Mr Pip

Lloyd Jones

Penguin

Otago Daily Times, October 14th 2006

I vividly remember the horrified fascination with which I read The Lord of the Flies, secure in the knowledge that it was fiction because there was no way the boys of my acquaintance could survive on an isolated atoll.

However, the question of how (or whether) a society can function in complete isolation is more than merely philosophical. In 1990, Papua New Guinea imposed a complete military blockade on the Pacific island of Bougainville. In addition to cutting off supplies of food, fuel and medicine, it shut out the eyes of the world for seven years. Up to 20,000 people died, undocumented and alone. Lloyd Jones was one of the journalists who attempted (unsuccessfully) to breach the barriers and his new novel, Mister Pip, is a powerful and moving evocation of this hidden history.

Matilda Laimo is 13 when the blockade is imposed and although the adults are careful not to discuss the violent struggle between the PNG army and Frances Ona’s resistance force, she and the other children are acutely aware of the situation. They see the babies dying of malaria and the older boys leaving the village to join the rebellion. They watch BRA helicopters flying out to sea and back again, and hear the rumours of rebel soldiers flung to the waves.

Even the sudden parental silences are evidence; “so we knew, didn’t we, that there was some fresh atrocity, the detail we didn’t yet know about”. The entire village is waiting to see who will arrive first, the redskins or the rebels. The hardest thing for the children is the closure of the school, providing as it did the central structure of their lives. Then Mr Watts, the only white man left on the island, offers his services as teacher. His teaching style is far from orthodox. There are many gaps in his knowledge and there are no books in the school other than his own copy of Dickens’ Great Expectations, from which he reads a chapter a day.

He invites adults to come and share their own, personal wisdoms: “And so we heard about the colour blue. Blue is the colour of the Pacific. It is the air we breathe. Blue is the gap in the air of all things, such as the palms and iron roofs — blue belongs to the sky and cannot be nicked, which is why the missionaries stuck blue in the windows of the first churches they built here on the island.”

But it is Great Expectations which captures the children’s imaginations, although there is much they do not understand: “We were amazed when he told us the truth of a rimy morning. We could not imagine air so cold it made smoke come out of your mouth or caused grass to snap in your hands. For us something cold was something left in the shade or buffered by the night air.”

Dickens’ words create a refuge from the fear and the waiting. “Mr Watts had given us kids another world to spend the night in. We could escape to another place.” Pip becomes both a friend, as real “as if I could feel his breath on my cheek and an embodiment of the fact that change is possible.”

Matilda’s mother, seeing her daughter stolen from her, tries to intervene and a defiant Matilda spells out ‘Pip’ in the sand with palm hearts and cowrie shells. When PNG soldiers finally reach the village, they demand to meet this mysterious Pip, and although Mr Watts tries to explain, he is unable to produce proof, for the book has disappeared. From this point onward the fate of the village is brutally, inevitably sealed.

Although this sounds horrifying and disturbing (and in parts it is), Lloyd Jones writes with a beauty and clarity that I found totally compelling. Deceptively simple and beautifully crafted (I can see it as part of a future high school curriculum), the novel set off resonances that continued to grow and deepen long after I finished the story.

There are no simple truths: Mr Watts and Matilda’s mother represent the standoff between colonisation and indigenous resistance as they battle for Matilda’s loyalty. But neither can survive the violent decompression of an isolated and abandoned society. Both Pip and Mr Watts are in one sense or another fictional characters, yet through the power of imagination comes hope. Pip is both saviour and agent of destruction.

Mister Pip is also a memorial for all of those innocent men, women and children who died during the blockade and whose stories will never be told. Funny, profound, moving and entirely human, there is a truth here that surpasses mere fact.