Fiction:Whoever wis the Booker, this shortlisted novel may prove the hardest to forget, writes Eileen Battersby
A native population fears for its life as war erupts. It is a particularly vicious war, with drunken rebels and menace in the air. The children have nothing, their teachers have fled. What had been an idyllic island becomes a hell. Into this despair comes hope, or at least a promise of hope, in the unlikely form of an eccentric white man. New Zealander Lloyd Jones pits the horrors of the present against the enduring magic of story and makes more than one point in a narrative that instructs without ever collapsing into bald polemic.
Nor does it falter towards the sentimental. Jones has called upon a tough story in the telling of an equally harsh one. The trick is that neither tale is devoid of an engaging charm. Matilda was there, she saw it all and sets out to tell us what happened. Throughout the telling, Jones conveys the sense of an older Matilda trying to make sense of it all. In the beginning she is one of the island children, hoping that life would improve:
Everyone called him Pop Eye. Even in those days when I was a skinny thirteen-year-old. I thought he probably knew about his nickname but didn't care. His eyes were too interested in what lay up ahead to notice us barefoot kids.
From the opening sentence Jones not only sets the scene, he establishes his narrator as someone we are going to trust. This is old-fashioned storytelling at its most appealing - and appealing is the word that continually comes to mind when describing what is an appalling story.
Matilda is a natural truthteller, and an observant one at that. Her instincts are surefooted but Jones wisely never tests either our faith or expectations. Matilda remains true to herself. "He looked like someone who had seen or known great suffering," she continues when recalling this crazy white man once known to the locals as Pop Eye, "and hadn't been able to forget it. His large eyes in his large head stuck out further than anyone else's - like they wanted to leave the surface of his face. They made you think of someone who can't get out of his house quickly enough."
Observations such as this make one attend to Matilda. She too is someone who has witnessed horrors. Her voice is gentle, and in time will emerge as determined; she wants us to know what happened, and most importantly, to understand. But for the moment she wants us only to see Pop Eye and his even crazier consort, Mrs Pop Eye, who stands passive in a trolley pulled by Pop Eye, complete with his red clown's nose. The Beckett-like image of this pair moving slowly through the village makes the reader think, but then the villagers have been thinking about it for a long time.
Speculation is rife: "Mrs Watts was as mad as a goose. Mr Watts was doing penance for an old crime. Or maybe it was the result of a bet."
This sideshow amounted to harmless fun. The new realities are different.
Matilda then looks back even further, a couple of years earlier to when she was 11 and her father "flew off on a mining plane", leaving Matilda and her mother on their own. On arrival in Australia, he sends back a postcard and can tell his wife and daughter that, from the air, their island looked no bigger "than a cow pat".
IT ALL SEEMS gentle enough, the clash of black and white. In the absence of any teachers, Pop Eye (real name, Mr Watts) decides to take over the schooling. He does so with the use of one valuable tool, his copy of Dickens's Great Expectations, which he reads to the children. It proves inspiring, particularly as Matilda recalls it: "I had come to know this Pip as if he were real and I could feel his breath upon my cheek. I had learned to enter the soul of another."
Each day's reading leaves her feeling as eager for more as the original serialised instalments left readers in 19th-century London. Along with his readings, Mr Watts also introduces a novel way of helping the wider community through the upheaval of war. One by one, the mothers of the children visit the classroom to share their knowledge, a knowledge that does not come out of books.
These sessions go well, but Mr Watts has one major critic: Matilda's formidable mother, a church-going woman who believes in only one book, the Bible. Her mother, a strong feat of characterisation, does introduce an element of tension; she distrusts all whites, including Mr Watts. Yet elsewhere there is extraordinary beauty. When the grandmother of one of the boys arrives, she begins: "There is a place called Egypt, I know nothing of that place. I wish I could tell you kids about Egypt. Forgive me for not knowing more. But, if you care to listen, I will tell you everything I know about the colour blue." Matilda adds: "And so we heard about the colour blue."
THERE ARE TIMES when it seems as if Jones may be about to shift the stance of the novel towards allegory. But he doesn't. Instead, it continues apace, Matilda tells the story and it is candid. She confides in the reader. Having come to know Pip, she then seeks a similar intimacy with Mr Watts: "I watched his face and I listened to his voice and I tried to hear how his mind ticked, and what he thought."
Great Expectations the novel is vital to this book, but it actually serves to open the door and is not the entire story. At one stage Mr Watts has another story to tell, his story, and he tells it in a bid to save his life, with obvious echoes of One Thousand and One Arabian Nights. Jones quite brilliantly imposes a gentle restraint on the narrative and then whips it all away. There are several tests of trust and betrayal: the villagers stand as their possessions are burnt, they then burn Mr Watts's.
Mister Pip is a traditional novel, but it is also topical. At times there are echoes of the early William Boyd, at others, increasingly, in the sense of having a narrator who knows everything that happened, it brings to mind Timothy Mo's The Redundancy of Courage, which draws on events in East Timor.
Jones has placed his story on a tropical island which we know to be Papua New Guinea. Matilda tells us about Mr Watts and his crazy wife, Grace, but she also tells us about her mother and, most of all, herself. As in Great Expectations, this is a coming-of-age narrative; it is also about coming to wisdom. Jones balances native beliefs against book-learning. Curiosity about what happens next in a story moves on to a more complicated question of the actions that determine life and death.
Shortlisted for this year's Man Booker Prize, the engaging realism of Mister Pip has emerged as the dark horse, challenging Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach and Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist. It is not as allegorical as Yann Martel's Life of Pi, but there is a deep, shocking message at its heart. Regardless of who wins on October 16th, Mister Pip, through the simplicity and candour of Matilda's singular narrative voice, may prove the most difficult to forget.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
Mister Pip By Lloyd Jones John Murray, 219pp. £12.99