by Penelope Lively
There is really little – well, no – point in my reviewing a novel which won the Booker Prize when I was an infant 1987. Needless to say, it has been done (probably better). But why let that stop me? This blog is about books I would recommend and I recommend this one. Perhaps I should stop there. I would, but for the fact I have already written the phrase ‘Booker Prize’ at which, perhaps, you recoil.
Lively’s novel (I’d love at this point to do some weak pun about the book being lively, which it is, but I won’t) is many things which put us less confident (but nonetheless still avid) readers off of Booker Prize winners and nominees. It’s clever; existential; arrogant; uses words I had to look up in a dictionary. But – I loved it.
As its narrator Claudia – the self confessed source of Moon Tiger’s arrogance – lies, aged 76, dying and patronised in a hospital the book subtly highlights the indignity of old age and death, never becoming depressingly entrenched in the issue. Instead it evokes times and places, showing how they’re recalled and forgotten in equal measure. At the start, historian Claudia promises to write ‘a history of the world... and in the process, my own.’ And in 205 pages (at least in my edition) she does. She weaves her own experience as a war correspondent in Cairo in World War Two seamlessly alongside the Hungarian Civil War, the Journals of Cook’s Voyages, the history of the Pyramids and the Cold War. Writing of wars she saw and wars she didn’t, her place and everyone’s in history Claudia delivers a memoir which is both personal and universal, factual and opinionated, funny and moving. Commenting on the power of language she reminds us:
‘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.’
Into Claudia’s narrative enter the voices of her significant others – her brother, lovers, daughter, friends and critics. Predictably, the term critic is not mutually exclusive to each of the others, and each voice offers a different perspective of Claudia, prompting her to observe that:
‘I shall survive – appallingly misrepresented... As a historian, I know only too well that there is nothing I can do about the misrepresentation so I don’t care. Perhaps for those who do, who struggle against it, this is the secular form of hell – to be preserved in forms we do not like in the recollections of others.’
However, while every other narrative has its rightful place in Claudia’s history of the world, it is her witty and lyrical one that resonates long after you’ve put Moon Tiger down. As a history, it is charming. As a novel, it is beautiful. It teaches you, it touches you, it whispers truths you never knew you knew.
