A good film

Last night we watched a good film: the cinema version of Lloyd Jones's Mr Pip.

We were struck by the variety of ideas Jones has packed into the novel. Apart from a cast of interesting characters, and a plot with plenty of action, the themes for the audience to go away thinking about are especially densely packed: differences in culture, the relationship of reality to fantasy or imagination, and are fictional characters like real people?

Through the personality of Matilda, we see the unsophisticated but age-old culture of Bougaineville contrasted with modern culture, peaceful village life contrasted with rebellion and military oppression, Dickens's nineteenth century imagination of Great Expectations compared with life at the end of the twentieth century.  We also get to consider such questions as whether Great Expectations and the Bible are the same kind of book, or whether real-life experience is more valuable than book-learning.

Set on the island of Bougaineville about 2000, the background is a strike by workers at the world's largest tin mine and the oppression of these people and their villages by the government of the day.

Into this situation comes Thomas Watts (Hugh Laurie in the film) to take up a job as village schoolteacher, for which he has no qualifications. His only equipment is his personality and a battered copy of Dickens's novel, which he proceeds to read to the children, and eventually to an appreciative audience of their parents, a chapter a day.

Pip, the hero of Dickens's novel, becomes a central character in the relationship between Mr Watts and the villagers, and especially in his relationship with his star pupil, Matilda, and her mother.

We certainly enjoyed renewing our acquaintance with this story as much as we had enjoyed reading the novel originally. So you have a choice between the book and the film; whichever I know you will find it worthwhile.