Jones, Lloyd 1955- (Simon Eliot)

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Jones, Lloyd 1955- (Simon Eliot)

PERSONAL:

Born 1955, in Lower Hutt, New Zealand. Education: Graduated from Victoria University.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Wellington, New Zealand.

CAREER:

Writer.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Katherine Mansfield Memorial fellowship, 1988; Deutz Medal for fiction, Montana New Zealand Book Awards, 2001, for The Book of Fame; 21st Commonwealth Writer's Prize for best overall book, and shortlisted for Man Booker prize for fiction, both 2007, both for Mister Pip; Richard and Judy Best Read of the Year best novel nomination, 2008, for Mister Pip; Scholarship in Letters and other awards.

WRITINGS:

Gilmore's Diary (novel), Hodder and Stoughton (Auckland, NZ), 1985.

Splinter (novel), Hodder and Stoughton (Auckland, NZ), 1988.

Swimming to Australia and Other Stories, Victoria University Press (Wellington, NZ), 1991.

(Editor) Into the Field of Play: New Zealand Writers on the Theme of Sport, Tandem Press (Auckland, NZ), 1992.

Biografi: An Albanian Quest (travel book), Deutsch (London, England), 1993, published as Biografi: A Traveller's Tale, Harcourt (San Diego, CA), 1994.

(With Bruce Foster) Last Saturday (exhibition catalog), Victoria University Press (Wellington, NZ), 1994.

This House Has Three Walls (collection of novellas), Victoria University Press (Wellington, NZ), 1997.

Choo Woo (novel), Victoria University Press (Wellington, NZ), 1998.

The Book of Fame (novel), Penguin Books (New York, NY), 2000.

Here at the End of the World We Learn to Dance (novel), Penguin Books (Auckland, NZ), 2002.

(Author of essay) Barefoot Kings, photographs by John McDermott, Craig Potton Publishing (Nelson, NZ), 2002.

Biography of a Local Palate, Four Winds Press (Wellington, NZ), 2003.

Paint Your Wife, Penguin (Auckland, NZ), 2004.

(Under pseudonym Simon Eliot) Everything You Need to Know about the World, Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin's Griffin (New York, NY), 2007.

Mister Pip (novel), Dial Press (New York, NY), 2007.

Series editor, Montana Estate Essay Series, for Four Winds Press, New Zealand.

ADAPTATIONS:

Biografi: An Albanian Quest was adapted by Al Miller as Matching Shadows with Homer, music by Barbara Truex, produced in Brunswick, ME, 2002; The Book of Fame was adapted by Carl Nixon into a play produced in Wellington, New Zealand, 2003.

SIDELIGHTS:

Lloyd Jones's stories deal with diverse subject matter, sometimes mixing fact and fiction, sometimes telling of commonplace lives disrupted by uncommon events, either horrible or beautiful. Some reviewers have characterized his work as unusual and challenging, and he has won significant honors. An early collection of Jones's short fiction, Swimming to Australia and Other Stories, was shortlisted for the New Zealand Fiction Award, and his novel The Book of Fame received New Zealand's Deutz Medal for fiction. Here at the End of the World We Learn to Dance was a finalist for that same prize. "I have no hesitation in listing Jones among the country's top 10 writers," commented Iain Sharp in a review of the latter book for Auckland, New Zealand's Sunday Star-Times, in which he also praised Jones's "willingness to try something different with each book."

Another landmark in Jones's body of work is Biografi: An Albanian Quest (published in the United States with the subtitle A Traveller's Tale), which "made the literary world sit up," according to Jason Steger in Age. This book finds the author walking "a fine line between fact and fiction," as Simon Garrett put it in the Lancet, and narrates Jones's experiences while traveling in Albania in 1991, shortly after the collapse of communism. The focal point of Biografi is Jones's search for Petar Shapallo, who Jones claims was the designated double of Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha, and who made numerous official appearances in Hoxha's place. According to Jones, Shapallo had given up a dental practice when he was recruited by the Albanian government because of his resemblance to Hoxha; he had plastic surgery to make the resemblance even closer. This life brought Shapallo material comfort but also isolated him. The government kept him in seclusion when he was not impersonating Hoxha; his wife and children were executed, and he was not allowed contact with his remaining family members or friends. When Hoxha died in 1985, Shapallo, well into his seventies, was left jobless and homeless. The communist government made no accommodation for him, and when it fell, Shapallo tried to join in the celebration but was jeered and assaulted by his fellow Albanians for his role in the former regime, with some even thinking him Hoxha's ghost. Jones writes of finding Shapallo in a labor camp after a journey that brought the author close encounters with the poverty and chaos of post-Communist Albania.

