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| Thursday, 17 April 2008 | |
Mister Pip One of last year’s literary surprises, ‘Mister Pip’ is the eighth novel of New Zealand writer Lloyd Jones – and the first to be published in the UK. Virtually unknown in the northern hemisphere, Jones was awarded the Commonwealth Prize for this highly unusual book and was the bookies’ favourite for winning the Man Booker Prize (which went instead to the Irish writer Ann Enright for her novel ‘The Gathering’). The bookies may have got it wrong, but their instinct was right: ‘Mister Pip’ is a remarkable achievement, and the fact that, among other things, it’s about reading yet manages to maintain a high level of excitement throughout makes it all the more remarkable and leaves one feeling a little less pessimistic about the fading literacy of our age. Mister Pip is of course the hero of ‘Great Expectations’. Jones brings him back to life in the minds of a group of school children in a setting that even in his wildest flight of fancy Charles Dickens could not have foreseen: the South Pacific island of Bougainville in the grips of a vicious civil war in the early 1990s. The only white man left on the island is the reclusive, down-at-heel Mr Watts, known as Popeye to the school children whom he has agreed to instruct after their regular teacher has escaped to safety. The only teaching material that Mr Watts has at is disposal is a dog-eared copy of what he regards as “the greatest novel of the greatest 19th-century English novelist”. Every day he reads a new chapter to the children, who, having no notion of what a metropolis like London resembles, or a frosty winter day feels like, are transported to a world unlike anything they know, except in two respects: long before Mr Watts comes to the end of his reading, they have learned the reality of loss and, for one of them – the narrator, twenty-something year-old Matilda, looking back on events of her childhood – displacement. Jones avoids all the pitfalls lying in wait for him: cultural arrogance, sentimentalism, pious platitudes about the humanizing influence of books. Matilda is a thoroughly convincing creation and her voice has a distinctive and powerfully haunting resonance as she recalls the weird disconnections and murderous collisions in being swallowed up simultaneously by war and a fiction so enthralling that it even makes the sounds of war dwindle to the distant booming of the surf on the surrounding reef. The Song Before It Is Sung  Another story of war, this time much closer to us. The South African-born writer Justin Cartwright spins a novel from the life and untimely death of Adam von Trott, one of the Prussian officers executed for their involvement in the failed July 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler. What intrigued Cartwright and gave him the impulse to write this fiction closely patterned on history was the fact that von Trott had been a Rhodes scholar at Oxford, where he had formed a friendship with the eminent Sir Isaiah Berlin, and that something happened in the early days of the Nazi takeover of Germany to estrange the two men. ‘The Song before It Is Sung’ is an attempt to come up with a plausible reason for that estrangement. At the start of the novel, Conrad Senior, a scholar and journalist, is bequeathed a bundle of papers by his professor, E. A. Mendel (i.e. Isaiah Berlin) and, with an obsessive obstinacy that soon wrecks his marriage, begins to investigate Mendel’s involvement with Axel von Gottberg (based on Adam van Trott) and with two English sisters, Elisabeth and Rosamund. The resulting story of love, friendship, ideas, courage and human frailty is compelling and goes right to the heart of a very troubled time. Oystercatchers by Susan Fletcher  This second book by the winner of the Whitbread First Novel award in 2005 is a brooding, poetic meditation on the loneliness of a woman who is something of a stranger to her own life. Sitting by the bedside of her younger sister, who has been in a coma since the age of 12, the novel’s lead character, Moira, confesses to her all the things she has never been able to speak to her, their parents or her own husband. Not that her life has been especially eventful or her actions unusually reprehensible; it is simply that she has finally discovered in herself the ability to love and to communicate. Though Moira’s confession jumps around for no very clear reason from a first-to a third-person narration, it ends up putting one to sleep: no matter how delicately written, a novel needs something more than an endlessly unfolding sensibility. |
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