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Great expectations
for the writer from nowhere
Last week the shortlist for the
Booker prize was announced. We may still only be at the
shortlist stage (it was announced last week), but the 2007 Man
Booker prize has already thrown up several surprises - JM
Coetzee and a bunch of big names cast aside, a clutch of
literary unknowns thrust into the limelight.
Of all the surprises to date, though, none is more intriguing
than those surrounding Lloyd Jones. Almost unheard of in
Britain, this genial, modest 52-year-old journalist and writer
from New Zealand suddenly finds his seventh novel, Mister Pip,
not only on the shortlist but also leading the pack as the
bookies' favourite, ahead even of Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach.
Previously Jones had only managed to get one novel, Biografi,
published in Britain. Now he is such a hot favourite to win the
country's ultimate literary award that the bookmakers have
stopped taking bets on him.
Jones himself, sitting at breakfast the morning after the
shortlist announcement, cannot explain the sudden interest - "I
was hoping that you would tell me," he says.
But he is not totally overwhelmed by the fuss, having already
got used to it back home in Wellington, where the press seized
on the huge advances he got from around the world for Mister Pip
and dubbed the book the country's first $1m novel.
Haunting and morally complex, the novel deserves its place on
the list and would make a worthy winner. Set on the real-life
island of Bougainville in 1991 at the start of Papua New
Guinea's bloody 10-year civil war, it tells the story of the
only white on the island, the tall, eccentric, pop-eyed Mr
Watts, who takes over a village school when the teacher flees
and starts tutoring his young charges using Charles Dickens's
Great Expectations as his only text.
As the children become entranced by the book, and by him, so
clashes arise, first with some local mothers, and then - more
seriously - with government troops hunting rebels.
Much of the politics of Mister Pip, and in particular its
chilling violence, is based on real-life events that Jones heard
about as a journalist when he was investigating the war between
the Papua New Guinea government and island rebels seeking
independence. Failing to get inside the country during the worst
of the troubles - "a bloody good thing, as it turned out, as I
would have been killed for sure" - Jones instead found himself
sailing up the coast on a steamboat, talking to a beer-drinking
off-duty soldier from the Papua New Guinea Defence Force.
The stories that came out during the conversation - about
government helicopters dumping rebels out at sea or dropping
them into the forest from a great height - fed into the book.
"I've flown over those forests in a helicopter and they're the
most awesome things - giant trees shooting 200ft to 300ft up in
the air."
His subsequent research on the island threw up even worse
stories of rape, torture and mutilation.
"Shocking things happened there over that 10-year period, just
unbelievable," he says.
Jones, born in a dormitory suburb of Wellington, is a practical,
down-to-earth writer, who sees no real difference between his
novel writing and his journalism. Such level-headedness probably
comes from his background. His father was a gold prospector, his
mother a typist. Both left school at 12.
"Having a family was their greatest achievement," he explains.
Remarkably, both parents (they are now dead) were also orphans,
a fact that has had a huge impact on Jones and has coloured
Mister Pip, where questions about absent relatives, departures
and new beginnings dominate.
A couple of years ago he went to Pembroke Dock in southwest
Wales in search of one possible relative. The trip was not a
huge success.
"I was so bloody distressed by the shallow end of the gene pool
I sprang from there that I gave up the ghost and fled. I kept
seeing my father everywhere, kind of baldheaded,
round-shouldered. It was like looking in a mirror."
A trip to Taunton in search of his mother's side of the family
threw up even more unsettling connections: a cousin who "looked
different to her but sounded exactly the same and had all the
same mannerisms".
As for the writing bug, Jones got that after reading politics at
university in Wellington. Travelling round America on a
Greyhound bus in an attempt to kick-start his literary
education, he ended up in a hotel in Schenectady, upstate New
York, and spent several months writing.
"It was a dosshouse full of ex-Vietnam vets on all kinds of
amphetamines prowling the hallways at night, and little old men
waiting to die."
It was the writers he discovered there - Hemingway, Bellow,
Sontag, plus Raymond Carver, Richard Ford and Tobias Wolff -
rather than any British novelists (including Dickens,
strangely), who have been the biggest influence on his career:
"What the Americans taught me is that less is more and that you
should leave space for the reader."
A self-confessed rugby nut - one of his novels, Book of Fame,
tells the story of the legendary 1905 All Blacks tour - Jones
can now look forward to a possible dream double this autumn: him
winning the Man Booker, his beloved All Blacks lifting the World
Cup.
Story published in The Sunday Times in London on September
9, 2007
 
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