Life can change without warning. That's one of the recurring notes sounded by Matilda Laimo, the likeable, self-effacing narrator of MISTER PIP, as she looks back on her early adolescence on a small island village in Bougainville, Papua New Guinea in the early 90s. It's a note of both warning and hope, for she was trapped on the island at the worst of times--during a ruthless, atrocity-ridden civil war--yet somehow managed to survive it. That's the one lifeline (the Mr. Jaggers--you'll learn what this means) that Lloyd throws his readers from the outset: Matilda has lived to tell her tale, we just don't know how or at what cost.

MISTER PIP's plot is likewise full of changes without warning: I didn't always know what would come next in this novel, which I found alternately heartwarming, repellant, funny, horrifying, sad, strange, uplifting. Early on, I thought I was in for another charming but sentimental homage to a teacher, that the "background chorus" of gunfire erupting from the Bougainville blockade would remain just that, an excuse for a group of trapped tropical island students to fall under the spell of a maverick teacher who reads them, of all things, GREAT EXPECTATIONS. And who would be the Donat/Poitier/Williams to star in its movie? I didn't pay enough attention to Matilda's forewarnings: "What I am about to tell results, I think, from our ignorance of the outside world." Eventually that world invades the village with a steadily increasing brutality that I won't soon, maybe ever, forget, and all my notions of getting cozy with the students as they listen to installments of Dickens were quickly disabused. There are many complex turns in this book, many levels of civil war, mysteries within mysteries, and in the end, Mister Pip couldn't be less sentimental; it has moments as bleak and soul-shriveling as THE HEART OF DARKNESS.

It's difficult to speak about this or any novel without giving too much of its story away, but it might be worth knowing for some that there are spoilers galore in MISTER PIP for GREAT EXPECTATIONS; you'll get a kind of SparkNotes overview of the latter. I wonder, in fact, what the experience of reading MISTER PIP without knowing GREAT EXPECTATIONS would be like--a call I can't make, having read it a number of times. I suspect, though, that Lloyd does depend on readers' familiarity with Dickens in some way because despite his many weighty themes--race, atrocity, surviving atrocity, sacrifice, strained mother/daughter relationships, crucial life lessons, abandonment, fatal misunderstandings and clashes of culture--his MISTER PIP is first and foremost about reading and the love of literature. About story as survival and the ability of novels, as Matilda says, to supply you with another world when you desperately need one. And what book lover doesn't cross paths, sooner or later, with GREAT EXPECTATIONS? If not before MISTER PIP, then I bet soon after.