Moon Tiger
by Penelope Lively
Award: Booker Winner 1987
Nomination: LA Times Finalist 1988
Date Read: February 12, 2022
Claudia Hampton is dying. And in one of the most beautiful books I’ve read in a while, Lively explores the life she lived, the love she gave and the shortcomings of her existence. Treating her with a tenderness and mercy that we all hope will someday apply to us, Lively gives breath to a flawed creature that simply did her best in the circumstances she found herself in.
“We open our mouths and out flow words whose ancestries we do not even know. We are walking lexicons. In a single sentence of idle chatter we preserve Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Norse; we carry a museum inside our heads, each day we commemorate peoples of whom we have never heard. More than that, we speak volumes – our language is the language of everything we have not read.”
Claudia and Gordon, her brother, are rivals from the very beginning. Always trying to outdo one another, they also have a profound love that wanders into incestuous territory for a time. When Claudia informs Gordon she is going to be a journalist, he dismissively tells her that girls can’t be journalists. For Claudia, this becomes a “hold my beer” moment.
She indeed finds herself in Cairo, reporting on the war. She finagles a ride to the desert where the action nearly is, but not quite. While there, her minder Tom attempts to describe what war is like, an almost impossible task. It’s so many things. Boring, uncomfortable, terrifying, exhilarating. In rapid succession… It’s like the whole of life in a single appalling concentration. It does lunatic things with time. An hour can seem like a day or a day like an hour. When you’re flung from one state of mind to another with such speed the physical world takes on an extraordinary clarity.”
Her love affair with Tom blossoms and grows on his random and various leaves and both begin to imagine a future together. As with all the uncertainties of war, the future Claudia and Tom are not to be but a child has been created that Claudia is determined to have on her own. She seeks the help of a Catholic order to deliver her child but she is informed the child was stillborn. I always wondered if that was a line and the child was simply put up for adoption. Lively doesn’t go into this so I am left wondering.
Yet, Claudia already has a child by Jasper, her on again/off again lover. Claudia knew as soon as Lisa was born that she wasn’t the motherly type. Claudia seems chronically disappointed by her. Although she throws enormous amounts of culture Lisa’s way, she realizes one day that Lisa is simply ordinary. She has no innate curiosity that compels her forward. She just wants an uncomplicated life – perhaps a counterpoint to the childhood she experienced.
A Moon Tiger “…is 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.”
Lively has created an absolutely beautiful world here in the midst of tragedy and strife. I can clearly see why she was awarded the Booker for this. Sigh. I almost want to start all over again right now.
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