Review of Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively

The novel Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively makes for a suitable companion novel to The Gathering. As it happens, Ms Lively won the Man Booker Prize with this novel. I mention this because the last book I reviewed in these pages, The Gathering by Anne Enright, also won the exact same prize. While the latter won in 2007, the former received her award in 1987, precisely 20 years before. "Moon Tiger" is, in fact, a mosquito repellent and the name refers to a specific type of mosquito coil that was used in Egypt during World War 1 and for some time afterwards. The name was also popularised by Penelope Lively's novel, in which the coil is described as a green, glowing, slow-burning repellent.  We can conclude that the title of the book is a metaphor for the persistence of certain memories and how they, too, are on a slow burn as our flame of life is slowly extinguished. 

Both novels have a lot in common. They are written by fiercely intelligent and intense women. Both novels are told in the first person: we are invited into the mind of an all too frail narrator in the sense that both subscribe to the inevitability of fate and to the sheer chance that life is. Both have to learn to accept the hand of cards they are dealt in life and to play that hand as best they can. Also, we are left in no doubt as to the intellectual ability of both, coupled with a wonderful wisdom only gained by reflecting on years of lived experience.

Lively is a brilliant writer, but not at all as lyrical as Enright. In reading Enright I was bowled over by the intensity of her language, which I felt to be lyrical and poetic in intensity. Lively is more of a prose writer who commands a lot of knowledge from a lot of arenas. Her character, Claudia H., is a writer of history books, a Fleet Street journalist and an ex-WW II war correspondent. She describes what it was like to be brought up in Cairo, Egypt before the Second World War and her knowledge of history and desert warfare is deep and indeed convincing: as well as doing her research with great attention, she could also draw on her own personal experience of growing up in that particular North African country. 

In Enright’s book, we meet the narrator around her fortieth year, 39 years old to be pedantically precise. On the other hand, we meet Claudia H. as she enters a hospital to die. We are brought into this old woman’s mind as she surveys all around her and as she seeks to come to terms with all the periods of her long life - pre-war in Egypt, her relationship with her parents and with her brother Gordon to whom she was always close, her life in Egypt during the Second World War and her period as a War correspondent.  She also describes her relationship with her husband, from whom she had been separated or divorced and her memories of her daughter Lisa and grandchildren. We are left in no doubt that she has been “somebody,” as the nurses who admitted her to the hospital mentioned that one-word description casually to one another. They believe that she has authored books and that she has been quite famous and revered as a good historian and a very good journalist.

Reading Enright reminded me of reading Friedrich Nietzsche because she possesses the same poetic intensity as well as the lack of belief or faith in anything. Then reading Lively reminded me of reading a book by Camus, say The Outsider, because it is far more clinical and scientifically observed and not as caught up in the passions and emotions we associate with strong feelings like grief and loss.

Claudia H’s acknowledgement of the contribution made to her creative work by her “alter ego, understanding little but seeing a great deal.” I like this because it is so Freudian, that is, it acknowledges that oftentimes we know more than we are aware of; that truly our unconscious mind has a huge role to play in our behaviours in life.

Initially, the nurses think that this old bird who has come into the hospital to die is quite simply “off her rocker.” One of the first things she says to them is: “I’m writing a history of the world… I may as well - no more nit-picking stuff about Napoleon, Tito, the battle of Edgehill, Hernando Cortez…The works this time. The whole triumphant murderous unstoppable chute - from the mud to the stars, universal and particular, your story and mine… eclecticism has always been my hallmark…” (p. 1)

Claudia is an ambitious woman, years before her time, one of the first female war correspondents. She is also university educated and possesses a fine mind. She is somewhat cocky and almost too sure of herself at times, but she wins us over by her honesty and sincerity. We intuitively pick up that she is no phoney at all: while she may be strong-willed, she is also compassionate, as witnessed by her treatment of her “newly adopted” son from Hungary, called Laszlo.

Eclecticism is the hallmark of Claudia Hampton’s work, we are informed. (She is called Claudia H. afterwards in the novel.  Being called by her first name and only the initial letter of her second name adds a certain mystique and refinement to her character.) As she lies on her deathbed in the hospital, she muses on the meaning of history and tries to come up with her own philosophy thereof. Here she is musing on this philosophy:

“The question is, shall it or shall it not be a linear history? I’ve always thought a kaleidoscopic view might be an interesting heresy. Shake the tube and see what comes out. Chronology irritates me. There is no chronology inside my head. I am composed of a myriad Claudias who spin and mix and part like sparks of sunlight on water. The pack of cards which I carry around is forever shuffled and reshuffled; there is no sequence, everything happens at once.” (p. 2)

No wonder the nurses think this complex old woman is silly or senile. However, she is far from it. She is merely, in the current bawdy terminology or new cliché, “getting her shit together” before as Shakespeare puts it she “shuffles off this mortal coil.” This old bird would have liked that quotation mixed in with her thoughts, I should imagine.

She muses on the Big bang Theory, the Theory of Evolution, Darwin, fossil hunting with her brother Gordon, the inevitability of wars, Chaos Theory, Illnesses, Cancer of the gut from which she’s dying, Greek mythology which she loves especially the Fates in whom she delights for the fact that they were all women.

Lively appeals to me because her Claudia H believes that she has many selves. Distant echoes of Freud here, and most certainly closer echoes of Carl Gustave Jung. These psychiatrists and analysts certainly considered the theory of the possibility of several selves which go to make up our person, self, soul, or psyche - call it what you will. Sub-selves, I believe, Jung called them. Well done, Ms Lively, you are not only widely read but also very insightful into human nature and the human predicament. This latter, I think, is also a hallmark of all great literature: it always has something meaningful to say about the human condition.

The plot of this novel is simple enough, and this belies its great richness and complexity. On the surface it deals with how an old lady faces death; with how an accomplished writer faces death; with how she makes sense of the whole enterprise we humans call life; with her origins, her family, her husband and her daughter and her quasi-adopted son and then in the final lines we have her extinction or death all described clinically. Lively is, at heart, a cold scientist and clinical observer of life. She writes a dispassionate prose. However, it is only with her wartime lover Tom that she becomes in any way passionate in her writing. However, even this, too, is observed and observing. At the end, we are allowed to read entries in her wartime lover Tom’s diary and this, too, is coolly observed with hints of passion here and there as Tom thinks about Claudia. We read this diary through the eyes of the narrator at the end of the novel.

All in all, a brilliant achievement. There is much in this novel that makes one think, from the various scientific theories of our origins to the meaning of life and the philosophy of history itself. This is a thinking person's book. It reminds me in parts of the Russians, say the novels by Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky, and certainly the novels of Aldous Huxley. I enjoy such novels as they make the reader think, and that I believe is one of the most important tasks of all decent literature worth its name.

In short, this is a very clever book, provoking deep and questioning thought.  It is also evocative of times past and of other places unknown to the reader, and all this is told in hauntingly beautiful, if somewhat clinical prose.  Penelope Lively is still alive and kicking at the age of 92 and even has her own webpage here: P.L.