With his rumpled tropical suit and wide-eyed look of perpetual concern, Hugh Laurie's Mr Pip – the only white man on the island – could be a character out of a Conrad novel. But it's 1991 and he has been caught in the midst of a civil war in Bougainville, where he's trying to lighten the spirits of the village children with readings from Dickens' Great Expectations.
This unlikely but beguiling idea was dreamed up by New Zealand novelist Lloyd Jones after he covered the conflict between Papua New Guinea and Bougainville over the closure of Rio Tinto's copper mine in the 1990s. And it gave him a prize-winning novel, which has done more to expose the sufferings that the war inflicted on Bougainville's people than all the reporting done at the time.
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