Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively
Named after a brand of mosquito coil used in Egypt during WWII, Penelope Lively’s novel reveals the heart and mind of historian Claudia Hampton, now an old woman in a hospital bed as she reflects on how we are mentally imprisoned in the era we inhabit. Her own father “died on the Somme, picked off by history,” and she has learned that “the unexpected lies waiting, grinning from around corners.” Trapped as we are in our historic context, “fiction can seem more enduring,” and mythology, with it’s form, logic and internal message, is “much better stuff than history.”
Claudia has always asked uncomfortable questions, often She remembers how at fourteen, “all guile and innocence” she asked her teacher why it was good to learn about history. Far from satisfying her, the bland reply that it will “help her understand why England became a great nation,” awakens a ravenous fascination with the past.
Thinking about her parents, brother and daughter, she observes how “we all scrutinize our childhoods, go about the interesting business of apportioning blame.” Yet as adults, we are incapable of remembering who we were as children, who “inhabit not our world but a world we have lost and can never recover.”
Remembering her lovers, she ponders decision making and destiny. Destiny involves miraculous connections. During the North American fur trade, “The price of beaver on the London market determined the value of wampum.” How “agreeably bizarre” that “a hat worn under a rainy Middlesex sky should be a matter of life and death for sea-shells creeping in the shallows of Cape Cod,” the source of wampum. We “all act as hinges — fortuitous links between other people.”
Claudia is a writer, and momentarily forgetting a common word inspires her to marvel at how each time we open our mouths, “out flow words whose ancestries we do not even know.” Yet “in a single sentence of idle chatter, we preserve Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Norse…each day we commemorate peoples of whom we have never heard…our language is the language of everything we have not read.,” and “words are more durable than everything.”
A survivor of WWII who spent four years in Egypt as a war correspondent, the old woman accepts that almost nobody remembers any of that. In the end, observing that “It might be easier if I believed in God,” Claudia reflects how much she needs the people who have been closest to her because “unless I am a part of everything, I am nothing.” Before this flamboyant woman burns out like a comet in death, she feels the need to face her flaws and reflect on her life and times. Poetic, humorous, and tragic by turns, this evocative novel is a meditation on the transitory nature of life.