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A Bougainville story
By JOHN MATTHEWS
"Mr. Pip" is a fictitious book about the PNG's Bougainville
crisis.
The book recently won the NZ$ 27,000 (K55, 000) Commonwealth
Writers' Prize for New Zealand author Lloyd Jones of Wellington.
Lloyd Jones is no stranger to the podium. Six years ago, he won
the Montana New Zealand award for fiction.
Mr. Pip is a reflective book, it achieves harmony between the
interior and exterior lives of its characters. We are in two
worlds simultaneously. A book needs to achieve this balance.
Mr. Pip is on high demand here in New Zealand libraries, copies
need to be placed on hold for at least a week or two before you
will actually have access to the book. You can also purchase a
copy for thirty five New Zealand dollars ($35.00) from any leading
book stores in New Zealand.
With Mr. Pip, Jones, former journalist and prolific award-winning
novelist, is the first New Zealand writer to have cracked the
magical million-dollar book contract. Reading this complex book,
it is not difficult to see why.
Jones, who covered the story as a journalist has superb insight
into the intricacies of the human situation - intimate and global.
He sets his story in the first few years of the blockade of
Bougainville.
In 1990 the government of Papua New Guinea, supported by
Australia, decided to take action against the traditional
landowners and villagers of Bougainville in a way that has been
compared to the clearings the Scottish and Irish governments did
to their crofters when something more valuable than human life was
in dispute.
Bougainville has the richest copper mine in the world, although
the immensely fertile natural world of fish and plants is
certainly not economically insignificant.
The words are those of Matilda, a village girl who is 13 when it
begins. She was named by the Australians who opened up the mine
and her name stands throughout as ironic comment on
responsibilities intimate and global.
Matilda lives with her mother, Dolores, in a tiny village. Her
father has been away for three years, working for the mining
company in Australia, and her village is characterized by the
absence of young men.
Most of them are away in the jungle fighting the government
forces. Life in this traditionally matrilineal place is simple:
fishing, growing food, cooking, telling stories. For months there
has been no generator for electricity, there are no medicines, all
the white helpers have left and as the village becomes
increasingly isolated from the outside world it reverts to what it
was before the white men came.
Matilda feels suspended in time, although the helicopters that
sometimes fly low and the stories that mysteriously and
terrifyingly creep into their world suggest to her that it isn't
time that has stopped; it is the village.
The last white man on the island is Mr. Watts, a skinny man who
lives with his islander wife, Grace, in the old mission house. The
children call him Pop Eye because his eyes seem to want to jump
from his face.
Sometimes he wears a red clown's nose on his already large one and
when he does this he drags his huge and silent wife around the
island in a small cart. It's a spectacle that causes the villagers
to turn their eyes to the ground because you never saw such
sadness.
The puzzle of Mr and Mrs Watts also offers the only uncertainty in
a world of sameness and boredom.
One day, out of the blue, Mr Watts offers to fill-in as a teacher,
not because he can teach but so the children can structure their
aimless lives by coming each day to school. He has an ingenious
way of teaching. Over and over he reads aloud the best book by the
best writer of his time. It is Dickens' Great Expectations, the
story of Pip and Estelle, of Magwich and Mr Jaggers, of Miss
Haversham.
A story of everyone's great expectations and the reality of
destiny.
Matilda becomes obsessed with Pip, so obsessed that her mother
becomes jealous of this imaginary boy and angry with the white man
who introduced the book to her daughter. Her own beloved book is
the Bible in pidgin.
Dolores is full of the lore of her village, something Mr Watts
appreciates, and each day he asks the village women to come to the
school house to "tell what they knew" to the children.
So they have their own eternal stories, of nature and survival, of
fish and tides and weather, told along side the immense and
timeless story of another world and another time.
Then the helicopters land. The soldiers in their crisp uniforms
and bored manners want to know where the young men are, in
particular they want to know where this Mr Pip is. They have
evidence someone worships him because they find his name written
on the sand.
The fallout is as brutal and barbaric as anything seen in the
Gravesend convict hulks that Dickens wrote about a century and a
half ago, but Matilda survives to write her story the way the
original Pip (Dickens was as much Pip as he was David Copperfield)
wrote his.
Lloyd Jones reinvents himself in each new novel but this time,
writing with the voice of an adolescent girl, a middle-aged
Australian man whose life has become one of exile, or an unhappy
woman who feels abandoned by her husband and lives only for her
daughter, Jones is matchless.
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.
Jones' epigraph is Umberto Eco's "Characters migrate". They do.
Read this novel and Mr Watts, and perhaps Matilda, will migrate
instantly into your heart.
Already a big seller in New Zealand, the overseas rights went for
over $1 million
(just over K2 million). Now Jones hopes the award will boost sales
when Mr Pip is released in the Northern Hemisphere in the later
half of this year.
-The writer
is a Papua New Guinean Lecturer with the School of Information and
Social Sciences at The Open Polytechnic of New Zealand in
Wellington, NZ.
 
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