You can bite me, Mr. Pip

It appears, from the the cover, to be quite promising: short listed for the Man Booker, winner of the Commonwealth Writer's Prize. Not only that but it came recommended. "You must read this book," said my aunt, pressing Lloyd Jones's Mr. Pip (2007) into my hands. Were my expectations too high, am I giving up too early (I admit, I am only about halfway through)? Am I really just a jaded and cynical book reader, hater of Paolo Coehlo and all that is simplistic and pure?

What, exactly is my problem with Mr. Pip?

Well, let me tell you.

First off, one has to be very, very careful in taking on the voice of a young woman of colour especially when one is not in fact a person of colour nor for that matter a woman. Lloyd Jones is neither. A tricky place to start considering the long and illustrious history of sexism, colonialism, oppression and patriarchy weighing on his shoulders. This does not seem to bother our dear Mr. Lloyd who has as a protagonist a quasi-pubescent girl from somewhere on a pacific island. Mr. Lloyd doesn't seem to see a problem in having a main character who is mind-bogglingly innocent and who seems to have grown up, in the nineties no less, completely isolated from any sense of global culture (what, they have generators and airplanes but no one's ever bothered to get a television?). I have been to some far flung villages, too. No running water, no cars or scooters, no doctors or candy, but the people were a lot more worldly than Mr. Lloyd's land of dopey islanders.

So that's a start, but to make matters worse, Lloyd contrives to have the story revolve around the last white man on the island. A strange and marginal character named Mr. Watts, who somehow becomes the local teacher during the beginnings of a civil war. Why this foreign yokel should become the teacher when all he does is pull his wife around in a cart, can only be explained because he is white, and therefore the holder of great wisdom. I kid you not. Of course, Mr. Watts is faux-humble and then reads to the kids, who admire him above all else and are ashamed of their parents, from Dickens' "Great Expectations". The kids of course (of course!) love the book, never having read one before themselves, and admire Mr. Watts even more. And friends, none of this is written with even a hint of irony, not a trace of neo-colonialist shame, not a smidgen of self-doubt. Mr. Watts is great. Everyone thinks so, except the parents and they are superstitious losers anyways.

The island's parents come into the school, one after the other, to share their own educational wisdom. This is of course Mr. Watts' idea and he looks on most benevolently. The stories they tell are sweet and innocent (ahhh, them native folks) and they are all crushingly embarrassed or shy or humble. Noble savage, anyone? The kids squirm in shame and I am left to wonder why the parents wouldn't just tell these stories at home or in their proper context rather than in the white man's school. Really!

Now, don't get me wrong. Some of my favourite authors are white men who have strayed too long in the tropics: Kapuscinski, Graham Greene, Bruce Chatwin, Paul Theroux. But their writing always has a sort of self-consciousness to it. Their characters may be self-important losers but the reader is made aware of the discrepancies, the fault-lines, the power dynamics, the fragility of being a white man in a non-white world. Mr. Watts, while sometime shown to be frail and at times a victim, remains a character without any sense (internally, from within the novel to externally, through Jones' prose) of power, responsibility, or sense of himself as a white man in a non-white environment.

Instead, everything is syruply straightforward. Island full of innocent native folk, wise and genteel white man educates island's children, everyone loves Great Expectations (hey, I had to read it in high school and found it so boring I couldn't get past the first twenty pages and bluffed my way through the exam), and then rebels come and ask, "who's this Pip character?'" because they've seen his name written on the beach. Yes, the rebels are stupider than the villagers, and that's saying something.

Mr. Lloyd, please. Give your characters some credit.

(to be continued and perhaps amended once I have actually finished the book)