Skip to main content

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.

--

This is my forty-fourth book review of 100 to raise money for Refuge, the domestic abuse charity. If you liked this review, or just want to help out, please donate on the link below!

JustGiving - Sponsor me now!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Review 34: The Long Song by Andrea Levy

I’ve read a few books dealing with black slavery as part of this challenge. It’s interesting how each one looks at it through a slightly different lens, adding slightly different perspectives to the whole picture. In The Long Song , the thing that rings as much through the book as the horror and inhumanity of slavery is the sense of humour between the slaves themselves. It felt odd to laugh out loud while reading this, but there are plenty of times I did. I guess that this in itself is important – humour is an essential and universal human trait, so if we deny the slaves’ humour in recounting their stories, maybe it’s another way of denying their humanity all over again. I tried rewriting this about five times to make me sound less like a pseudo-intellectual jerksack, but this is the best I could do, I’m afraid. Anyway, TLS is set in a Jamaican sugar plantation in the early 19th century, and spans the periods just before and after slavery was abolished in the British Empir...

Review 9: The Portable Veblen by Elizabeth McKenzie

The Portable Veblen is an odd read, and possibly not in the ways you’d expect. Picking it up, I assumed it was some sort of sci-fi or magic realist novel. Was a Veblen some sort of futuristic gun? A translation device? A highly treatable but somewhat embarrassing rash? In fact, as with so much in this world, it really only serves to highlight my troglodyte-level ignorance. Apparently Veblen is a reference to Thorstein Veblen, a Norwegian socialist and sociologist living in America in the late 1800s. He essentially decried capitalism and proposed an alternative system to Marxism, and it is after this prominent thinker that TPV ’s main character, Veblen, is named. For me, the novel is really about contradictions between people and between families as they try to adjust from being purely individual to being part of a wider group. How do you decide what to compromise on and what to retain? What is an unhealthy hangover from your upbringing and what is a genuinely core part of ...

Review 25: With the End in Mind: Dying, Death, and Wisdom in an Age of Denial by Dr. Kathryn Mannix

There’s not much more predictable than death. Not the exact nature of anyone’s death, but the fact that we’re all going to hit the doom saloon at one point or another. And yet we fear it; avoid preparing for it; create unhelpful taboos around it. On a scale of dopey things to do, this ranks right up there with Morris dancing. This is one of the key messages of Dr. Kathryn Mannix’s With the End in Mind . Through a number of examples from her time working in palliative care, she explores what death really looks like and how to come to terms with it in an age increasingly concerned with preserving life at all costs. There are some genuinely moving points in the book, but for me none was more so than the first time she watches a consultant describe the dying process to a woman with a terminal condition, who is scared of the pain and loss of dignity she believes it to include. Mannix carefully recounts the process for us to benefit from too: gradually increasing tiredness, regular cycl...