The Man Who Loved Dickens

When "Mr. Pip" (Dial Press, 256 pages, $20), the eighth book from the New Zealand writer Lloyd Jones, was awarded the Commonwealth Writers' Prize earlier this year, a member of the judging panel expressed his admiration: "This mesmerizing story shows how books can change lives in utterly surprising ways." The novel is a paean to the transformative power of literature, particularly its ability to occlude an unpleasant reality with a fictional alternative and to expand an individual's sense of possibility. It takes place in a location that will be unfamiliar to most, and includes atrocities inspired by real events. But Mr. Jones's attempt to enliven this theme of the influence of literature founders, and he weighs down his promising premise with literary clichés.

Matilda, the adolescent narrator of "Mister Pip," lives with her mother in a village on the South Pacific island of Bougainville in the early 1990s. Matilda's father left the village several years earlier, wooed by the prospect of a regular paycheck, leaving the two women to their own defenses when a violent independence movement breaks out. The Papua New Guinean government erects a blockade to punish the rebels and the conflict intensifies.

The peaceful inhabitants of Matilda's village are generally apathetic to the politics of the crisis; for them both factions have lost whatever humanity they once possessed. The boys who emerge from the jungle to burns houses and steal food "were different from us. … They had turned into creatures of the forest." Matilda and her mother struggle for survival, which becomes additionally difficult with each destructive visit from the rebels.

Mr. Watts, the only white man to remain in the village, becomes a central figure for Matilda and the other local children. For no apparent reason other than their deference to all things white — "we had grown up believing white to be the color of all important things," says Matilda — the villagers elect Mr. Watts to be the interim schoolteacher.

Mr. Watts, or Pop Eye, as the children of the village have nicknamed him, was previously a figure of pathos-tinged ridicule — a man whose only ostensible occupation was wearing a red clown's nose, while he pulled his wife behind him on a cart — but he takes command of the classroom with ease. He waves "Great Expectations" over the children's heads like a magic wand, and transforms himself from village fool to learned elder.

The children love the novel. (Evelyn Waugh, whose Mr. Todd in "Handful of Dust" forces Tony Last read a page of Dickens every day as a lifelong punishment, might have framed the infatuation differently.) For precocious Matilda, the novel becomes her entryway to "a world that was whole and made sense." Literature is so powerful palliative that it is almost a drug; as Mr. Watts explains, "a person entranced by a book simply forgets to breath."

But with each assertion of literature's sublimity, Mr. Jones makes it sound increasingly pedestrian. "Great Expectations" gives the children "something new to fill [the] hole in our lives." It gives Mr. Watts "permission to change my life." And it literally expands his students' imaginations. "Where are our imaginations?" asks one child. "Out there," answers Mr. Watts, gesturing beyond the schoolhouse walls. "And in here," he says, tapping his head and pausing for dramatic effect as the children obediently swing their heads from one shining source of enlightenment to another.

"Mister Pip" is an ambitious novel that touches on some potent themes — the literary legacy of colonialism, the re-appropriation of literature, the multifarious unexpected effects of violence — with a likeable narrator and a unique story. But Mr. Jones merely brushes against these subjects, preferring instead to return, time and time again, to his lodestar, "Great Expectations," and allowing it to do his work for him.

There are some nice riffs on Dickens's novel: Matilda, like Pip, relates a youthful experience through a wistful older perspective; her broadened knowledge of the world estranges her from the person who raised her; and she even finds herself adrift in a river at the climactic moment of the book. But devotees of Dickens will be let down by Mr. Jones's tribute — any great expectations for "Mister Pip" will be disappointed by its saccharine sentimentality.

Ms. Schama, the former assistant literary editor of the New Republic, last wrote for these pages on "The Sushi Economy."