I just finished Mister Pip (published in 2006)by Lloyd Jones.  What a beautiful book, and what tears I am shedding now.  The tears threatened throughout the first pages, but those were tears of wonder; what an amazing gift Mr. Watts brought to these children, stuck on an island in the midst of a war that the world ignored.  He brought to them Great Expectations and Pip and the hope that the world could change.  Any day, everything could change.

Now I am crying for the change that did come and what it did to the teacher and the students, and in particular to the narrator, Matilda, and her mother.   Horror and yet survival, inspired by love between two people who could not understand each other, mother to daughter, and literature shared between two parties that could never really know each other, the students and Mr. Watts.

This novel tells of the possibility of literature to change a person, and to help and to comfort and to inspire and to sometimes simply act as mirror to an experience that you feared was yours alone.

This novel presents so much: the struggle between imagination and reality, and the usefulness of one or the other (“She was liable to say, “That won’t hook a fish or peel a banana.’ And she was right.  But we weren’t after fish or bananas.  We were after something bigger.  We were trying to get ourselves another life.”); the nature of family and love; the relationship between teacher and student; the terrible pattern of war, rebels and counter rebels and the fighting that will not end; the hope of escape or transformation, of going back in time or of being transported far away to another country and another century; the nature of the savior (even if it’s only a log) and the saved, and the future of saved one and the one who saved.  And it quite squarely states that it is the duty of every human being to be moral and “you cannot have a day off when it suits.”  So what can we do to prevent civilians being killed in murderous wars and the poverty and sadness?  What is our moral duty every day to alleviate these sufferings?  I don’t know.

I do know that every great story (book or story or tale or song) tells a moral lesson.  Whether it is just the gossip we share with another person, which not only makes us feel better (rightly or wrongly) about ourselves but which also solidifies the prevailing code of what is acceptable, what can be reached for, and what is beyond the pale, or if it’s a novel that relates a story that compels us to think and determine and decide, all stories tell us about responsibility, which is after all morality, the moral duty of every human being.

Death is the threat that looms over all of us and it is morality that makes our span of living worthwhile: at least, I argue, that is what makes great storytelling.  All great stories have a threat looming (usually death or something like it, the end of one kind of life to be exchanged for the unknown) and a hero who dares to challenge the expected response to the threat and move beyond to something more beautiful, more significant, more powerful.  In this book, Matilda and Mr. Watts are both reaching for more, reaching for transformation (saving), and in the end it is Matilda’s mother who takes the truly heroic, transforming action.

All stories, little and big ones, show us that there is no insignificant life, no tale not worth telling.  But a story must be told well, and one indication of a tale well told is that there is a lesson on living.  The lesson might be hidden or up-front, ugly or dressed up, but it is there, and we cannot help but absorb it, again, if the tale is well told.  And it is so beautifully and magnificently told here, in Mr. Pip.