Jones's story found both believers and skeptics among reviewers. "If I had not myself witnessed the lengths to which regimes such as Hoxha's are prepared to go to cheat and deceive, I should have been inclined to dismiss Shapallo's story as fanciful, and Jones as naive for believing it," commented A.M. Daniels in the Times Literary Supplement. Hoxha's regime, though, "was surely capable of such an elaborate deception," Daniels wrote. London Sunday Times critic Margarette Driscoll was at first "enthralled by this tale" but later had doubts about Shapallo's authenticity, which she attempted to check, turning up no conclusive proof. Jones has since acknowledged that Shapallo is a character he created. "Defending himself," noted Sharpe in the Sunday Star-Times, "Jones pointed out that it was by no means uncommon for travel writers to include ‘imaginative elements’ in their books." Driscoll, however, maintained that "there are so many real stories of suffering in Albania and countries like it that mixing fact and fiction seems to me to devalue the trauma the country and its people have undergone."

To Washington Post reviewer Dennis Drabelle, who also expressed doubts about Shapallo's existence, Biografi is "essentially a meditation on impersonation" and "a hybrid text with an unsettled relation to reality." He continued: "Yet the book has some good writing to recommend it, and Shapallo is a memorable character trapped in a plight worth exploring. Perhaps this ‘tale’ is best taken as neither truth nor fiction but as an odd new type of performance art." New Statesman and Society contributor Julian Duplain thought the ordinary Albanians whom Jones met had stories that, compared with Shapallo's, were "less grotesque but more revealing" about their country's recent developments. Dealing with the other merits of the book, Duplain wrote: "Jones chucks it all in without sufficient inquiry, confirming rather than explaining the television shorthand," although his book does provide "some strong images of a country suddenly opened up to the world." Daniels, however, called Biografi "travel writing as it should be: with an intellectual and emotional investment in the country which is its subject." A Publishers Weekly reviewer described the book as "a gem: sympathetic and informed, as enlightening as it is entertaining," and New York Times Book Review critic Annette Koback deemed it a work of "remarkable subtlety and assurance."

As with Biografi, historical events figure in The Book of Fame. "Where Biografi just fits into the travel section of your local bookshop, The Book of Fame is deliberately subtitled ‘a novel,’" reported Garrett in the Lancet. The Book of Fame is about a New Zealand rugby team, the All Blacks, that toured Europe and the United States in 1905, losing only one game—the Welsh Test in the United Kingdom—with that one marked by a disputed play. The team's members became heroes to New Zealanders, their performance and international fame a source of pride to a land that was still a British colony, not yet an independent nation. "Through these men," related Gilbert Wong in the New Zealand Herald, "New Zealanders everywhere walked a little taller, a little more confident of their place in the world." Jones tells the men's tale in first-person plural, with the team as a whole, not any individual, narrating the story.

This device allows Jones to show the players coming together "into something greater than the sum of their parts: a team," Garrett related. It also demonstrates, he noted, that they "live on in the imagination of New Zealanders still." The result is a story "about sport's place in the world … about what a team is, and about the relation between this team and nation-building," Garrett concluded. Age contributor Steger called the novel an exploration of "the origin of myth" and "the sense of self New Zealanders have both as individuals and as a nation," written in a style that is "spare and poetic." Wong offered a similar description, saying that despite the author's thorough research on the players and their tour, "what interests Jones is myth creation, what they did, not what they might have said. This is a novel, not history," composed of "terse sentences that … attain the intensity of poetry."

