Let me admit this and get it out of the way- I didn't finish the book and this time the fault is mine. I abandoned the book purely because I was too chicken to see it through. Even though the book was compellingly told with interesting characters and an original voice.
Briefly- Matilda is a young girl in the tropical island of Bougainville. Mr Watts is the only white person in the island. His black wife calls her self Sheba and the couple have a strange daily ritual which entails him pulling a wooden platform on which she stands. An act that puzzles the whole island and the reader- we discover the answer in the end. But I digress for this quaint ritual has little bearing on the course of the story.
The story- Mr Watts becomes the self- appointed teacher of the village school and the only book he as is Dickens' Great Expectations. Pip enters their world and acquires a life of his own. So real does he become the when civil war comes, the solders come looking for Mr Pip. Yes, Civil war is the menace that threatens this little idyll and it is a menace that comes to pass. There is a lot of loss, of varying kinds and degrees.As they fight this threat from outside , the islanders have to also deal with the threat that Dickens and Watts bring by the way of questions and new beliefs to the young students that oppose the ideas of the old. Of course, Pip's life does mirror ,in some small manner Matilda's
I skipped and peeked- so I know how the book ends. But I am more interested in hearing from somebody who finished the whole book.
This is a must read - for even though I abandoned the book, the book didn't let go off me. I pick it up and flick page or too and I wait for the day when I stop[ being a wimp long enough to actually finish it.
