This is by Penelope Lively, who was born in 1933, has not yet died, and is therefore currently 92...

Moon Tiger (which refers not to an animal, but to "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") was published in 1987, and won that year's Booker Prize (it was the third time Lively had been shortlisted).

I listened to the audio-version, which was beautifully narrated by Nicolette McKenzie (with a brief appearance by Thomas Judd).

This was such a good book... Poignant as you listen to it, it's the kind of story that lingers in your mind long afterwards.

We're in the late 1980s. Claudia Hampton, 70-something, and a successful writer of history books (popular, not academic), is dying. When she's not in a morphine-induced blur (during which she loses entire days), her mind is sharp, and she announces her intention to compose a history of the world -- and of herself. Her contention is that we're all so inextricably part of a bigger story, and yet our own story is always going to be -- to us -- the most important story there is: "The history of the world as selected by Claudia: fact and fiction, myth and evidence, images and documents."

Claudia is not, on the face of it, a particularly likeable woman. And yet you sympathize with her -- or I do -- partly because she's a woman ahead of her time, and all her apparent defects are features that men are rarely dissed for possessing. She's thrusting; she's thick-skinned; she's exploitative; she's not particularly maternal, leaving her daughter, Lisa (fathered by Jasper, whom Claudia never wanted to marry) to be brought up by her grandmothers, and never particularly valuing the young woman's choices; she's horribly good at making people feel inferior (Sylvia, her sister-in-law, is a case in point, and that's already a difficult relationship because of the unhealthy closeness that for a while connected Claudia and her brother).

At the core of the story, accounting perhaps for many of her prickly edges, is a tragedy. During World War II, while she was working as a war correspondent in Egypt, Claudia meets Tom, who's serving in a tank regiment. They fall in love. They both start to imagine a very different future for themselves. And then he's killed.


The closest I've ever come to Egypt is Cyprus... The photos are from Salamis, North Cyprus, 2017

Lively herself was born in Cairo, and lived there until she was sent to school in England in 1945. Her descriptions of Egypt are vivid and sensual. That episode, that doomed romance, stands out in the book like the "glowing red eye" of the moon tiger-- and leaves, in its turn, a trail of ash.

At the end of the book, Claudia dies. Her passing is beautifully rendered. Immediately, you miss her, regret that you won't get to hear any more of her sharp but telling observations.

***

There's lots to like about Moon Tiger.

To start with, there's the way it deals with history (Lively studied this subject at Oxford, graduating in 1956). Here's Claudia, musing: "The voice of history, of course, is composite. Many voices; all the voices that have managed to get themselves heard... I shall respect the laws of evidence. Of truth, whatever that may be. But truth is tied to words, to print, to the testimony of the page. Moments shower away; the days of our lives vanish utterly, more insubstantial than if they had been invented. Fiction can seem more enduring than reality... And when you and I talk about history we don't mean what actually happened, do we? The cosmic chaos of everywhere, all time? We mean the tidying up of this into books, the concentration of the benign historical eye upon years and places and persons. History unravels; circumstances, following their natural inclination, prefer to remain ravelled..."

So true...

Claudia became a historian because her history teacher tried to stifle any views that dissented from the narrative the textbook presented. She's not interested in questions: Just copy what's on the board, and make your headings neat. For Claudia, however, "argument, of course, is the whole point of history".

Rohan Maitzen comments: "It's through Claudia that we are directed out into the world of impersonal history: we are shown its events through her eyes and through her ideas about it, as if to remind us that objectivity is always already compromised, that nothing means anything until it is seen, considered, narrated — all of which requires a point of view, a story." Reading Tom's diaries, which come to her at the very end of her life, Claudia ponders: "Unless I am a part of everything I am nothing." Maitzen picks up this thought: "Everything, nothing; a history of the world, a history of one woman -- there’s something vertiginous in the novel’s movements between these extremes, but holding the ideas and the experiences together is always Claudia, because that, after all, is our own way of being in the world and in history."



***

The narrative style is curious -- and, as I experienced the book aurally, I was only peripherally aware of how this worked, and needed John Mullan's comments to set out the detail of what was going on: "Some of Moon Tiger is told in the past tense, and some in the present tense... [It] also alternates narrative voices. The passages in the past tense are narrated in the first person by Claudia as an old woman, looking back on her life. The passages in the present tense are narrated in the third person, though these always include Claudia as one of the actors. The novel shuttles us between times and between viewpoints, but also between tenses... This is the pattern throughout the book. First-person narrative jolts us into present-tense enactment. Experiences are narrated from one viewpoint, then re-narrated from another."

Mullan also interrogates how we interpret the alternative versions of key points. Has Claudia herself created them, making the whole novel "her act of memory"? Or do the different perspectives push themselves autonomously into Claudia's version? Readers are apparently divided on this, although it seems clear that Claudia is NOT privy to all the information we hold (that her daughter has a lover, for example).

Author Taiye Selasi says it was the style of Moon Tiger that empowered her to write her own debut novel: "Bouncing back and forth between past tense to present tense, starting sentences without subjects, ending paragraphs with ellipses, moving from first person subjective to first person omniscient to third person objective and back again was the wildest, freest, most thrilling prose I’d ever read."



***

The book is piercing because it reminds us of our inevitable passing, and the oblivion that threatens even relatively well-known people. "Was she someone?" asks one of Claudia's palliative care nurses: "I mean, the things she comes out with..."

All that's left now are the "myriad Claudias" from her past. Shards, I suppose... The competitive child, the argumentative schoolgirl, the risk-taking war correspondent, the feisty unmarried mother, the successful writer, and the woman whose one true love didn't work out.

As she looks at a photo of Tom, she reflects on their relative trajectories: "I am twice your age. You are young; I am old. You are in some ways unreachable, shut away beyond a glass screen of time; you know nothing of the forty years of history and forty years of my life; you seem innocent, like a person in another century. But you are also, now, a part of me, as immediate and as close as my own other selves, all the Claudias of whom I am composed; I talk to you almost as I would talk to myself."

The book is about loss. And yet, at the same time, nothing is ultimately lost. As this blogger puts it: "Claudia’s life is an accretion of all the experiences and relationships she has had... Those experiences are still with her, have formed her and are still part of her understanding of herself."

It's a strange thing, life. We get just one shot at it, and its end is old age and death. Moon Tiger is a novel that beautifully reminds us that "each man's death diminishes me... Send not to know for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee."



***

But before the inevitable end, we can be fired by Claudia's character. Astringent, demanding, intolerant -- but inspirational, as Moni Mohsin -- who changed her life path after reading this book -- testifies: "Soon after reading Moon Tiger, I chucked my safe little job and leaped into the roil of a young, zealous newspaper. I knew nothing about journalism, but I was suddenly confident that I'd learn. If the process proved painful, so be it. Like Claudia Hampton I was determined to lead my life, not be led by it."

She's far from endearing, our heroine, but she attracts readers, making them feel she's a woman they "yearn to be".

Ultimately, it's not the end that matters.