Story as “a weapon for survival”

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Matilda, the protagonist and narrator of Lloyd Jones’ novel Mister Pip[i]  confides to the reader at the conclusion of the story, “Pip was my story, even if I was once a girl and my face black as the shining night”. She is referring to Pip, the hero of Charles Dickens’ classic, Great Expectations and also to the context when she first heard the story as a 13 year old pupil in a village school in a remote Pacific island off the coast of Papua New Guinea in the 1990s.

The island which forms the historical backdrop of the fictional story of Mister Pip is torn apart by a brutal civil war and is under siege from the ruthless Government forces of the nearby mainland following a dispute over mining rights. There is a certain irony that the children of the island of Bougainville should find comfort in Great Expectations, as they fearfully await and expect the almost inevitable catastrophic attack of merciless gunmen.  Dickens’ story is rooted in another time, place and culture but Matilda describes her intimate relationship with the narrative, “At some point I felt myself enter the story…I wasn’t identifiable on the page, but I was there, I was definitely there.” (40)

In all the upheaval of conflict the school on the island had been closed.   Mr. Watts, nicknamed as Pop Eye and in many ways an unlikely figure for a teacher revives the school. The highlight of each day is when Mr. Watts  reads aloud  to the class the  story of  Dickens.  It is this story – sometimes interwoven with Mr. Watts’ own history – which  prepares the islanders, himself included,  for the  threat that looms over  the island.  In Matilda’s words, “What did I hope for? Just hope itself, really, but in a particular way. I knew things could change because they had for Pip.” (44)

A community of readers and listeners is created through an engagement with a  single book that brings literature alive and gives  each one  a sense of hope that they too have a voice. Matilda writes, ‘My Mr. Dickens had taught everyone of us kids that our voice was special , and we should remember this whenever we used it , and remember that whatever happened to us in our lives our voice could never be taken away from us.” (219) For Matilda’s mother the relationship to the book and the role of Mr. Watts is more ambivalent and yet she too is changed by the book and becomes finally  in her daughter’s  eyes ‘the moral person’ who  does the right thing  “no matter how awful or how difficult the situation.” (46)

The tattered and worn out copy of Great Expectations is lost in the midst of all the tensions when the homes and possessions of the community are deliberately  destroyed by fire. The children, together with Mr. Watts resolve to  ‘retrieve’ the fragments they remember of the book. Matilda writes, “We worked hard to make scraps of a vanished world.” (127)  Mr. Watts tells the children to ‘dream freely’ and not to worry about the order or ‘even as it really happened’. He warns the children, “You won’t always remember it at a convenient moment. It might come to you in the night. If so, you must hang on to the fragments until we meet in class. There, you can share it and add it to the others. When we have gathered all the fragments we will put together the story. It will be as good as new.”

Matilda  struggles to recall details and events of the book alone but then she realizes that it is the pooling of memories  that gives flesh and bones and meaning  to the story.  “It was easier in class. For some reason, whenever one of us produced a fragment I could almost always remember another one either side of it. It happened this way for the others as well.” (118) This process of becoming authors not just passive listeners is made possible by collaboration. Matilda grasps that it is not just her individual experience that brings the book to life but the memories that each of the children have treasured.

She also begins to understand what Mr. Watts means by asking for the “gist” of the text when she says “We could fill in the gaps with our own worlds.” It is this underlying meaning of the story that Mr. Watts realizes when he identifies with Pip to tell his own story to the rebels. In that  description Mr. Watts tells of how he, a New Zealander clerical worker   and his second wife, an indigenous woman from the same Pacific island  shared  and negotiated their experiences in what he calls “the spare room” – a third space which was not familiar to either.   Matilda is called upon to translate and wrestles with the challenge to make the metaphor of a spare room meaningful to herself and to her audience. She writes, “I talked about a womb to be filled, a hull to fill with fish. I spoke of the coconut hollowed out of its white flesh and milk.” (153)

The blur between fantasy and reality, the world of literature and life itself is powerfully but painfully explored in Lloyd Jones’ novel through the probing  voice of Matilda. She writes, “He (Mr. Watts) had given us Pip  and I had come to know this Pip as if he were real and I could feel his breath on my cheek . I had learned to enter the soul of another.”  (50)  This does not mean that she escapes tragedy and loss  nor  does it save her from exposure to the horror of  senseless and savage violence but  the power of imagination  helps her to see beyond both the boundaries of her self and  to confront the limits of bestiality  and the dangerous possibilities of heroism.

One dimension of the book Mister Pip is how a story  – in this case a story within a story  – can be transformative for both  teacher and learner. Children may be wary of an overzealous parent, teacher or librarian who seeks to manipulate their minds and hearts through a text but there are occasions when readers of all ages sense that a story is a “weapon for survival” even in the harshest of times.

[i] The book Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones was first published in 2006. The references here are from the 2017 edition published by John Murray, London.