<p>Many of us will be able to think of certain books which had a lasting impact on us, triggering powerful memories or helping to shape the way we view the world. Mister Pip tells the story of Matilda, a teenage inhabitant of the remote tropical island of Bougainville, whose life is transformed by Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations. This masterpiece of Victorian literature is perhaps an unlikely novel to catch the imagination of a young girl whose only experiences of the world come from the jungle village in which she lives. However, there is little choice in the matter for Matilda and the rest of her close-knit community. When the island is blockaded by ‘redskin’ soldiers from Papua New Guinea and civil war breaks out, the role of teacher in the tiny village school is taken on by the only remaining white person, Mr Watts. Lacking resources or expertise, he turns to Dickens to educate and enlighten his students. These daily readings from Great Expectations are an instant hit with the children, and soon begin to have a powerful effect on the lives of all the islanders. Mister Pip is a thought-provoking and highly readable novel which was well received by critics, winning the 2007 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and reaching the shortlist of the Man Booker Award. The author, New Zealand writer and journalist Lloyd Jones, describes his book as ‘all about story’, and he uses the islanders’ discovery of Dickens to explore how stories grow and how they are significant to those who tell and hear them.[1] The book opens with an epigraph taken from Umberto Eco: ‘Characters migrate’. This is an idea embraced by Mister Pip as the novel transports the orphan Pip and his accompanying cast of grotesques across the sea from Victorian England to tropical Bougainville. Matilda, the young narrator of Mister Pip, becomes particularly enthralled by the adventures of Pip. Although Pip’s arrival in her life causes some tension, the ideas which migrate with him translate remarkably well into their new island home. Matilda comes to see the fictional character as a friend, and Pip’s world offers her an escape from her own sometimes difficult existence: as the rebels and redskins went on butchering one another, we had another reason for hiding under the cover of night. Mr Watts had given us kids another world to spend the night in. We could escape to another place. It didn’t matter that it was Victorian England. We found we could easily get there. It was just the blimmin’ dogs and the blimmin’ roosters that tried to keep us here. (p. 20) Though the world of Pip is alien to Matilda, it often feels more relevant to her than the traditions and beliefs which her devoutly Christian mother tries to instill in her. Complex family trees and abstract ideas about God and the devil hold little interest for Matilda. Instead, she feels kinship with Pip, this other child who doesn’t know his father and is struggling to find his place in the world. Ideas about good and evil are fleshed out by the characters in the novel and the situations they face, and these, more than the teachings of the Bible which Matilda’s mother quotes to her, inform the moral choices which Matilda makes. Through Pip’s eventful experiences, Matilda gains new perspectives and frameworks with which to understand and evaluate the increasingly difficult circumstances of her own life. The power of Dickens’s story illuminates both the familiar and the changing aspects of Matilda’s life in a new way. The character of Miss Havisham offers her new insight into her mother’s feelings, the concept of a ‘gentleman’ informs the way she understands Mr Watts’s actions, and Pip’s behaviour challenges her notions of identity, loyalty and the person she wants to become. Many things which Matilda has always taken for granted are seen in a different and sometimes strange light, while the problems that war brings to her village are also both shaped and handled with reference to the ideas that Great Expectations has inspired within its fans and critics on the island. The characters of Dickens’s masterpiece migrate not only through space and time to reach Bougainville, but also from the pages of the book into the hearts of Mr Watts’s listeners, changing their lives forever. Matilda’s immersion in the world of Great Expectations helps her to deal with the conflict around her, but it also brings new areas of conflict into her life. As she is increasingly influenced by the book and by her teacher, she finds that her views and relationships are changing. Matilda is drifting apart from her mother, and knows that difficult decisions will have to be made: As we progressed through the book something happened to me. At some point I felt myself enter the story. I hadn’t been assigned a part – nothing like that; I wasn’t identifiable on the page, but I was there. I was definitely there. I knew that orphaned white kid and that small, fragile place he squeezed into between his awful sister and lovable Joe Gargery because the same space came to exist between Mr Watts and my mum. And I knew I would have to choose between the two. (p. 40) The theme of choice is strong throughout Mister Pip. Mr Watts and Matilda’s mother represent two different ways of viewing the world, and Matilda is faced with a choice about which beliefs she will