booklit

Already having taken the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book, Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones now has its sights firmly set on the Man Booker Prize 2007, having been recently longlisted. And with strong writing telling a story that pushes the reader to all manner of emotional experiences, it certainly stakes its claim to be a modern classic, whatever the outcome.

Set in a blockaded Bougainville in 1991, during rebel uprising, the narrator Matilda tells us of how the one remaining white man in the province, Mr Watts, reopens the school and introduces them to “the greatest novel by the greatest English writer of the nineteenth century.” Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens. Each day he reads a chapter from the book, encouraging the children to use their imaginations to transport them back Victorian England, a place they’ll never know. And when the book gets lost, it is the imagination that is used to recall the novel, helping them to rebuild their shattered lives.

There are some books where I feel that having knowledge of another text would be useful prior to reading (e.g. Icelandic sagas for Halldór Laxness, or even Jane Eyre, prior to Wide Sargasso Sea) but with Mister Pip I didn’t feel less ignorant of the story due to my ignorance of Great Expectations. In fact, it put me more on a level with the children coming to this story for the first time, the snippets given eking out the story in my head.

Although it’s set in the real world, there are times when the book’s tropical setting seems almost mythic, not least because of the isolated setting, but through the folklore shared by the kids’ mothers:

We heard about an island where the kids sit in a stone canoe and learn sacred sea chants by heart. We heard you can sing a song to make an orange tree grow. We heard about songs that worked like medicine. For example, you can sing a certain one to get rid of hiccups. There are even songs to get rid of sores and boils.

Stories are what it’s all about, their power to engage the imagination, their indestructibility, and how one’s voice, written or spoken, is a unique thing that can’t be taken away. In many senses, Mister Pip has the feel of a book for children, although that notion is quashed as the book soon darkens, with scenes reminiscent of Uzodinma Iweala’s Beasts Of No Nation, only told from the other perspective.

The prose is wonderful, Matilda’s narration in harmony with the lazy days feel of island life, yet shot through with observations of the harsher aspects of life:

We could see the beach palms spreading up to a blue sky. And a turquoise sea so still we hardly noticed it. Halfway to the horizon we could see a redskins’ gunboat. It was like a grey sea mouse - it crawled along with its guns aimed at us. In the direction of the hills we heard sporadic gunfire. We were used to that sound - sometimes it was the rebels testing their restored rifles, and besides, we knew it was a longer way off than what it sounded. We had come to know the amplifying effects of water, so the gunfire just merged with the background chorus of the grunting pigs and shrieking birds.

The characters step off the page in their own ways, be it their need to understand the world around them or through enigmatic qualities. Why does Mr Watt, for example, sometimes wear a red nose? And no matter how comic or strange someone appears, they’re also steeped in sorrow.

While not a debut novel (that was published in 1985) Mister Pip is Lloyd Jones’s first to be published in the UK and it’s an accomplished creation, and surely destined for classic status. There’s joy, there’s wonder, there’s fear, sadness, shock. There’s Dickens. There’s so much more. Its success should hopefully see his back catalogue - and future novels - published in Britain as, for once, I wouldn’t mind keeping up with the Jones’s.

Trying out a debutante author can be a huge step into the unknown but, with praise from Rushdie, Ghosh, and a number of British broadsheets adorning the cover, it’s a step I decided to take with Beasts Of No Nation by Uzodinma Iweala, an unsentimental study of war through the eyes of a child soldier. And it doesn’t disappoint, providing a detailed series of events that add background to the stories of civil war in Africa that we often see in the news, although its arching tale of chilling conflicts and unspeakable acts is somewhat let down by a somewhat fortunate conclusion - for the character, that is, and not the reader.

Agu, our narrator, tells us not where he is from or how old he is but begins by giving an account of how he became a soldier when his village was raided and he ran from the scene into the clutches of a band of rebels. Then, before he knows it he is following the command of two men (early twenties, at most) called Commandant and Luftenant as they lead their band of boy soldiers across the nation for the cause.

The cause itself is never mentioned; Agu doesn’t actually know what he is fighting for. He is only able to differentiate between the time before war came (which becomes more and more a faded memory) and now. But, to aid the cause, Agu’s troop find themselves killing at random, raping women, burning villages to the ground, and stealing. Beasts Of No Nation is a catalogue of man’s inhumanity to man in the time of war and its lists expands to include prostitution, cannibalism, and child sex abuse. While never explicit in his description, it’s the suggestion of these acts, as described by Agu, that resonate.

As a soldier, Agu doesn’t know what he is meant to be doing. In fact, the only soldiers who seem to have a clue are Commandant and Luftenant:

Commandant is yelling, TENSHUN and I am seeing that now all of us is standing here and all of us is forming tenshun very quickly. Then, Commandant is saying to us that we should be behaving ourself and looking sharp and resting well well that we will be knowing what is happening in some time. Everybody is listening, but nobody is really understanding what he is saying about moving to the front and fighting the enemy in this place or that place because I am never seeing this place or that place for my whole life. Anyway, it is not mattering too much because I am just following order and not having to do anything else. After he is shouting on us like this, he is telling us to dismiss and make camp.

Rather than be soldiers, the kids are more interested in looking like soldiers. They carry guns or machetes and wear uniforms to show status. Uniforms, itself, becomes a loose term since any clothing they can find (soldier, policeman, etc. ) is taken from the dead and worn with pride.

As you can tell from the quote above, Agu’s narration is given authenticity by mixing tenses, incorrect use of plural and singular terms. The effect, at times, can be poetic and his voice assumes a wonderful rhythm. There were a couple of times where I had to read the sentence again to work out what had just been said. My only criticism of using this style is that Agu has a limited vocabulary and I noticed him using the same similes (like bullets; like ants) on multiple occasions. Fair enough, given that it’s the character’s voice, but it felt like the narrative could achieve more with some extra vocabulary.

If I was to have any major criticism of Beasts Of No Nation it is that Agu is surplus to requirements within his own narrative. The conclusion of the novel (or, at least, the penultimate conclusion) is perpetrated by another character which renders Agu as observer and not master of his own destiny which one would hope for in a character study.

Of the aforementioned reviews on the cover of the book, the one that rings true most is Rushdie’s, when he says “this guy is going to be very, very good”. It’s a fine little novel, showing some truth about conflicts we rarely think of when war is mentioned, and gives a voice to the images of child soldiers splashed occasionally on the news; but it’s not quite perfect.