KEY POINTS:
An enchanting Pacific story, Mister Pip is a modern mix of fairy tale and folk tale, an exercise of high imagination. Few novels I've read in recent years have drawn me in so deeply and warmed me with such as depth of feeling.
Towards the end, Jones brilliantly sails close to reefs of sentimentality, but holds course and the book ends a triumph.
As war ravages a small Pacific island, a village school is left without a teacher. A resident European, Mr Watts, takes over the class, reading from Charles Dickens' Great Expectations. Mr Watts had been known as Popeye and he and his black wife, Grace, had been objects of ridicule in the village. But in a world unpolluted by round-the-clock television, he mesmerises the children with his story-telling, especially a teenage girl, Matilda, the narrator.
As warring parties sweep through the village, Mr Watts keeps up the readings and also invites women villagers to tell the children things they know about. A philosophical clash develops between Matilda's mother and Mr Watts concerning the existence of God and the Devil. When Great Expectations has been read through, Mr Watts has the children recreate what they remember from it.
After a rampage by Government soldiers creates two diffident martyrs, Matilda escapes to Brisbane where her father lives, and she pursues her interest in Dickens and in the history of Mr Watts, for a while seemingly unable to extricate one from the other.
This is an extraordinary novel, real yet touched with magic, intellectually and emotionally satisfying.
Not the least remarkable thing about Jones is the way he creates every novel differently. Whereas many writers tend to handle similar subjects in stylistically similar ways, he has embraced a number of ideas and varies his tone and style accordingly.
I can vaguely remember his first novel Gilmore's Dairy, which he seems to have dropped from his bibliography, but Choo Woo, the story of a paedophile, was deftly told with remarkable insight into the minds of predator and child.
The Book of Fame, about the 1905 All Blacks, won the Montana in its year, even though it barely fitted into the conventional definition of a novel. Two novels since then, Here at the End of the World We Learn to Dance and Paint Your Wife, were again different in location, style and tone. All his work has been impressive but Mister Pip is a step up from anything he has done before and hints at striking possibilities for the future.
