KEY POINTS:
Mister Pip is the most successful novel to come out of New Zealand, far outpacing the "other" New Zealand novel, Keri Hulme's 1984 Booker winner The Bone People.
The first of its author's eight novels to have been published in Britain, Mister Pip has had rave reviews in the US, won the Commonwealth Prize and been scooped up by publishers worldwide.
"Latvia fell last night," Lloyd Jones says when I meet him in Berlin, where he is spending a year on a New Zealand writers' residency. "Last week, it was Serbia, Croatia, Turkey, Greece and Iceland. I jokingly said to my Australian publisher, 'What the hell's happened to Korea?' and he said, 'Oh, we sold it last week. I forgot to mention it.' So looks like only the Inuit are holding out."
The novel that has affected people all over the world is the story of Matilda, a 13-year-old girl from the island of Bougainville in the South Pacific. It is the early 1990s, civil war is nearing her village and most of the men and older boys have gone. Only one white person remains on the island, the down-at-heel, risible Mr Watts, who takes charge of the village school and, in the absence of any other teaching material, begins to read Great Expectations.
Dickens' novel was the first adult book Lloyd Jones read and, like Matilda, he experienced it first as an enchantment, an adventure story, and only later came to understand its wider resonance.
"If you're from a migrant society, it's easy to see the orphan and the migrant as interchangeable. For both, the past is at best a fading photograph."
As Great Expectations opens out its meanings to Matilda, so Mister Pip broadens into a consideration of post-colonial culture, a meditation on what is kept and what rejected, what remembered and what forgotten and the extent to which individuals can choose how to be in the world.
Jones is a shaven-headed, burly and genial 52-year-old, the separated and re-partnered father of three grown-up children. He has also written two volumes of short stories, a children's book and non-fiction, so international fame hasn't come in an early rush. This may be partly the fault of provincialism (Britain's, not his); as he says, "being called a New Zealand writer is a bit like being called a Maltese writer or Falkland Islands writer. Straight away, you're diminished by where you come from."
If it's true that anything he does tends to be seen as peripheral, then Mister Pip's success is all the more impressive. He is at a loss to explain what it is about this book that has touched such a nerve.
"I am not the right person to answer that. I'm the guy with his head under the hood, tinkering with the engine, not the person who sees the car and thinks, 'I wouldn't mind a trip in that'."
This is an interesting admission, particularly given that at one point he describes as the centrepiece of the book the scene in which Mr Watts and his wife Grace, a scholarship girl from Bougainville, decorate their spare room in Australia.
Each writes on the walls things that are important to them - place names, family histories, observations and myths - in the hope that eventually their daughter will be able to pick and choose from their separate cultures. This is the one scene that seems to me not quite to work. When I query the idea of the overly symbolic spare room scene's being the centrepiece, he backtracks a little.
"It's the centrepiece in the sense that it's in the middle of the book. And it was the centrepiece of earlier drafts.
"When I started out, I thought the novel might never leave that room. I saw it as a fresco about the future of the Pacific, where the dominant settler culture has pretty much been disbanded. It turned out that that idea was incredibly interesting to a writer and boring as hell to a reader."
He realised the writing was on the wall, so to speak, when "I read out some to a friend over the phone. I could tell from the silence at the other end of the line".
Almost immediately afterwards, he says, the voice of Matilda came to him and "after that, the book pretty much wrote itself". He had, however, written hundreds of thousands of words to get to that point. "I had nine drafts and the last one had the working title Inventing the Pacific: Last Chance."
I suspect Jones' novel resonates far beyond the Pacific for three main reasons. First, because so many people now have experience of geographical and cultural displacement. Second, because the novel is a passionate defence of the importance of reading as "a deeply humanising activity".
But the chief reason must surely be the contrast between the idyllic setting of Bougainville, where food drops off the sunlit trees - a kind of iconic image of natural bounty - with the savage butchery of the war. Both island and war are quietly conveyed through the engaging, intelligent, often understated narrative voice.
The politics of Bougainville are complex and, even after Jones has explained them, I'm not sure I fully grasp them. What is clear is that for much of the '90s, the so-called developed world looked the other way while the island was subjected to a campaign of genocide. Jones tried to get there on a journalistic assignment after Papua New Guinea imposed its blockade in 1991 - "I didn't try very hard. If I'd succeeded, I'd be dead now."
He did spend a night with a soldier and the atrocities he heard about then are one seed of Mister Pip.
Ahead, he has the Booker dinner and a meeting with the Queen, who always sees the winner of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize. "I feel I haven't touched the ground since I arrived."
Previous Man Booker prize winners
The only New Zealand winner of the Booker prize has been Keri Hulme. There have been three Australian winners; Peter Carey (twice) Thomas Keneally and D.B.C. Pierre, although he prefers to call himself Mexican. The South African born J.M. Coetzee, who has also won twice, is now an Australian citizen.
* 1969: P.H. Newby, Something to Answer For
* 1970: Bernice Rubens, The Elected Member
* 1971: V.S. Naipaul, In a Free State
* 1972: John Berger, G.
* 1973: James Gordon Farrell, The Siege of Krishnapur
* 1974: Nadine Gordimer, The Conservationist, and Stanley Middleton, Holiday
* 1975: Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Heat and Dust
* 1976: David Storey, Saville
* 1977: Paul Scott, Staying On
* 1978: Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea
* 1979: Penelope Fitzgerald, Offshore
* 1980: William Golding, Rites of Passage
* 1981: Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children
* 1982: Thomas Keneally, Schindler's Ark
* 1983: J.M. Coetzee, Life & Times of Michael K
* 1984: Anita Brookner, Hotel du Lac
* 1985: Keri Hulme, The Bone People
* 1986: Kingsley Amis, The Old Devils
* 1987: Penelope Lively, Moon Tiger
* 1988: Peter Carey, Oscar and Lucinda
* 1989: Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day
* 1990: A.S. Byatt, Possession: A Romance
* 1991: Ben Okri, The Famished Road
* 1992: Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient, and Barry Unsworth, Sacred Hunger
* 1993: Roddy Doyle, Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha
* 1994: James Kelman, How late it was, how late
* 1995: Pat Barker, The Ghost Road
* 1996: Graham Swift, Last Orders
* 1997: Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things
* 1998: Ian McEwan, Amsterdam
* 1999: J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace
* 2000: Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin
* 2001: Peter Carey, True History of the Kelly Gang
* 2002: Yann Martel, Life of Pi
* 2003: D.B.C. Pierre, Vernon God Little
* 2004: Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty
* 2005: John Banville, The Sea
* 2006: Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss
2007 Shortlist
* Darkmans by Nicola Barker (Fourth Estate)
* The Gathering by Anne Enright (Jonathan Cape)
* The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid (Hamish Hamilton)
* Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones (John Murray)
* On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan (Jonathan Cape)
* Animal's People by Indra Sinha (Simon & Schuster)
- Observer
