Moon Tiger

Author - Penelope Lively ... [Goo?] [Posters]

This Paperback Book item from Grove Press was reviewed on 7-Nov-2008.

Search ISBN:0802135331 offer from Abebooks or used books from Alibris. Moon Tiger Reference Book. Classifications : Lively, Penelope ( L ) Authors, A-Z Literature & Fiction Subjects Books Contemporary Literature & Fiction Subjects Books Literary Literature & Fiction Subjects Books General AAS Literature & Fiction S . Click the following link to view the cover of Moon Tiger.

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1) Paperback Book Moon Tiger by Grove Press. Winner of the 1987 Booker Prize, Penelope Lively´s Moon Tiger is a contemporary pitch-perfect crafted novel that reverberates around the dying Claudia Hampton, a best selling author of popular history. Dying from cancer in a London hospital, she is forced into the cell of her bed, but while her body is severly restricted, her soul and consciousness are free, far from the repression of illness and medicinal injections. With that freedom, the independent Claudia takes a journey unlike any that she has taken previously; it is a journey into her inner self, into the treasure trove of her mind where all the experiences and memories of her earlier life are vaulted. And it is with that that she decides to write or convey an oral history to herself in the hopes of untangling the vast assortment of questions that accrue over a life span of how and why a person does the questionable things that they chose to do. She is, in essence, forced to go back in time and face her own Judgement. In the novel she confronts failed love (the character of Jasper), lost love (the tank commander Tom), a daughter with nothing in common (Lisa), to a plethora of other matters, both great and small. Moon Tiger is a good read, powerful in its evocation of the past through the kaleidoscopic memories of a dying soul. It is a work of fiction where the tapestry of memories becomes the art form, and the keeper of those memories becomes the artist. How true for us all.¤

2) Paperback Book Moon Tiger by Grove Press. Nearing the end of her illustrious life, Claudia Hampton decides that her final work as a historian should be to write the history of the entire world. While she may not achieve this lofty goal, Claudia succeeds in providing the history of her own life. Lively uses her narrator´s profession to great advantage, and the novel is comprised of Claudia´s ruminations on her past told in the first person, as well as glimpses of her experiences told in third person. Her philosophies about history--which permit both anachronisms and fictionalization--dictate the manner in which her life story unfolds. Claudia informs us, "I´ve always thought a kaleidoscopic view might be an interesting heresy. Shake the tube and see what comes out. Chronology irritates me." Her other assessment, that she is "a myriad Claudias who spin and mix and part like sparks of sunlight on water," also provides the framework for which the story will be told, and is representative of the poetic tone Lively uses throughout the novel.

The majority of the novel recounts Claudia´s experiences as a journalist in Egypt during World War II, where she engages in a fondly-remembered romance with a soldier named Tom. With the exception of the unusually close bond she shares with her brother Gorden, most of the other events and interactions in Claudia´s life--however exciting and life-altering--pale in comparison to her love for Tom. Her relationship with her daughter, Lisa, is strained, probably because two of Claudia´s most admirable traits--professional ambition and wanderlust--result in frequent absences from the child´s life. Although her relationship with Jasper, Lisa´s father, is amicable and provides one of the few constants in Claudia´s life, it lacks the intensity she feels with Tom. As her life draws to an end, Claudia considers the separateness of the past and present, while not discounting the former´s everlasting influence.

While the temporal and narrative shifts are initially confusing, they work well within the greater concept of the novel, and it is interesting to watch Claudia´s life unfold from the "kaleidoscopic" view. Occasionally, a scene narrated by Claudia will then be told in the third person, with slightly different details, adhering to the notion that history is never free of fiction. Lively´s narrator is witty and amusing, albeit distant and abrasive to those around her. She´s seldom apologetic or regretful which, strangely, seems to make her more likable. Claudia does not try to drive people away for the sake of being icy or vindictive, it is simply part of her nature to give precedence to her own pursuits. (As I was reading, Katharine Hepburn came to mind. Claudia would have been right at home in Hepburn´s repertoire of unconventional, fiercely independent wartime heroines.)¤

3) Paperback Book Moon Tiger by Grove Press. Thoroughly enjoyable. Claudia Hampton, a popular historian, lies dying in her hospital bed contemplating a tongue-in-cheek "History of the World." But what mainly emerges are memories of her own life, more vivid for her and the reader than the friends and relatives who visit from time to time. One theme dominates: her time in Egypt as a war correspondent in the 1940s and the great love of her life whom she met and lost there. Here, the writing is superb, with a compelling emotional immediacy and magnificent sense of place.* But interesting though the rest of Claudia´s life is, it tends to pale beside these central chapters, hence the reluctant absence of the fifth star.

