If you’ve come across One Big Damn Puzzler by John Harding, the plot of Lloyd’s Jones’ Mister Pip may seem familiar: the introduction of a classic text of English literature to a remote Pacific island civilisation that exposes the chasms between ‘civilised’ and primitive culture. However where Harding dramatises the damage wrought on a preliterate society by the invasion of Western Capitalism, Jones explores the consequences of how, in the midst of a brutal civil war, literature has the power to displace – to teach a person to inhabit their imagination.
Matilda is our narrator, growing up 1990’s Bougainville: an island in the South Pacific. As her village quakes nervously amid the conflict between rebel forces and the Papa New Guinea government army, Matilda is distracted by the intervention of Mr. Watts – a white immigrant who takes it upon himself to rekindle the Bougainville children’s neglected education. The source of the curriculum is Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations; Matilda learns to escape the sense of inevitability that haunts her village by following Mr Pip in his journey through 19th century England.
Jones structures his story around the tensions that arise from the collection and cultivation of knowledge in an infrastructure focused on survival. He demonstrates how the social fabric of a community relies on communication. Matilda struggles to explain the power of literature to her fundamentalist mother who despises Mr Watt’s as a heathen. The children collectively use their education about an alien world to escape the terror of their everyday life. The secrets held by Matilda, her mother and Mr Watts seal the fate of the village as the government forces approach. Great Expectations succeeds in distancing the innocent from the military conflict, but it is their very naivety that endangers them. The question for the reader is whether their imaginative escapism provides a protective shield for the children or a dangerous delusion distant from grim reality.
Matilda’s testimony is touchingly acute in its innocence, honesty and frank language. Her persistent interrogation of Mr. Watts about the distant realm of white society, puzzling over words like ‘frost’ and ‘beneficiary’, is extremely endearing. The narrative is strikingly creative coming as it does from the pen of a white, male, middle-aged New Zealander.
At the beginning of the book the threat of violence paroles the perimeter of Matilda’s story but, like the creeping vegetation that left un-maintained ‘would march down the steep hillside and bury our villages in flower and vine’, the war suddenly emerges from the jungle, wreaking devastating consequences for Matilda and her community. Simultaneously tragic and comic, heart-warming and politically profound, Mister Pip expertly reveals the frightening expanse of human character; its weaknesses and its strengths.
