“Mr. Pip” by Lloyd Jones

I just finished Mr Pip and I wanted to strike while the proverbial iron is hot. I‘m still trying to catch my breath. I think may have actually said “Wow!” out loud at some point.

When I picked up “Mr. Pip,” I thought it looked enchanting; a nice island book about how stories can change everyone’s lives, the power of the written word and all that.

Not quite.

Harder and better than that.

In the 1990’s, although situationally that is irrelevant, a young black girl is living on an island somewhere off the coast of Australia. Near the Solomon Islands is my guess. Matilda’s town is rotting under the cloak of civil unrest. Bandits in the jungles and armies fight over the remnants of a prosperous copper mine.Her father – like many others – has gone to the white man’s mainland to work. The remaining islanders have little structure or means, and live in the haphazard expectation that change – good or bad – is coming.

The pivotal change starts with the decision of the last white man, Mr. Watts, to resurrect some semblance of school for the village children. Not being a teacher, he chooses “Great Expectations” by Charles Dickens as his primer.Every day he reads one chapter. The children slowly reach out to the lifeline being cast and Matilda, especially, becomes enraptured.

Mr Watts is giving them another life, “ another piece of the world … (they) could go back to it as often as they liked.” A world outside their own that both feeds them and encourages the whole village to share.

Parents and grandparents come to school to contribute their views on everything from the color blue to braiding hair. Lines are drawn between Matilda’s mother and Mr. Watts when religious convictions are tested, but the real story is how all of this holds up when the very real dangers on the island manifest themselves physically.

The horror of war, no matter how small, is here. The death, the defeatism, the terror, are all-encompassing, and we are very much afraid for the village. With each blow, they somehow manage to rise again until it becomes too much to bear .Will “Great Expectations” have taught them enough about themselves to stay strong? Will they remember “to be human is to be moral, and you cannot have a day off when it suits.”

Just as Dickens’ Pip finds he can no longer return to his old life, so does Matilda. Indeed, no one will ever be the same again.

LLoyd Jones is a very good storyteller and Mr. Pip will leave you both slightly disturbed and yet also encouraged.