It would be fair to say, despite the awful pun it involves, that I had great expectations for Mister Pip. It tells the story of Matilda, living with her mother in their village on a Pacific island (which a bit of Googling reveals to be Bougainville Island, part of Papua New Guinea). Matilda’s father has gone to work in Northern Australia following the closure of the island’s copper mine; that closure is because of the war for independence that is taking place between the authorities (‘redskins’) and the rebels, and Matilda’s people are caught in the middle; at home, the solid presence of her mother vies with the ideal of her absent father for her loyalty and affection.

Matilda’s relationship with her mother deteriorates when Mr Watts re-opens the village school. Mr Watts is a curiousity – the only white man in the village, he is married to Grace, a local woman who he met while she was training abroad. Before reopening the school, he was mainly noted for donning his white suit and a red clown’s nose and towing his wife around the vilage on a hand cart, which doesn’t give much idea of what to expect from his teaching. As it turns out, he has two main strategies: getting adults from the village to share whatever practical wisdom and folklore occurs to them; and reading from Great Expectations by Charles Dickens.

The readings quickly capture the imagination of Matilda – despite the alien nature of 19th century England, she is intrigued by Pip’s adventures and experiences. I have not read Great Expectations (or in fact any Dickens – for shame), but I know some of the key aspects of the story – Pip’s humble origins, his elevation from them to a higher stratum of society, the peculiarities of Miss Haversham – but it’s worth saying that having no knowledge of the novel is not a problem for reading Mister Pip – like Matilda, we get everything we need to to know by Mr Watts.

When the realities of the war intrude on the life of the village, Matilda’s obsession with Pip has unforeseen consequences for the villagers, and ultimately for Mr Watts. In the events that follow, she is able to take great comfort from the characters that she has learned about, and gains a deeper understanding of Pip’s experiences.

Having recently read and enjoyed Chris Cleave’s The Other Hand, with its wonderful Nigerian narrator Little Bee, I have already said how difficult it must be to convincingly project the narrative voice of someone from a completely alien society – but, like Cleave, it’s a trick Lloyd Jones handles with applomb. Mister Pip is a clever, sad, sometimes shocking yet still life-affirming book, and I enjoyed it a great deal. It certainly lived up to my expectations, though it turned out to be darker than I had imagined. A very clever piece of work.

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