Mister Pip, by Lloyd Jones

Perhaps the most famous example of what might be called the Dickensian afterlife comes at the end of Evelyn Waugh's A Handful of Dust (1934). Here a British explorer, rescued from the Amazonian jungle, is held prisoner by the illiterate Mr Todd, who supplies food in return for a daily dose of one of Dickens's novels. To Waugh, Bleak House and Dombey and Son are a technical device to drive on the plot. In Mister Pip, Lloyd Jones uses Great Expectations to underpin the destiny of an entire community.

Bougainville, where this devious meta-fiction takes place, is a South Pacific island plunged into decline in the dismal early 1990s. The white men have left with the closure of the local mine. Gunfire from an ongoing civil war between the "redskins" of the government forces and jungle-crawling insurrectionists ("rambos") features on the daily soundtrack. A single white man survives – enigmatic, linen-suited Mr Watts, known to the villagers as "Pop Eye", who can sometimes be seen pushing his trolley-bound wife along the beach.

All this is quietly observed by a teenager called Matilda Laimo, whose father jumped ship for "Townville" (Australia) four years back, along with his temperamental failings. Each of the underlying tensions that were built up in the opening chapters – personal, communal and political – is brought into focus by Mr Watts's decision to reopen the school as a venue for daily readings of a book that begins: "My father's family name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip."

Very soon, the storytelling sessions are both bulked out by older relatives, bidden by Mr Watts to impart cooking tips or local lore, and undermined by conflict. One strand of dissent involves pious Mr Laimo, who regards Mr Watts as godless. Much more serious is the arrival of a detachment of redskins wanting information about "Mr Pip". The book, which Mrs Laimo has quietly concealed in her absent husband's sleeping mat, gets incinerated in a punitive trashing of the village.

Imperceptibly, what began life as a hymn to the redemptive power of literature turns into a sinister and bloody account of life on the Third World garbage truck. By the time that Mr Watts sits down to re-create the novel to an audience of villagers and fascinated "rambos", its horizons seem to have expanded to include the nature of storytelling, the landscapes of memory and a great deal else besides.

The coda of the tale, in which a globe-trotting adult Matilda clocks Mr Watts for a shabby fantasist and finds that Satis House has been converted into an apartment block, is in some ways even more of a corrective than the brutality that precedes it. If Mister Pip has one faint blemish, it is that some of its imaginative connections are overstated. We know what Matilda has gained from an exposure to Dickens: further comment can be superfluous. Rarely, though, can any novel have combined charm, horror and uplift in quite such superabundance.

DJ Taylor's 'Bright Young People' is published by Chatto in October

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