Mister Pip Lloyd Jones

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Mister PipLloyd Jones

• Montana Book Awards
• Commonwealth Writers Prize
• Shortlisted Man Booker Prize
• Million-Dollar Book Contract
• National and International Acclaim
• Journalistic Experience

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Setting
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Geographic and Political Context

• 1884 Britain Cede Northern Solomon Islands
  (Including Bougainville) to Germany German New
  Guinea in Exchange Western Samoa
• 1904 British New Guinea (Southern) Administered
  Australia Renamed Papua
• World War I Australian Troops Occupy German New
  Guinea
• 1918 League of Nations Grant Australia Mandate to
  Administer (German) New Guinea Papua Extended
  Territory of Australian Commonwealth
• 1945 Papua New Guinea Administered United Nations
• 1975 Independence

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Bougainville

• 1960s Copper Deposits Bougainville, Panguna Mine,
  Local Protest
• 1975 Secessionist Revolt, Attempt to Claim
  Independence as Republic of North Solomons
• 1988 Protest Against Mines Led Francis Ona and
  Pepetua Serero Formation Panguna Landowners
  Association
• Ona Form Bougainville Revolutionary Army (BRA)
  Sabotage Mine (Shut 1989)

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Bougainville

• Civil War 1988-1997 Claim 20,000 Lives
• Papua New Guinea Military (and Mercenaries) and
  BRA
• Anarchy, Violence
• Papua New Guinea Blockade
• 1997 Ceasefire
• 1998 Lincoln Agreement, Elections

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Setting

• Juxtaposition of Natural Beauty and Human Cruelty
  - p. 34, 179
• Storm Cleansing Force, p. 183
• Destruction and Creation Rebirth in Flood

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Black, White, Red

• Different World Views p. 4
• Mine Employment, Change, Alienation
• Redskins
• Rambos
• Complexity Dolores and Matilda pp. 41-2
• Post-Colonial?
• Universal Brutality and Kindness
• Balance Written and Oral

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Intertextuality

• Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (1860-1)

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Jones on Dickens

• Great Expectations plays a crucial role in Mister
  Pip - when did you first come across this book
  and why did it leave such an impression on you?
• It was the first of Dickens books I read. I was
  sick at home from school. I heard someone knock
  on the door. It was a salesman of some kind. Next
  I heard my mothers footsteps in the hall. She
  came in with a book. Great Expectations. My
  reward for being sick, I suppose. From the moment
  Magwich confronts Pip in the grave yard I was
  hooked. Ive returned to it many times, and as I
  got older and better at reading I began to see
  the book in a slightly different light. Pips
  invitation to go up to London and turn himself
  into a gentleman is similar to the challenge we
  all face to make ourselves into something.
• http//www.themanbookerprize.com/perspective/artic
  les/89

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Jones on Dickens

• Dickens's novel was the first adult book that
  Lloyd Jones read and, like Matilda, he
  experienced it first as an enchantment, an
  adventure story, and only later came to
  understand its wider resonance. 'If you're from a
  migrant society, it's easy to see the orphan and
  the migrant as interchangeable. For both, the
  past is at best a fading photograph.
• As Great Expectations opens out its meanings to
  Matilda, so Mister Pip broadens into a
  consideration of post-colonial culture, a
  meditation on what is kept and what rejected,
  what remembered and what forgotten and the extent
  to which individuals can choose (to use a phrase
  Jones uses more than once during our interview)
  how to be in the world.
• Geraldine Bedell
• http//www.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/oct/14/booker
  prize2007.thebookerprize

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Jeremy Rose, Scoop Review of Books, 15 March 2008

• Agnes Titus says the book was painful to read.
  It was a bit dry at first but once I got to the
  tale about what happened during the crisis. I
  didnt want to put it down. By the third day I
  had finished it.
• It actually brought memories back. Because it
  seemed too true it was quite painful. It was like
  reliving the situation again.
• She says the scene in the book where the women
  went to the school to tell stories was a
  realistic example of how the mothers, in
  particular, tried to maintain a sense of
  normality during the crisis in an attempt to
  protect their children from the suffering of war.

