Book un-rec
So, someone gave me Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones ("The multi-award winning international bestseller") at some point, and I picked it up and read it recently.
The narrator of the book is Matilda, 13 years old, who lives on Bougainville, during the civil war. I did a quick double-check, and Lloyd Jones is, as far as I can determine, a white New Zealander who's never been to Bougainville. That bothered me, but I kept reading.
During the initial scene-setting part of the book, I wasn't too bothered - every so often Matilda would describe something in a way that made me think "would a 13-year old who's native really think of Bougainville (or its relationship to the rest of the world) that way, or is this a White Fail?" These moments made me increasingly distrustful that Matilda had much relationship to any real Bougainvillean child.
Then we get to the plot: because of the civil war etc, there's no school, and the only white person around volunteers to teach the school, primarily by reading Great Expectations and the children are entranced and caught up in this alternate world to their own, and it causes some confusion when the PNG troops hunting down rebel soldiers reach the village, with tragic consequences. However, Matilda manages to escape Bougainville/the war, goes to school in Australia (where her father has been working) and eventually gets a university degree in English Literature.
I should mention that Charles Dickens has never worked for me, I find him tedious and have never finished anything by him (unlike that other Victorian Chuckie D - yes, I've read the entire Origin of Species and not an entire Charles Dickens novel, although given my background I probably had more motivation going into OfS.)
So to get to the guts of it, I think "Mr Pip" is this giant hero-worship of Charles Dickens as a Creator of Great Universal Literature (that can be Inspirational To Anyone On The Planet). And I just don't believe in Great Universal Literature, particularly not since it all seems to be written by white men (I've never even heard Jane Austen described as a Creator of Great Universal Literature, and she clearly belongs in the Western Canon as much as Dickens), and the people who believe in GUL don't seem to have much insight into how different people really are and can be, and don't seem to have noticed or cared that if there was such a thing as GUL, really, it should be capable of being created by anyone on the planet.
In other words, I think GUL is a massively racist and white-centred concept and when a white dude writes a book about how another white dude's book about a white dude, read aloud by the only white dude around, changes the life of a girl native to Bougainville, excuse me for not feeling inspired, and wondering how exactly this book got awards?
I did get one clue, by reading the review in The Australian which I found more blatantly racist than "Mr Pip" itself (howthef*ck can this book possibly be "post-colonial literature"???). [Note: I generally refuse to read The Australian since the day of the NT Invasion Intervention and the fawning coverage of Howard's actions on its front page, while I was thinking "Surely someone other than me is appalled by the racism?", so I guess I shouldn't be shocked.]
I didn't learn anything from this book about Bougainville, its people, their culture, who they really are, or the civil war, that I trust a word of. I know rather more than I'd like to about Lloyd Jones' attitude to Charles Dickens, and his apparent conviction that white people are just so much more interesting than non-white people, because even the ending seems more about that "only white person around" than Matilda.
My summary: massive white dude fail.
This entry is originally published at http://aquaeri.dreamwidth.org/86302.html. Please go here to read comments; here to leave a comment (you can use your LJ OpenID).
comments so far.
The narrator of the book is Matilda, 13 years old, who lives on Bougainville, during the civil war. I did a quick double-check, and Lloyd Jones is, as far as I can determine, a white New Zealander who's never been to Bougainville. That bothered me, but I kept reading.
During the initial scene-setting part of the book, I wasn't too bothered - every so often Matilda would describe something in a way that made me think "would a 13-year old who's native really think of Bougainville (or its relationship to the rest of the world) that way, or is this a White Fail?" These moments made me increasingly distrustful that Matilda had much relationship to any real Bougainvillean child.
Then we get to the plot: because of the civil war etc, there's no school, and the only white person around volunteers to teach the school, primarily by reading Great Expectations and the children are entranced and caught up in this alternate world to their own, and it causes some confusion when the PNG troops hunting down rebel soldiers reach the village, with tragic consequences. However, Matilda manages to escape Bougainville/the war, goes to school in Australia (where her father has been working) and eventually gets a university degree in English Literature.
I should mention that Charles Dickens has never worked for me, I find him tedious and have never finished anything by him (unlike that other Victorian Chuckie D - yes, I've read the entire Origin of Species and not an entire Charles Dickens novel, although given my background I probably had more motivation going into OfS.)
So to get to the guts of it, I think "Mr Pip" is this giant hero-worship of Charles Dickens as a Creator of Great Universal Literature (that can be Inspirational To Anyone On The Planet). And I just don't believe in Great Universal Literature, particularly not since it all seems to be written by white men (I've never even heard Jane Austen described as a Creator of Great Universal Literature, and she clearly belongs in the Western Canon as much as Dickens), and the people who believe in GUL don't seem to have much insight into how different people really are and can be, and don't seem to have noticed or cared that if there was such a thing as GUL, really, it should be capable of being created by anyone on the planet.
In other words, I think GUL is a massively racist and white-centred concept and when a white dude writes a book about how another white dude's book about a white dude, read aloud by the only white dude around, changes the life of a girl native to Bougainville, excuse me for not feeling inspired, and wondering how exactly this book got awards?
I did get one clue, by reading the review in The Australian which I found more blatantly racist than "Mr Pip" itself (howthef*ck can this book possibly be "post-colonial literature"???). [Note: I generally refuse to read The Australian since the day of the NT Invasion Intervention and the fawning coverage of Howard's actions on its front page, while I was thinking "Surely someone other than me is appalled by the racism?", so I guess I shouldn't be shocked.]
I didn't learn anything from this book about Bougainville, its people, their culture, who they really are, or the civil war, that I trust a word of. I know rather more than I'd like to about Lloyd Jones' attitude to Charles Dickens, and his apparent conviction that white people are just so much more interesting than non-white people, because even the ending seems more about that "only white person around" than Matilda.
My summary: massive white dude fail.
This entry is originally published at http://aquaeri.dreamwidth.org/86302.html. Please go here to read comments; here to leave a comment (you can use your LJ OpenID).
comments so far.