Finished: September 2009
Pages: 256
Challenges:
** Read & Review ** Summer Reading Challenge ** Dewey's Books**
This book was stunning. I would say I loved it, except love doesn't seem the kind of word that should be used for this book. Mister Pip is one of those books which stay with you for a long while after completion. I finished it early last week and I am still thinking about it. The prose is not hard to read--Jones has a very sparse yet poetic style at times. Some of the events towards the end of the book were difficult to read--and some reviews I have read felt that those events did not fit the story. I totally disagree. I think those event are very believable--especially within the context of the setting of this book. It is set on a small island, somewhere between Papua New Guinea and Australia. The island has been taken advantage of and then betrayed by white men and now is caught in the middle of a civil war that rages around them and then within their own little village.
From The Washington Post
On an island called Bougainville in the early 1990s, civil war rages. Rebels have taken up arms, and soldiers helicopter in from nearby Port Moresby to reestablish New Guinea's sovereignty over the island. All the whites have fled except one: Mr. Watts, a New Zealander married to a local woman. He offers to replace the departed teacher and reopen the village school; on the second day of class, he begins to read Great Expectations aloud.
Suddenly, the village's children have a refuge from the incomprehensible conflict engulfing their world. "We could escape to another place," declares Matilda, the 13-year-old narrator. "It didn't matter that it was Victorian England. We found we could easily get there."
New Zealand writer Lloyd Jones's spare, haunting fable explores the power and limitations of art as Matilda chronicles 21 increasingly desperate months. The villagers are trapped between the rebels and the soldiers just as inexorably as Matilda is caught between Mr. Watts and her fiercely religious mother. Outraged by her daughter's immersion in Great Expectations, a novel that she finds both immoral and dangerously irrelevant to their imperiled existence, Matilda's mother insists, "Stories have a job to do. . . . They have to teach you something."
Mr. Pip/Mr. Watts (one and the same person) gave the children of the village permission to use their imaginations--something oh-so important during those harrowing war months.
From page 256:
...my Mr. Dickens had taught every one of us kids that our voice was special, and we should remember this whenever we used it, and remember that whatever else happened to us in our lives our voice could never be taken away from us."
I have been meaning to read this one for such a long time. Such a big book within such a small frame.
ReplyDeleteI reviewed this one last year and really enjoyed it. As you said though, 'love' is not quite the word to use but I know what you mean.
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