Mister Pip
SynopsisPlot
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, an 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, are 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.
Story
About this book
On a tropical island torn apart by civil conflict, most teachers and professionals have already left. The one white man who stays is Mr. Watts, an eccentric figure viewed with suspicion by many villagers. He sweeps out the ruined school and reads aloud from Charles Dickens's Great Expectations to the children. Thirteen-year-old Matilda, the narrator, becomes absorbed by Pip, a young orphan in London.
As the readings continue, the fictional city starts to feel as solid to the children as their own damaged landscape, even while artillery sounds in the mountains. The villagers, at first wary of this foreign book, begin bringing their own tales and inherited mythology into the classroom. Lloyd Jones, a New Zealand author, sets local oral storytelling beside an imported literary text.
The novel follows what happens when a story takes hold in a place where survival is the daily task and imagination carries real risk. Matilda's attachment to Pip and to Mr. Watts sits uneasily with her mother's beliefs and with the pressures of a place at war. The island is copper-rich, echoing Bougainville in the western Pacific.