Although Choo Woo is wholly fictional, Jones was inspired to write it after hearing about a real case of child sexual abuse, in which a young girl was impregnated by her father, gave birth in secret, and kept the child hidden for several days. "It made me think how the hell would something like that happen?" Jones told Amy Egan for the Sydney Daily Telegraph. In Jones's book, the abuser of an adolescent girl, Natalie, is not her father but her mother's new boyfriend. The father, Charlie, has maintained a close relationship with Natalie during the couple of years since he and his wife, Vivienne, separated, but he becomes cut off from his daughter after the boyfriend, Ben, comes into their lives. With Vivienne in denial about her lover's true nature, Ben manipulates Natalie into a sexual affair and fathers a child whom the girl calls Choo Woo, after a sex game Ben has played with her. She hides the baby in a nearby vacant house, and it dies a few days after its birth. Natalie is left tormented by guilt, and her parents angered and bewildered at how these events could have taken place.

"Jones's novel has the conviction and untidiness of a case study, rather than the more complex emotional range it has perhaps sought," commented Peter Pierce in the Sydney Morning Herald. Katharine England, writing in the Adelaide Advertiser, thought Jones succeeded "at putting a sinister edge on the everyday, at cataloguing mental cruelty and interpreting a climate which allows abuse to flourish," but found the novel ultimately marred by a "strident, voyeuristic and oddly self-righteous tone." In Australia's Canberra Times, however, Frank O'Shea praised Choo Woo as "visceral in its authenticity" and "a book which will rivet you."

Here at the End of the World We Learn to Dance has a topic that is apparently much lighter, but the story is poignant and bittersweet. It tells of two pairs of lovers who also love the tango. In New Zealand during World War I, piano tuner Paul Schmidt begins a love affair with client Louise Cunningham by teaching her to tango. Paul, who is a target of bigotry because of his German heritage, eventually immigrates to Buenos Aires. Louise follows him, and their love endures for many years, even though he is married to another woman, who is surprised to learn, upon Paul's death, that he has asked to be buried next to Louise. In the book's other love story, set in present-day New Zealand, Paul's granddaughter Rosa, who is in her late thirties, captures the heart of naive college student Lionel, a part-time worker in her restaurant, when she teaches him the tango. He takes the relationship more seriously than she does, a circumstance that in the end forces him to grow up emotionally. Lionel narrates the story, with details of Paul and Louise's affair emerging as Rosa tells them to him. Of the two couples, Jones told Age writer Steger that "the only place they can achieve some sort of intimacy is on the dance floor without raising suspicion."

The novel is "ineffably sad, just like the tango itself, heartbreaking and exhilarating," commented Margie Thomson in the New Zealand Herald. Jones, she said, has managed "to write about music so that the words themselves express its character," using "the form and cadence of tango music" and dealing with "the wistfulness of romance, of love without possession, the poignancy of departure, of leaving and being left, that are among this music's central themes." Sydney Morning Herald critic James Ley praised the book's "artful construction," with a "unifying metaphor in an unspoken language of music and gesture," but he called Jones's character portrayals sometimes "lacklustre," with Paul and Louise less fully realized than Lionel and Rosa. Sharp of the Sunday Star-Times voiced a similar criticism of the characters, concluding, however, that though the novel is "flawed, it's still a great read." Steger thought the book "packs a powerful emotional punch," while Thomson summed it up as "very rich, but never hard work" and "a wonderful, aching tale."

In his award-winning novel Mister Pip, Jones revisits the Papua New Guinea island of Bougainville he had explored as a reporter in the 1990s. At that time, the island was torn by a violent civil war in which Bougainville sought its independence from Papua New Guinea and control over its rich copper mineral resources. Mister Pip is a fictional story of island children and their encounter with Mr. Watts, the last white man living in the area. Because of the violence, teachers have fled from the local village. Mr. Watts agrees to teach the children, but his concept of teaching is, to say the least, idiosyncratic: he only reads to the children from Charles Dickens's novel Great Expectations. "Though the children hope the promised introduction to ‘Mr. Dickens’ will provide anti-malaria tablets, aspirins and kerosene," stated Olivia Laing in the Manchester Guardian, "in Great Expectations they discover something just as vital as medicine and fuel: ‘a bigger piece of the world’ that they can enter at will." "Government troops (known contemptuously as ‘redskins’) and the local boys who have become armed rebels (known as ‘rambos’) pass through the village, sometimes with scary or horrible results," explained New Zealand Listener reviewer Nicholas Reid. "Still Mr. Watts reads. And, in spite of everything, the children are touched and begin to see new imaginative possibilities in their lives. They relate to the orphaned status of Dickens's Pip and to the theme of being uprooted from home." "In the fertile soil of Bougainville," Laing concluded, "Mr. Watts's cultural seed has taken root and flourished."