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Intertextuality

• Bildungsroman
• Adult Voice Looking Back
• Jones on Narrative Voice
• persuasiveness of voice
• Do I believe this voice?
• Voice will convince the reader of the most
  extraordinary situations.
• http//www.youtube.com/watch?vc_CTZrEt81Ueurlht
  tp//community.indigo.ca/posts/Videos-and-trailers
  /group-201/319308.html

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Jones on Narrative Voice

• You chose to tell Mister Pip through the eyes of
  a fifteen-year-old girl, Matilda how did you
  manage to create the authentic voice of Matilda?
• It isnt authentic because I am a fifty-two year
  old white male. An authentic narrative by a 15
  year old girl is written by such a person. I
  prefer to talk about literary truth. Matilda is
  persuasive because she sounds plausible. (As
  writers, voice is our chief charm offensive).
• http//www.themanbookerprize.com/perspective/arti
  cles/89

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Intertextuality

• Dickens Refracted Through Mr Watts Refracted
  Through Matilda
• Great Expectations Recreated by Children Memory
• Great Expectations Appropriated by Mr Watts
• Post-Modern Power of Reader
• Room as Inter-Text (pp. 154-5, 158-9)

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Shaping Power of Literature

• Escape Foreign, Compelling World
• Parallel, Make Sense (Mr Jaggers and Father, p.
  130 Mum and Miss Havisham)
• Redemptive Power Solace, Meaning, Hope, Faith
• Privacy, Own Space (p. 108)
• a place of light p. 14
• what no person can take...our minds and our
  imaginations (p. 107)
• a relief...it contained a world that was whole
  and made sense, unlike ours (p. 58)
• Mr Watts was giving back something of ourselves
  in the shape of a story (p. 165)
• friend in Pip...slip under the skin...an act of
  magic (p. 200)

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Jones on Dickens

• Q Why have Great Expectations anchor a South
  Pacific story?
• A Well, it is considered a classic in the
  English-speaking world. More importantly, it
  offers (teacher) Mr Watts to draw on the
  similarities between the status of an orphan
  (Pip) and an immigrant (himself). Both have their
  pasts severed both are given the possibility to
  make themselves anew. In other words, we need not
  be stuck with what we arrive to in the world. I
  think that is quite a powerful message for a
  bunch of kids caught up in a slow disintegration
  of the place they call home.
• http//www.reuters.com/article/lifestyleMolt/idUSS
  P20247920071012

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Jones on Literature

• Mr Watt's "survival weapon was story" yet,
  ultimately, it was not enough to save him. How
  far are we to believe in the restorative power of
  literature? Well story is hardly a match for a
  bullet or a machete. Yet, clearly story had saved
  Mr Watts up to a point. He says as much when he
  tells Matilda that the example of Pip gave him
  the courage to think he could change his own
  life. Furthermore, by sharing his enthusiasm for
  Great Expectations, hed shown a class of
  children how to access another world. Thats not
  a bad tool to have up your sleeve when your own
  world is diminished or shattered. If we are lucky
  as readers, then for a period of time, we forget
  ourselves, our own life, and step into anothers
  with eyes wide open, brain ticking in an alien
  world that becomes increasingly familiar, weirdly
  and fabulously even more so than the one we
  inhabit when we wake up to begin the day. How
  magical is that? A made up world eclipsing the
  one in which we actually live and with real needs
  such as satisfying thirst and hunger or other
  frustrations. A world in which we ghost in and
  out of.
• http//www.bookgroup.info/041205/interview.php?id
  35

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Dangers, Insufficiency Literature?

• Dolores Bible and Stories
• Cultural Colonisation?
• No Protection
• Mister Pip to Blame?
• Mr Watts as Fantasist?

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Tragedy

• War, Brutality, Inhumanity
• Personal Loss
• Ongoing Trauma
• Sacrifice to be human is to be moral (p. 181)
• Restoration and Hope?
• Where Should the Book End?
• Claiming Your Own Voice (p. 220)

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Helen Elliott, Review, theage.com.au, 22
September 2006

• It reads like the effortless soar and dip of a
  grand piece of music, thrilling singular voices,
  the darker, moving chorus, the blend of the light
  and shade, the thread of grief urgent in every
  beat and the occasional faint, lingering note of
  hope.
• However, unlike the orchestration of massed
  voices and instruments, the finale does not bring
  wonder but despair. And that's a wonder in
  itself, that such a grim subject can still carry
  something as luminous and as revealing to readers
  worlds away from a forgotten village on the
  pacific.

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Kerryn Goldsworthy, Sydney Morning Herald, 2
October 2006

• Jones has done something very difficult with
  this novel he has taken a recent and brutal
  piece of contemporary history and has told a
  story that not only reveals these events to the
  wider world but also shows what they mean in the
  larger and more abstract field of human
  behaviour. A brutal and senseless episode - the
  atrocities committed during the Bougainville
  blockade has been compared with events in Rwanda
  - becomes something from which a lesson may be
  learned.
• It's also a novel about imagination and about
  the power and value of art as a potentially
  redemptive force in a nightmare situation.