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Review 44: Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively

Moon Tiger
Claudia Hampton, the star of Penelope Lively’s Moon Tiger, is about as big a shit as you can imagine without actually being a psychopath or criminal. This book, then, is all the more impressive for being able to take such a dislikeable character and reveal the reasons why she is the way she is, and make you empathise and sympathise with her.

Actually, before we get into that, let’s address the stripy lunar elephant in the room: Moon Tiger is a brilliant title for a book. It’s the sort of title I imagine that, when she came up with it, Lively lit a big cigar and swanned around the house for days chuckling to herself. A tiger! From the moon!

Whimsical diversions aside, this book has nothing to do with tigers or the moon, so get that out of your head right now. It’s actually about a woman evaluating the history of the world as it relates to her, and the discovery of the events in her life that developed her personality.

It’s also a book that’s very concerned with the fallibility of perspective, and the difficulty in demonstrating truth. Lively does this very neatly by having the same scene recounted by the different characters involved, so we see that one person remembers a conversation one way, and another remembers it with subtle differences. We have no idea which is accurate, if either. And then Lively scales this up to the example of history as it’s written, to say: if we can’t even accurately portray a conversation that happened yesterday, how can we hope to get to the real truth of what happened thousands of years ago? She does this carefully, sensitively and with great touches of humour.

The core and crux of the book takes place in Egypt in the Second World War. It’s a perspective we don’t tend to see in the UK so much – our war focus tends to be so much on France and Germany, the realism and chaotic terror of the tank campaigns in Africa feels fresh and disorientating.

Ultimately, a lot of the tragedy and pathos of the book comes from this, not just in itself but also as a backdrop to the more personal human tragedies of Claudia.

Moon Tiger covers a lot of ground, as I suppose you’d expect in an unconventional history of the world, that is really just an unconventional history of the author, Claudia. Academia, truth, history, love, incest, parenting – all of these are discussed in a louche and singular style. It gripped me like a wordy vice.

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