The Book Tower

4 Stars

I do not know what you are expected to do with memories like these. It feels wrong to want to forget. Perhaps this is why we write these things down, so we can move on.

Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones is about the effect that Great Expectations has on a particular individual. Appreciation of Dickens’ novel is preferred but not essential to read Mister Pip – it is about how a book can shape our lives in how we make sense of our own place in the world when we compare it to fiction, and about how others may choose to interpret a book for us and how we might come to find the faults in a story. Any story – told well or badly. It might not be Dickens for everyone, but I think we all have books that has made such a mark on us. Or even stories told to us by the forgotten.

On the South Pacific island of Bougainville in 1991, a vague yet threatening war casts a worrying shadow. Mr Watts, also known as Pop Eye, assumes the role of school teacher in an attempt to keep normality flowing. He has only only one text book to hand – Great Expectations. He invites the locals to provide improvised lessons to fill the gaps; the rest of the time he reads Dickens to his class. Mister Pip is in turn narrated by Matilda, who becomes fascinated by the world of Pip, Magwitch, Estella, Miss Havisham … and Mr Watts. As she grows older she turns from Dickens student to scholar, and along the way the narrative also turns – from well observed humour to darker meditation on human cruelty.

What I liked most about Mister Pip was the subtle charting of Matilda’s maturity. It’s not education that saves her – Mr Watts can’t provide education in the conventional sense – but the wisdom she gains as an observer. Fiction from a child’s point of view doesn’t always work, but Jones manages to pull it off. So much so that I didn’t question this voice of a young girl, ready to consume the world but instead facing terrible tragedy.

For a slim work, Mister Pip has great depth. The mystery of Pop Eye’s history is slowly unravelled for Matilda, and through his eccentricity and sadness she does, oddly, learn a lot. This made me think about my own teachers and how, quite frankly, useless they were in the great scheme of my life. Sometimes the oddest characters we encounter can teach us the most. Whether the classic, like Joe Gargary or Philip Pirrip in Great Expectations, or the forgotten, like Mr Watts.

A book to be treasured.