"Stories Have a Job to Do" Recommending Mister Pip

Over the term break I was determined to read some contemporary New Zealand fiction. I voiced my intentions to the open ears in the English department and was flooded with suggestions. Ruth, my right-hand kiwi-lit enthusiast was quick to mention Mister Pip, a novel by New Zealand writer Lloyd Jones. I've been meaning to blog about it but kept putting the task on the blog back-burner. The final spark to get things moving was the announcement of its recent prestigious award, The Commonwealth Writers' Prize 2007: Overall Best Book Winner

One of life's most welcome gifts is finding a good book to read. We all take a gamble with our library cards and credit cards when choosing new reading material, but the payoff is priceless when we find that stack of pages that we cannot put down. We read at every possible moment -- on the bus, at interval, through the weekend, into the weee hours of the night (and I've even set my alarm clock to wake up early after a late night of reading!). Totally engrossed, involved, and enraptured. That's a good book.

Mister Pip had me roped me into the scenery and history of the Solomon Islands and inspired me to hunt down a copy of Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. I could not put down the story of Matilda's life.

Here's what the publisher has to say:

Lloyd Jones’ new novel is set mainly in a small village on Bougainville, where Matilda attends the school set up by the only white man in the village, Mr Watts. By his own admission he’s not much of a teacher and proceeds to educate the children by reading them Great Expectations. Matilda falls in love with the novel and the promise of the next chapter is what keeps her going; Pip’s story protects her from the horror of what is happening around her – helicopters menacing the skies above the village and rebel raids on the ground.

After several visits to the village by soldiers, the book goes missing and is then destroyed. Mr Watts encourages the children to retell the story, the whole being constructed from their remembered fragments. Later, when she has fled the island for Australia, Matilda reaches for a copy of Great Expectations in the school library and realises that Mr Watts was reading them his own version of the text, another ‘invention’ of the original.

"Mister Pip" is a love song to the power of the imagination and of storytelling. It shows how books can change lives.

Mister Pip is not yet available in Canada (according to Chapters.ca), and thus I feel slightly privileged to have caught a glimpse of the future (which makes up for the frustration of the repeat television series!). I love this book for its beautiful language -- steeped in metaphors and sensory description it has taken me on one of the most memorable journeys in my readers' mind.

I haven't been able to turn the "English Major" switch to "off," so during my reading I kept note of some of my most treasured passages. May they serve to heighten your interest in the story of Mister Pip.

"A book gives you permission to change your life" (p 135)

"Stories have a job to do. They can't just lie around like lazybone dogs. They have to teach you something" (p 75)

"My sense of time was governed by the school year -- when term began, when it ended, the holidays between" (p 10)

"I want this to be a place of light" (p 14)

"The surprising thing is where I found him...in a book. No one had told us kids to look there for a friend. Or that you could slip inside the skin of another, or travel to another place..." (p 20-21)

"As we progressed through the book something happened to me. At some point I felt myself enter the story" (p 40)

"The forge was home: it embraced all those things that give a life its shape. For me, it meant the bush tracks, the mountains that stood over us, the sea that sometimes ran away from us...it was the jungle and its constant reminder of how small you were, and how unimportant, compared to the giant trees and their canopy's greed for sunlight" (p 46-47)

"If everything we did made sense, the world would be a different place. Life would be less interesting, don't you think?" (p 80)

"A dream is a story that no one else will get to hear or read. Thanks to dreams, in the history of the galaxy the world has been reinvented more often than there are stars" (p 160)

"Dreams are nervy things -- all it takes is for one stern word to be spoken in their direction and they shrivel up and die" (p 165)

"I only knew the man who took us kids by the hand and taught us how to reimagine the world, and to see the possibility of change, to welcome it into our lives. Your ship could come in at any time, and that ship could take many forms" (p 211)

"My Mr Dickens had taught ever one of us kids that our voice was special, and we should remember this whenever we used it, and remember that whatever else happened to us in our lives our voice could never be taken away from us" (p 220)

"We have all lost our possessions and many of us our homes," he said. "But these losses, severe though they may seem, remind us of what no person can take, and that is our minds and our imaginations" (p 107)

"No one in the history of your short lives has used the same voice as you with which to say your name. This is yours. Your special gift that no one can ever take from you" (p 108)

I'm gearing up for the next leg of my trip and will be reading Great Expectations with thoughts of Mister Pip and the Solomon Islands on my mind. I'd love to hear your thoughts on the story should a copy find its way into your hands.

Thanks for reading.

L.