Soon, however, reality intervenes. "When Matilda writes her beloved Mr. Pip's name on the beach, the ‘redskin’ soldiers find it. Believing he is a real person, they order the villagers to give him up," Delia Falconer stated in the Australian. "Retelling Great Expectations is now a life-or-death matter; a Mister Pip must be found. And so, like a European plant bolting in the tropics, Dickens's reinterpreted and reinvented novel goes feral. When the original book is lost, Watts's students reconstruct their own version, an empowering process." "There are places [in the novel] where it's almost impossible not to fall in love with the main character Matilda, and the way this barely literate teenage girl on a tropical island develops a massive nerd infatuation with our sooty Dickens antihero Pip," declared a reviewer for the Chicago Center for Literature & Photography Web site. "The story definitely has a strong argument to make for such things as the power of imagination—the power it has to bring people together across classes and cultures, to make people less susceptible to fanaticism, to maintain a minimum human dignity and optimism about the world." The book, concluded Anthony Byrt in the New Statesman, "is an intelligent novel that says as much about the power of reading as it does about bloodshed and loss."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Advertiser (Adelaide, Australia), March 13, 1999, Katharine England, "To the Dark Edges of Abuse."

Age (Melbourne, Australia), June 8, 2002, Jason Steger, "A Dance in the Margin," Saturday section, p. 7; May 1, 2004, Olga Lorenzo, review of Paint Your Wife.

Atlantic Monthly, January 1, 2008, review of Mister Pip.

Australian, November 4, 2006, Delia Falconer, "Mister Pip."

Booklist, June 1, 2007, Joanne Wilkinson, review of Mister Pip, p. 37.

Canberra Times, January 31, 1999, Frank O'Shea, "Sad New Zealand Tale of Betrayal and Abuse," p. A18.

Daily Telegraph (Sydney, Australia), January 23, 1999, Amy Egan, "The Enemy Within," p. 120.

Financial Times, July 21, 2007, Carl Wilkinson, review of Mister Pip, p. 40.

Kirkus Reviews, July 1, 2007, review of Mister Pip.

Kliatt, July 1, 2007, Joanna Solomon, review of Everything You Need to Know about the World, p. 44.

Lancet, March 9, 2002, Simon Garrett, "Nation-Building and Rugby," p. 901.

Library Journal, July 1, 2007, Chris Pusateri, review of Mister Pip, p. 78.

Manchester Guardian, July 7, 2007, Olivia Laing, "Pip Pip."

New Statesman, September 10, 1993, Julian Duplain, review of Biografi: An Albanian Quest, p. 40; June 4, 2007, "Hard Times," p. 59.

New Yorker, October 22, 2007, review of Mister Pip, p. 175.

New York Times Book Review, December 4, 1994, Annette Koback, review of Biografi, pp. 13, 50-51.

New Zealand Herald, August 26, 2000, Gilbert Wong, review of The Book of Fame; March 15, 2002, Margie Thomson, review of Here at the End of the World We Learn to Dance.

Publishers Weekly, September 5, 1994, review of Biografi, p. 105; May 28, 2007, review of Mister Pip, p. 37.

School Library Journal, September 1, 2007, Sadie Mattox, review of Everything You Need to Know about the World, p. 217.

Spectator, July 28, 2007, "Pied Piper of Bougainville."

Sunday Star-Times (Auckland, New Zealand), September 1, 1996, Iain Sharp, "Exposing the Authors Who Wing It," p. 5; March 31, 2002, Sharp, review of Here at the End of the World We Learn to Dance, p. 2.

Sunday Times (London, England), September 5, 1993, Margarette Driscoll, "Double Trouble."

Sydney Morning Herald, February 20, 1999, Peter Pierce, "Against the Rules," Spectrum section, p. 9; May 4, 2002, James Ley, "Right on Detail," Spectrum section, p. 12.

Times Literary Supplement, August 6, 1993, A.M. Daniels, "Hoxha's Double," p. 12.

Washington Post, January 2, 1995, Dennis Drabelle, "Adventure in a Land of Illusion," p. D2.