on her time growing up in an island's small village on the fringes of war-torn Papua New Guinea. The village regularly receives news and gossip about the ongoing conflict between the perceived "red-skin invading government" and the black rebels made up of many young men from local villages. They hear about the vandalism and destruction of communities as well as the gruesome murder of many innocent civilians caught in the civil war. However, Matilda is only vaguely aware of this happening in the back ground. At first, she's more concerned with the daily details of life with her protective mother (her father left them some time ago to do business in Australia), playing with her friends and wondering about the local oddity - Mr. Watts (or Pop Eye as the children call him), the only white man in the village, who is occasionally found pulling his mysterious black wife in a cart while wearing a red clown nose. When the children are left with no teacher, Mr. Watts surprisingly comes forward to educate all the local children. However, with no formal teaching skills, he spends the majority of class time reading aloud to them from the novel Great Expectations. Matilda is enraptured by the story and comes to think of its characters as her friends, finding common themes between Pip's life and her own. However, her strict Christian mother is less than pleased about the way Mr. Watts is influencing her daughter. When the fighters come to Matilda's small village, the girl's adoration for the character Pip inadvertently causes a conflict which throws the village into chaos and threatens their peaceful existence. Jones masterfully re-creates life within this small village using straight-forward, beautifully-wrought prose. He describes the way in which storytelling can powerfully affect people, letting their thoughts and experience meld with the tales to make them wholly personal and unique. The author also manages to subtly make original and profound statements about racial differences. When scenes of horrific violence appear they are delivered with heart-breaking simplicity rather than artistic flourishes. Jones shows the slow painful destruction which war brings, exhausting and maiming the fighters, creating upheaval and chaos in the lives of ordinary citizens and tarnishing the future of the innocents. This is what makes Mister Pip a truly universal tale accessible to anyone. The thing which is shown to survive, beyond all the villagers' physical possessions, is their imagination and memory. They are what allow Matilda to reconnect with her past and rebuild her identity out of the ashes. She eventually discovers Mr. Watts has hidden stories of his own as does her beloved author Mr. Dickens. Though she endures a painful amount of hardship, it feels like a kind of victory that Matilda's own story can survive despite her childhood world being erased by the march of history. This is only th

"There Is No Frigate Like A Book"

Emily Dickinson's famous lines "there is no frigate like a book to take us miles away" could not be more apropros of Lloyd Jones' magical MISTER PIP. Matilda, the narrator, is a black child entering puberty living in New Guinea when we first meet her. Her beloved father has left her and her mother to seek his fortune in Australia and try to, in the words of her mum, "turn into a white man." Matilda becomes fascinated, as does the reader, with the only white man on her island, Mr. Watts (some days he wore a red clown's nose), nicknamed by the children of the village "Pop Eye." His wife is a black woman named Grace whom he often pulls around on a trolley. When war breaks out and many people flee the settlement, Mr. Watts teaches the remaining island children. He reads aloud to his spellbound students Charles Dickens' GREAT EXPECTATIONS, which he describes as the greatest novel by the greatest English writer of the nineteenth century. Dickens' character Pip makes an indelible impression on the young Matilda and becomes much more real to her than dead relatives. Much of the conflict in this beautifully crafted story has to do with the tension between Mr. Watts, who does not believe in a god, and Matilda's mother Dolores, a devout believer in the Good Book. Matilda sees many parallels between her life and that of the fictional Pip. As an adult she remembers his confession,"it is a most miserable thing to feel ashamed of home" and thinks of her island. That passage and many others she sees as "personal touchstones." Mr. Jones' narrative will hold you in its spell, and you will long remember Mr. Watts. Like many teachers, he is part charlatan, part magician, but also a kind and loving mentor. He is more alive than many of the people on the nightly news-- and certainly more decent-- and as real as William Styron's Sophie, John Updike's Rabbit or Thomas Hardy's Tess. MISTER PIP says wondrous things about the power of the imagination, the permanence of storytelling-- when the novel is lost, Mr. Watts and his students remember fragments from it and write them down-- kindness and courage. The author is a wizard with words, but he also lets his characters make profound statements about life as well. For example, the Jones' ocean shuffles up the beach and draws out; Matilda hears "the lazy flip-flop of the sea--so much louder at night than during the day" and Mr. Watts defines the word "opportunity" to his students: "'The window opens and the bird flies out.'" Matilda, from reading this one book of Dickens, finds out that "you can slip under the skin of another just as easily as your own, even when that skin is white and belongs to a boy alive in Dickens' England. Now, is that isn't an act of magic I don't know what is." Another character muses on youth and age: "' Everyone was young in those days. That's the main complaint you hear from people who are getting old. You stop seeing young people. You begin to wonder if there are any left and whether there were