Warm, poignant and inspiring - should have won last year's Booker

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	• Mister Pip Lloyd Jones Dial Press Trade Paperback, 2008 - 272 pages average customer review:based on 44 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Great Expectations...Fulfilled

I had great expectations for Mister Pip, shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize (and, in my mind, far more deserving than The Gathering). I'm pleased to say that my expectations were truly met. This imaginative, courageous, and heartbreaking book captured my own imagination and will stay with me a long time.

The book takes place on a lush tropical island -- a paradise -- with Garden of Eden overtures. Here, Mr. Watts -- the only white inhabitant, a somewhat eccentric schoolteacher -- and Grace, the mother of the main character Matilda, wrestle for her soul, through fiction and religion. Both are products of imagination; both have the power to transform and both are redemptive. And ultimately, the moral values of both Mr. Watts and Grace emerge to be essentially the same.

There are surprises at the end and heartbreaks -- no spoilers -- that have haunted me since closing the last pages. There is wisdom about the power of imagination and reinvention, the nature of true courage, the way we repair ourselves with stories old and new.

And in the end, Lloyd Jones says it best: "Perhaps there are lives like that -- poured into whatever space we have made ready for them to fill... we needed a magician to conjure up other worlds and Mr. Watts had become that magician." Nothing is ever quite what it seems, and both art and religion have power and limitations. With its sparse, haunting prose and powerful story, Mr. Jones has conjured up some magic of his own.

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Greater Expectations!

I bought this book when I was in New Zealand, and it was impossible not to do so when every bookshop had piles and piles of it, and everybody was grabbing a copy of it! So I didn't really read what this book was about beforehand.

So I loved it at the beginning, but then.... There is a really shocking and violent episode that ends with Matilda, the principal character, leaving the island..... and from there on, the book just let me down. And there are some parts of the novel that relied too much on re-telling Dickens Great Expectations, but not really building up on the story.

My last advice is: don't read this book if you haven't read Grat Expectations, or if you don't remember it well.

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Good intentions and nothing else

Lloyd Jones' "Mr Pip" has all the good intentions in the right place, and this is the biggest problem of the novel. His subject is very interesting indeed. A simple girl's life being changed by her love for books. It has the heart one would expect to such a material, but it hasn't the profundity one would want. Jones' narrative is simple and predictable once you get where he is leading to. He also thrust in easy tears replacing wit sometimes, what is really sad, since he has so many good moments. As we all know, "Mr Pip" is one more brick in the road to hell.

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Warm, poignant and inspiring - should have won last year's Booker

In the civil war torn island of Bougainville in the early 1990s where rebels face off soldiers from encroaching forces, there lived a native community long deserted by whites who had fled to the safety of Australia and New Zealand except for one with a native wife who chose to remain behind as a local school teacher, like flotsam from an earlier tide. His name was Mr Watts but in the eyes of the children took on the name and identity of Mr Pip, a character from Charles Dickens' "Great Expectations", which he read and taught to the children. Mr Watts or Mr Pip, as he was fatefully known, through his story telling brought hope to the community by creating another world, one which though imaginary became more real than the one they lived in. In the words of little Matilda, Dickens' characters were more real to her than the many dead ancestors she never knew. While Dickens was undisputably a godsend, Mr Pip's quiet agnosticism became a bone of contention for the god fearing Dolores, Matilda's mother, who was increasingly resentful of Mr Pip's secular thoughts and its influence over her daughter and the other students.

Poor Mr Pip - visually, you can almost see actor Peter O'Toole in the role if a film version were made of the story - didn't see the tragedy that would unfold when his imaginary name and identity became the trigger point for trouble that would shatter the lives of the entire community. It is a testimony to author Lloyd Jones's tremendous skill and confidence as a writer and his understanding of how less might be more in that unforgettable scene of horror and carnage told with the pitiless brevity of a passing news item. That truth and integrity should surmount differences in belief and uphold the essence of humanity is indeed cause for righteous tears and celebration. After experiencing such a dramatic high, the closing narrative cannot but feel slightly anti-climactic. But that's only inevitable.

Lloyd Jones' "Mister Pip" is a tremendous of piece of work, warm, poignant and inspiring. It is possibly the strongest contender for last year's Booker prize. A book of enduring value that will be read beyond its current print run. Highly recommended.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9

In a novel that is at once intense, beautiful, and fablelike, Lloyd Jones weaves a transcendent story that celebrates the resilience of the human spirit and the power of narrative to transform our lives.

On a copper-rich tropical island shattered by war, where the teachers have fled with most everyone else, only one white man chooses to stay behind: the eccentric Mr. Watts, object of much curiosity and scorn, who sweeps out the ruined schoolhouse and begins to read to the children each day from Charles Dickens?s classic Great Expectations.

So begins this rare, original story about the abiding strength that imagination, once ignited, can provide. As artillery echoes in the mountains, thirteen-year-old Matilda and her peers are riveted by the adventures of a young orphan named Pip in a city called London, a city whose contours soon become more real than their own blighted landscape. As Mr. Watts says, ?A person entranced by a book simply forgets to breathe.? Soon come the rest of the villagers, initially threatened, finally inspired to share tales of their own that bring alive the rich mythology of their past. But in a ravaged place where even children are forced to live by their wits and daily survival is the only objective, imagination can be a dangerous thing.

From the Hardcover edition.

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