ABSTRACT
In Lloyd Jones’s (2008) evocative novel Mister Pip, readers are transported into the mind of Matilda, a young girl whose life of deprivation and danger on a war-torn South Pacifi c island is transformed by the power of fi ction to kindle the imagination and to reimagine the world. In a ruined schoolhouse, the only white person left on the island, Mr. Watts, volunteers to become the children’s teacher. He reads aloud to the children from his favourite book, Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, enticing them to share the adventures of the young orphan Pip. Entranced by the characters and their far-away life in 19th-century London, Matilda is drawn into identifying herself and her own world with the book:
As we progressed through the book something happened to me. At some point I felt myself enter the story. I hadn’t been assigned a partnothing like that; I wasn’t identifi able on the page, but I was there. I was defi nitely there. I knew that orphaned white kid and that small fragile space he squeezed into between his awful sister and lovable Joe Gargery. (Jones, 2008, pp. 46-47)
As the dangers of the civil war increase, and the islanders’ houses and few possessions are burned by soldiers, Mr. Watts encourages the children to retrieve and reimagine the story, keeping their courage and imaginations alive through the horrors around them:
The loss of our houses helped us to understand that what they had kept safe was more than our possessions; our houses had concealed our selves that no one else ever saw when we lay on our sleeping mats at night. Now Mr. Watts had given us another room to lounge around in. The next stage was to furnish it. To that end Mr. Watts announced a special task. We would retrieve Great Expectations. Some of us were
not sure what Mr. Watts meant by the word retrieve. Then it became clear. . . . “Let’s see if we can remember it,” he said. . . . Mr. Watts encouraged us to dream freely. We did not have to remember the story in any order or even as it really happened, but as it came to us. (Jones, 2008, pp. 125-126)
What is it about reading imaginative fi ction that can kindle such powerful emotions, resonances, and imagination? What can we say about the books that demand particular attention, evoke great personal meaning, and produce signifi cant emotional involvement for a reader? Margaret Mackey (2002) suggests: “Attention is shaped by experience and fuelled by affect” (p. 8). Her research with contemporary young readers illuminates how the desire for story remains unabated, even when these readers are immersed in a variety of media and modalities. Following their experiences of approaching a particular text in various media (as a novel, a fi lm, or a computer game), participants in Mackey’s study were asked to name their favourite version of that text. Inevitably, their decisions were based upon the level of individual interest and personal engagement evoked by a particular version.
