She lies awake in the small hours. On the bedside table is a Moon Tiger. The Moon Tiger is a green coil that slowly burns all night, repelling mosquitoes, dropping away into lengths of grey ash, its glowing red eye a companion of the hot insect-rasping darkness. She lies there thinking of nothing, simply being, her whole body content. Another inch of the Moon Tiger feathers down into the saucer.
As Claudia Hampton – the records do suggest she was someone, probably – lies in her hospital bed, waiting to succumb to the cancer that has stricken her in old age, she is suddenly seized by the project she should have tackled years earlier: a comprehensive history of the world and her own place in it. As a writer of popular histories, Claudia is a purist for historical fact; but as a lifelong researcher, she also understands that not only is history told by the victors, but that every “fact” is coloured by the person who remembers it; people exist only for as long as someone, somewhere, remembers them; and no one has ever really known her. Claudia decides to take a “kaleidoscopic approach” to her history – shake the tube and see what comes out – and while she does flit between details from the Jurassic to the World Wars and her own domestic past, her narrative more closely resembles the titular Moon Tiger, slowly spiralling down towards the glowing red eye at its centre; the glow of a brief affair that colours everything that came after for her. When Moon Tiger won the Booker in 1987, some reviewers dismissed it as “the housewife's choice”; I can happily claim that this housewife couldn't be more delighted to have discovered Penelope Lively's intelligent and moving story in 2018.
I stood outside some concrete and plate-glass tower-block, picked a handful of eucalyptus leaves from a branch, crushed them in my hand, smelt, and tears came to my eyes. Sixty-seven-year-old Claudia, on a pavement awash with packaged American matrons, crying not in grief but in wonder that nothing is ever lost, that everything can be retrieved, that a lifetime is not linear but instant. That, inside the head, everything happens at once.Moon Tiger examines the nature of memory and history and their relationship to “truth” (especially well done when Claudia is grilling an actor at a Pioneer Village or pointing out the flaws in the Hollywood adaptation of her own work), and I enjoyed every time that Lively would write a scene from Claudia's point-of-view and then immediately recast it from the POV of someone else in the scene – the differences would be subtle, but different nonetheless. As Claudia lies in her hospital bed, in and out of consciousness, we learn what she really thinks of the visitors who come to her bedside – and while Claudia is mentally stressing that none of these visitors know what pain glows red at her centre, these visitors are also thinking their own private thoughts; these familiars are ultimately unknown and unknowable to Claudia, as well. The format – with the slowly doled out details, the recasting of memory through changing POVs, the nonlinear narrative that drives towards a foreshadowed climax – is masterful and clever; hardly domestic chic lit.
It might be easier if I believed in God, but I don't. All I can think, when I hear your voice, is that the past is true, which both appals and uplifts me. I need it; I need you, Gordon, Jasper, Lisa, all of them. And I can only explain this need by extravagance: my history and the world's. Because unless I am a part of everything I am nothing.In addition to the big picture, Claudia lived a very interesting life: Her father died during WWI, leaving her and an older brother – an intimate fiefdom of two – to be raised by a stiff upper-lipped (but curiously oblivious) proper British Mum; Claudia joined the Press Corps during WWII and reported from Cairo (and the scenes of desert warfare and their human effects outshine anything from The English Patient); she had a postwar affair with an aristocratic dandy and kept the child that ensued to raise on her own; she gained fame and riches from her history books; and she spends her end days being dutifully visited by what family she has left. All of the historical details of this most fascinating of times were richly drawn; sprawling and intimate. Claudia herself is a great character: an alluring mix of intelligence and beauty, she has always considered herself better than those around her (equalled only by her beloved brother), and while she comes off as prickly and unlikeable (and especially cruel to her brother's dull wife), when we readers are shown what is hurting at her core, it leads to understanding (if not pity).
This might have been a five star read for me if it didn't compare unfavourably to one of my favourite books (The Stone Angel, with a similar end-of-life history of an unlikeable old woman; but one which shook me emotionally to the core), but that's not to say that I didn't admire and enjoy Moon Tiger; this is an outstanding achievement deserving of its acclaim.
The Moon Tiger is almost entirely burned away now; its green spiral is mirrored by a grey ash spiral in the saucer. The shutters are striped with light; the world has turned again.