It also sets me wondering about the shape of the book as a whole. I have now read three of Penelope Lively´s novels: her latest, CONSEQUENCES (2007); THE PHOTOGRAPH (2003), which I consider the best of the three; and this one, MOON TIGER, which won her the Booker Prize in 1987. All three are essentially romances. All feature independent women doing interesting jobs (writers, artists, academics). Despite their personal independence, the women are shown within the dynamics of families, in relation to a mother, a daughter, or (here especially) a brother -- only very occasionally a husband. Claudia, for example, is unmarried, but we hear of at least three men whom she has loved in different ways. She has a daughter, Lisa, who understands as little of her mother as she does of her; almost of equal significance to Claudia are her first baby lost in a miscarriage, and a Hungarian refugee whom she unofficially adopted. The family ties here vary from the almost meaningless to bonds so strong that they distort all other relationships. Lively´s characters mostly forego the support of conventional values and religion; their main defence against the arbitrariness of fate is a strong sense of their own identity, and a very few special connections with others. Claudia protests that she is no feminist, but there she is wrong; Lively´s books all come through as an exhilarating manifesto of the feminist spirit.

Lively´s success resides less in her stories than in the way she tells them. I think the reason that I liked CONSEQUENCES less, despite the attractiveness of all its characters, was that the narrative began at the beginning and continued to the end. THE PHOTOGRAPH, conversely, begins at the end (with the discovery of a photograph of a dead woman) and works back to the beginning. MOON TIGER also begins at the end, but its action jumps around in much the way that memory does. It also has the delightful trick of occasionally describing the same event from two different points of view in quick succession. Besides, Claudia is so intelligent a companion and her History of the World notion is so amusingly bizarre that what might seem a depressing situation (an old lady dying of cancer, for heaven´s sake) turns out to be full to the brim with life, love, and even laughter.

*[I came to this directly after reading two other works set at least partly in Egypt, Lawrence Durrell´s ALEXANDRIA QUARTET and Michael Ondaatje´s ENGLISH PATIENT. Lively´s style is the most down to earth of the three, but no less vivid.]¤

4) Paperback Book Moon Tiger by Grove Press. "Moon Tiger" was my introduction to Penelope Lively´s books, and I was delighted to read such a beautifully crafted book with stunningly alive characters. Simply fantastic.¤

5) Paperback Book Moon Tiger by Grove Press. Claudia looks back on her life as she lies dying in a hospital bed. Hardly an original concept, and in fact this would be an ordinary book, except for the writing, which is terrific. Lively proves equally fine in describing a trip behind British front lines in the North African desert, and a walk in the woods by a mother and her young child. The novel is rather unusual in that while it is almost entirely written in Claudia´s voice, it occasionally, and briefly, employs the voice of her daughter and others - very effectively. Claudia is a very successful historian, yet her own daughter´s inner life is as obscure to her as the inner lives of the figures she writes about. I enjoyed the romantic aspect of Claudia´s tale, the lover who is killed in battle and whom "she mourns for the rest of her life" as one reviewer put it, but I do not believe this is what made the novel worthy of the Booker prize.¤

6) Paperback Book Moon Tiger by Grove Press. The last thoughts of a dying writer are captured in this intelligent novel by Booker Prize-winner Penelope Lively. The moving and poignant story of life as a writer, historian, and mother ends as a saga of unfufilled love.¤

Page Updated: Robert N. Goolsby, 5-Dec-2008, 08021353319780802135339, 570-210-850-310-900-IWB-GYB-0UB-8

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