assimilate into own framework for life. Matilda’s mother represents religion. The only book she knows is the Bible, and her ideas about God and the devil are at the centre of everything she believes and does. The traditions of the island are also very important to her and she is concerned that Matilda should not forget her roots. Mr Watts believes in the power of the imagination above all else. He rejects traditional Christian teaching, preferring to invent the world for himself: ‘while we may not know the whole world, we can, if we are clever enough, make it new. We can make it up with the things we find and see around us’ (p. 51-52). Using stories as his teaching method, Mr Watts aims to inspire his students to exercise their imaginations and play an active role in shaping their world as they would like it to be. The worldviews advocated by Mr Watts and Matilda’s mother are inspired by very different books. While Mr Watts draws from literary classics, Matilda’s mother sees value only in ‘the Good Book’. However, Lloyd Jones appears to see both as equally valid and portrays them in a very similar light. Both Mr Watts and Matilda’s mother offer ‘light’ to the children of the village (p. 14, 38), and neither seem particularly concerned about supporting what they teach with facts: ‘Quality of argument was neither here nor there,’ Matilda’s father would say of his wife, ‘It was all about the intensity of belief’ (p. 36). When Matilda’s mother is invited to speak to the class, she tells them: ‘You must believe in something. Yes, you must. Even the palm trees believe in the air. And the fish believe in the sea’ (p. 36). Throughout Mister Pip it is belief in something, whatever form that might take, that allows the various characters to cope with the confusing and difficult situations that face them. While their faith is built on very different foundations, both Mr Watts and Matilda’s mother are equal in courage and dignity when they face the ultimate test. The novel is entirely unconcerned about whether what they believe is true. For Matilda, and perhaps the author, the important thing seems to be that the characters are true to the story they have chosen. The implication of Mister Pip is that the truth of a story lies in its usefulness and inspirational value, rather than whether it is based in fact. Thus Pip is more real to Matilda than God or the relatives she has never met. In a scene that Lloyd Jones describes as ‘the centrepiece’ of the book[2], Mr Watts and his wife decorate their spare room with all the names, traditions and ideas that are important to them. Their different cultures complement each other at times, and clash at others, but they aim for the finished product to offer all their accumulated wisdom to their daughter to pick and choose from as she wishes. While emphasising the power of stories to shape us, Jones also seems to suggest that we are free to choose what we allow to influence us and what we would like to believe in. In the end, Matilda will go through this process for herself, taking aspects of what she has been taught by both her mother and Mr Watts to form her own distinct voice. Mister Pip raises the question of what stories we will allow to inspire and shape the people we become. It assumes that it is possible for us to choose what influences us, and this is obviously something that Christians would affirm. While we are bombarded every day by messages in the media that seek to affect our thoughts and decisions, if we pay attention to what we are hearing, we are able to thoughtfully accept or reject the ideas with which we are presented. In emphasizing our freedom to choose our beliefs, Mister Pip also acknowledges that some choices can be better than others. Mr Watts says of Pip: ‘He has been given the opportunity to turn himself into whomever he chooses. He is free to choose. He is even free to make bad choices’ (p. 61). The same thing could be said of Mr Watts himself, any of the other characters in the book, and of us. This is why we need to ensure that we understand the messages behind the stories that we are told. However, Christians would go further and claim that it matters whether the choices we make are based on truth: choosing a way of life based on a false premise will always be a bad choice. While humans are able to invent any story about the world in which we live, and then base their behaviour on what they have imagined, Christians believe that God has told us who we are and how we are to live. If this is the case, then any other way of life is hollow and has no meaning beyond what we attribute to it. Stories like Mister Pip, Great Expectations, and those which have inspired us can have a profound and often very positive effect on the way in which we relate to the world. But Christians believe that the book to which we should ultimately turn for greater understanding of our character and purpose is the book which God has given us. ‘All Scripture is inspired by God and is useful to teach us what is true and to make us realize what is wrong in our lives’, the Bible states. ‘It corrects us when we are wrong and teaches us to do what is right. God uses it to prepare and equip his people to do every good work’ (2 Timothy 3:16-17, NLT). Even more than with Matilda and Great Expectations, it is a book which might change your life.</p>