Moon Tiger
by Penelope Lively
Summary
Claudia Hampton is dying in a hospital bed, and the nurses have decided she is a confused old woman. She was a war correspondent, a popular historian and a person of considerable ferocity, and she announces on the first page that she is going to write a history of the world, with herself in it.
What follows is not chronological and not reliable. Claudia gives you an episode, then gives it again from her brother's view, or her daughter's, or her lover's, and the versions do not match. She is vain, dismissive of her daughter, contemptuous of her brother's wife, and entirely honest about none of it.
At the centre is Cairo in 1942, with Rommel advancing and the city full of correspondents, and a tank officer named Tom Southern. What happened there is the thing the whole book circles and the reason the rest of her life has the shape it does.
The moon tiger of the title is a coil of mosquito repellent that burns through the night and collapses into ash, which tells you what Lively is doing.
It is short, formally clever without being difficult, and much sharper than its quiet reputation. Best for readers who like a strong unlikeable narrator and do not need to be told what to think about her.
At around two hundred pages it can be read in a sitting, and it rewards a second one immediately, since the repeated episodes only reveal their disagreements once you know where the book is going.
Historical Context & Significance
Moon Tiger won the Booker Prize in 1987. Penelope Lively had been shortlisted twice before, for The Road to Lichfield and According to Mark, and she had established herself first as a children's writer, winning the Carnegie Medal before turning to adult fiction.
The novel is frequently described as among the prize's most underrated winners, partly because 1987 was a strong year and partly because Lively's careful, unshowy manner has never generated much noise.
Its handling of memory as something plural and contested, rather than a record to be recovered, put it well ahead of a fashion that arrived properly in the following decade. Lively continued publishing into her nineties and was made a Dame in 2012, having by then produced more than twenty novels alongside the children's books that began her career.