A Past Revisited and Relived – Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively

Time is undoubtedly linear, but our perception of it is not. And for Claudia Hampton, the principal character of Penelope Lively’s novel, Moon Tiger, time, manifest as her life, is a veritable jumble of memories, unfulfilled ambition, probabilities and denied possibilities. She is confused, at least on the outside, and lying infirm in a nursing property bed. But her mind is alive with a life lived, a life she distils to share with us.

Claudia´s confusion, however, is only an external phenomenon. Internally her memory is sharp, if not ordered. She reminisces on childhood, eager sexual awakening in adolescence, a career as a war correspondent, historian and writer, an affair or two, one extremely special but doomed, an eventual marriage, maturity, parenthood and old age, but not necessarily in that order. Events are assembled and revisited. Along the way there has been death, birth, a miscarriage, disappointment, fulfilment and ambition, seasoned with shakings of passion, hatred, pride and not a small incest. It has been an fascinating life, specially outstanding for the way that Claudia relives it for us.

Claudia’s memories are usually intense. There is an focus to detail that renders her character totally 3 dimensional, four if you consist of time. She has struggled – and continues to do so – with what seems to be a basic lack of really like for her daughter, Lisa, and a deep impatience with her grandchildren. Jasper, her partner, was a thing of a disappointment, but at least a reassuring a single, right after war had dealt cruelly with what she herself had wanted.

Claudia not only recalls but also relives her passion. She has usually been totally free with her affections, but she has only when offered herself entirely. Her recollections of the horrors of war are each raw and stark. There is no heroism right here: heroic deeds possibly, but only when the protagonists impact them by default.

But in a lot of approaches Claudia’s life stopped these years ago in the nineteen forties. What life promised would never ever be realised and what it had generated died ahead of it genuinely came to life. Living has therefore been a compromise that Claudia herself was only partially willing to make. It is into the gaps left by compromise that occasional views of her from another’s perspective add real spice to the narrative.

Moon Tiger is a complex, difficult read. It is so rewarding, even so, that time stands nonetheless whilst you read, but then, at the finish, seems to have flashed by in an instant. The instant, of course, was Claudia’s life. Moon Tiger was a brand of mosquito repellent that Claudia and her lover burned during their brief time together in Egypt. What was left was just a tiny ash.