by Lloyd Jones
In Rochester you arrive at a place you know you feel obliged to like. There it is—the perfect postcard of how an English village is supposed to have looked like in eighteen-hundred-and-something. You trip over the cobbles and choke on the sentimentality. Everywhere you look Dickens is a shopkeeper, a restaurateur, a merchant in secondhand goods. You find you have the choice between Fagin’s Café or eating at Mrs. Brumbles or A Taste of Two Cities.
I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip is one of the most endearing lines in literature. This is who I am: please accept me as you find me. This is what an orphanage sends its charges out to the world with. This is what emigrants wash up on Pacific shorelines with. This is what Mr. Watts had asked the rambos to accept. But I could not accept a blimmin’ fruit and veg shop named after Pip as in Pip’s of Rochester.
There were another two hours to fill before I caught the train back to London, so I decided to tag on to the end of a guided tour. A woman from the Charles Dickens Center at Eastgate House led the party up the stairs of the town hall into a long room where Pip was signed over into an apprenticeship with Joe Gargery.
From the town hall there was a short walk up the hill, and at some point I realized that we were taking the same route as Pip had on his way to visit Miss Havisham. The same route which was known to me, having walked it before as a besotted reader on an island on the other side of the world.
The woman from the center pointed out a two-story manor—this was Satis House. Here I learned something new. Mr. Dickens pinched the name and stuck it on a larger and more imposing mansion next to the brewery, where he installed Miss Havisham and Estella.
After a short walk through a park, we stood across the road, staring back at the gates, the same gates where Estella first receives Pip and condescends to call him “boy.” A taxi drew up and a yuppyish young man bounced out. He gave us a quick glance. I thought he looked annoyed. The guide said Miss Havisham’s house had been turned into apartments.
We watched the young man let himself in the gate and walk up the path. We watched him set his briefcase down and put a key in the door. The door opened and closed. After that we let our eyes drift. We stood there for some time drifting with our eyes and thoughts. “Well,” someone said at last.
The tour ended back at Eastgate House. I followed the others up the stairs, and there I encountered Miss Havisham in her white wedding gown. She was stuck behind glass, her back turned to us sightseers. There for all eternity. I wished she could turn, just for half an instant, to find a black woman staring at her.
The tour ended in Mr. Dickens’ study. A mannequin of the author himself reclined in a leather chair, his legs sprawled before him, his hands in gentle repose. His sleepy eyelids at half-mast. We had walked in on Mr. Dickens while he was daydreaming. Behind the restraining rope, the man standing next to me heard me whisper, “I have met Mr. Dickens and this is not him.” He smiled and looked away. I did not try and convince him. But if I had, this is what I would have said.
The Mr. Dickens I had known also had a beard and a lean face and eyes that wanted to leap from his face. But my Mr. Dickens used to go about barefoot and in a buttonless shirt. Apart from special occasions, such as when he taught, and then he wore a suit.
It has occurred to me only recently that I never once saw him with a machete—his survival weapon was story. And once, a long time ago and during very difficult circumstances, my Mr. Dickens had taught every one of us kids that our voice was special, and we should remember this whenever we used it, and remember that whatever else happened to us in our lives our voice could never be taken away from us.
For a brief time I had made the mistake of forgetting that lesson.
In the worshipful silence I smiled at what else they didn’t know. Pip was my story, even if I was once a girl, and my face black as the shining night. Pip is my story, and in the next day I would try where Pip had failed. I would try to return home.
Acknowledgments
I want to thank Michael Heyward and Melanie Ostell of Text for the wonderful confidence and enthusiasm they showed in Mister Pip from the first day it arrived as a manuscript. To Melanie, for her astute editorial probing and suggestions; to Michael, for guiding the book out into the world.
And I especially want to thank my longtime publisher, Geoff Walker of Penguin Books New Zealand, and my agent, Michael Gifkins, for their unflagging efforts on my behalf and Mister Pip’s.
A grant from Creative New Zealand helped toward the writing of this book, for which I remain extremely grateful.
About the Author
LLOYD JONES was born in New Zealand in 1955. His best-known works include The Book of Fame, winner of numerous literary awards, Biografi, a New York Times Notable Book, Choo Woo, Here at the End of the World We Learn to Dance, and Paint Your Wife. He lives in Wellington, New Zealand.
OTHER BOOKS BY THE AUTHOR
Swimming to Australia
Biografi
This House Has Three Walls
Choo Woo
The Book of Fame
Here at the End of the World We Learn to Dance
Paint Your Wife
MISTER PIP
First Published by The Text Publishing Company, Australia, 2006
A Dial Press Book / August 2007
Published by The Dial Press
A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York, New York
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved
Copyright © 2006 by Lloyd Jones
The Dial Press is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc., and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Jones, Lloyd, 1955–
Mister Pip / Lloyd Jones.
p. cm.
1. Books and reading—Fiction. 2. Storytelling—Fiction. 3. Bougainville Island (Papua New Guinea)—Fiction. I. Title.
PR9639.3.J644M57 2007
823'.914—dc22 2007005224
www.dialpress.com
eISBN: 978-0-440-33716-4
v3.0