Novel Gets Readers Inside Civil War on Bougainville

Mister Pip

Lloyd Jones

Seventy Years of Fighting on a Tiny Island

Some of the most intense fighting of the war occurred on this scrap of land. If we look at the South Pacific "Island Hopping" campaign of WWII (of which Guadalcanal, Saipan, Iwo Jima are only a few) most islands were captured and held by the Japanese, then captured and held by the Allies. When American forces landed on Bougainville, however, soldiers from both nations remained on the island in a years' long for dominance; the Americans remained to defend a vital airfield while the Japanese struggled to destroy it. Unlike other islands in the South Pacific campaign which saw battle briefly then returned to a well-earned peace, Bougainville saw ongoing conflict until the very end of the war. 

 

 Civil War on Bougainville in the 1990's

After the war, the world's attention drifted away from the island and has never yet returned. That doesn't mean, however, that Bougainville has been peaceful. From 1988 onward (though a cease-fire has been in place since 1997) all hell has been breaking loose on the island of Bougainville. Some call it an uprising, some a war of liberation. Mercenaries, rebels, and the New Guinea regular army have been busily burning villages and killing civilians, but little attention has ever been paid by the outside world.

Novel Mister Pip is Rare Glimpse into the Sensual Heart of Modern Bougainville

Lloyd Jones' Novel Mister Pip is a rare literary reference to this all-but-unknown conflict. Mister Pip is both a light-hearted, elegiac read with beautifully-drawn characters, and a window into a tragic history most of us haven't heard. The forest village in which his narrative unfolds has somehow managed to remain willfully innocent of the bloodbath that surrounds them.

The narrator is Matilda, a young villager. Other main characters are her mother Dolores -- a woman who cares deeply but is too afraid of being duped to understand the people around her, and Mr. Watts, the only white man remaining on the island after war has caused anyone who can manage it to flee. When he is coaxed into reopening the school for the local children, he uses Great Expectations as his text.

As rebels and government troops struggle over control of the village, life for the inhabitants goes from bad to worse. In the end, a smoking ruin is left of Matilda's life, and she begins to hope for death. The character Pip from the Dickens novel plays both a part in the destruction of Matilda's community and paradoxically inspires her to go on living after everyone else is dead.

Infused with the sense of what it means to live in the tropics, Jones' writing makes the reader know how it feels to grow up and live at the very edge of human endeavor, tens of thousands of miles from "cultural centers," in one of the last places to be inhabited on the globe.

It won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize in 2007 for Best Book, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.