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Lloyd Jones has been to a few book award ceremonies over the years but the 2007 Commonwealth Writers' Prize, which he won for his Bougainville-set novel Mister Pip, had an atmosphere all of its own. Presented with the prize at the Calabash International Literary Festival in Jamaica at the end of May, Jones noticed something in the air. Quite a lot of it.
"The air was thick with ganja with a reggae band playing down the back," he relates. "You know how when you're walking down the street you'll get a whiff of ganja and then you're back to oxygen, it was the other way around there. You're breathing it. The wife of a South African writer - I'm not bullshitting you - it was a huge tent with 2000 people there, she had to put a wet handkerchief over the face of their daughter so she wouldn't get a hit at the age of 7. It's a different, wild place."
One gets the feeling Jones rather enjoyed himself at that festival, and not just because he won top prize, the first New Zealander to win the £10,000 ($26,400) award since Janet Frame in 1989. In Jamaica, where he spent a week at the festival, he attended a community project in Bath Botanical Gardens in St Thomas - "again, dope in the air, all these speakers with reggae" - and noticed a striking woman coming towards him.
"I was sitting next to the director of the Commonwealth Foundation and said, 'Jesus, who's that woman?' He said, 'You berk. That's the Prime Minister.' "
Jones had just eyed up Jamaica's first female Prime Minister, beanie-wearing Portia Simpson-Miller.
It was a different deal altogether at Monday's Montana NZ Book Awards at SkyCity's Convention Centre - much more formal, no dope, no reggae, just some annoying bursts of "themed" pop every time a winner was announced, as if we were at a cricket test. Jones was seated at a table behind PM Helen Clark, who most definitely was not sporting a beanie. Until it was announced, Jones didn't know Mister Pip had won the Montana Medal for Fiction and the night was long.
"It was strange. You've got that fake smile pinned to your cheek. The Book of Fame, for example, I was really thrilled, it was the first big award I'd ever won [the Montana NZ Prize, in 2001]. At the Commonwealth Prize, again, it was really good. Last night it was more of a relief. I was thinking if I've won the Commonwealth, surely I'm a frontrunner, surely, but on the other hand" - Jones bursts into one of his infectious "ha ha ha" laughs - "and this being New Zealand ...
"The other thing is," he continues, "it's a horrible thing for writers to be in. It's putting those books in a false environment, not where books should be placed. They should be placed on shelves and bookshops and libraries, and how the hell you say, this book rather than that book ... "
But so many people are saying Mister Pip is "that book". Because it is set in Bougainville in the early 90s when the Papua New Guinea-administered island was being torn apart in a civil war, Mister Pip includes mouth-drying accounts of atrocities on both sides which replicate some events Jones heard about when he was covering the area as a freelance journalist.
He tried to get into the place in 1990, and failed as all forms of transport had stopped going in.
"Luckily I didn't get there. There was no way to get there and everyone had just left, so I ended up in Rabaul [in East New Britain, Papua New Guinea], talking to expats who had lived there and were pretty shaken up, actually.
"I've told the story so many times, about being on a boat and running into the PNG defence officer who was telling me about what they were doing" - including stories about rebels being thrown out of helicopters rented by the PNG Army from the Australians.
After the New Zealand Army helped broker peace talks, Jones visited with the New Zealand Minister of Defence, then again when he stayed with Sam Kauona, the military commander of the Bougainville Revolutionary Army, and later, Joseph Kabui, who was elected president in 2005.
"I saw the gun workshops, visited old places of battle, heard the ghastly things that had happened so I had an intimate understanding of the place, as much as any outsider would have. No one knew what was going on. They were black. If they were white, the whole world would have responded differently. Bougainville was always going to fall under the radar."
Mister Pip's dark side is counter-pointed by the portrayal of 13-year-old village girl Matilda, who relates the narrative, and her escape into a wider imaginative world through school readings of the one book left in the village, Great Expectations, by the only remaining white man, the elderly Mr Watts. Martha bonds with the character of Pip, but when she inscribes a shrine to Pip on the beach, with his name written in the sand, the "Rambos" (the PNG goons) demand he must be found. One of the book's many strengths is that the ending is far from predictable.
Since its release just under a year ago, Mister Pip has retailed 20,000-plus copies in New Zealand alone, and its publishing rights have been sold around the world. Jones reels off a list of countries, gets to about 20, then stops.
"You know, the real kind of triumphs happen when you get something right on the page - it is so hard. All writers experience the moment when they pluck something out of nothing and put words to something that would go unnoticed but for the fact that they have identified that moment with the right kind of words.
"These are the achievements; this other stuff is sort of showbiz. Oh God, I am just turning into a performer, I can't stand myself. One of the things that attracted me to writing is its invisibility. I'll have to go back to drainlaying."
At 52, Jones is the youngest of a family of five, including his millionaire brother Sir Bob, who has tried his hand at writing fiction from time to time. Is there a sense of competition between them? "Not from me," says Jones drily. Did Bob ring to congratulate him on the Montana win? "No, his daughter rang me first thing this morning, in a sort of ambassadorial way. Ha ha ha. He's pleased, of course he's pleased."
Jones says he "wasn't one of those kids who always had their heads in a book. I was more into sport but at university I started to read - not academic stuff. I travelled a lot after university and as a way to responding to the world, I started to write things down ... I don't like classifications, that I am a novelist or a journalist. I am a writer."
A rich writer by now, surely? Jones looks mildly bored. "I feel okay financially. I talk to my friends and we all feel the same way - couldn't give a shit. You know, I just don't care. I worry about health but I never worry about finance and I never think about it.
"I can go and buy any bottle of wine I like and any book I like and I'm pretty much master of my own time. I've got enough but I still have to work, you know."
Tomorrow, Jones flies off to live in Berlin for a year as a Creative New Zealand writing fellow, an opportunity he says he is champing at the bit to start. He has two projects planned - one fiction, one non-fiction. "I could say what they are but they will end up being completely different. I have a starting point and that's just a point of departure.
"Over the past year, it's been tricky, a distraction. Normally, I know what I'm going to work on next and normally I'd be fairly well down the track. All these damn prizes, it puts a bit of static in your head and you can't think clearly. Thank God it's all over now. Germany will be a nice bolthole."
Then he does another one of those lovely "ha ha has" and says, "No, actually, it won't be. I've got the Berlin Writers' Festival when I get there and in October, three Canadian festivals. And I'm having tea with the Queen as well. Poor woman. It'll be just like having tea with my mother" - his mother died last year aged 93 - "except there'll be a tiara and some dogs."
