Having the Last Word

According to a paperback column in the Daily Telegraph (15 August 1988) I greatly admired Penelope Lively’s Moon Tiger (1987) and thought its closing pages ‘among the most moving I have read in years’. I wasn’t alone; the novel had already won the rather more significant distinction of the Booker Prize the year before, marking the high point of Lively’s much-honoured career in both adult and children’s fiction. So why, given my proclaimed enthusiasm, did I not read another word of hers for more than thirty years? Impossible to explain, though I made good the deficit recently, having spent the first lockdown reading about a dozen of her books in close succession.

I began with her wonderful memoir of old age, Ammonites and Leaping Fish (2013), in which the author notes, ‘The body may decline, may seem a dismal repetition of what went before, but the mind has a healthy continuity, and some kind of inbuilt fidelity to itself, a coherence over time . . .’ Claudia Hampton, heroine-historian of Moon Tiger, is an old woman in decline, dying of stomach cancer in a hospital bed, yet her mind remains as sharp and her temperament as cussed as they were in her prime. ‘I am writing a history of the world’, she announces, and as a maverick of her trade she intends to provoke – to shock. Maybe she can tell it from the point of view of the ‘primordial soup’, of a crustacean, or of an ammonite: ‘An ammonite with a sense of destiny’. Happily for the reader Claudia chooses not to go full Jurassic and instead concentrates upon the life she has lived, and the people she has known and loved – and lost. Moon Tiger still manages to be a work of formal, and formidable, sophistication. It kaleidoscopes personal history, darts from first person to third, hopscotches in and out of time. Scenes are replayed with a different emphasis or in a different voice. Claudia accepts the slippery nature of her project, and will allow others to speak, to give their side of the story – ‘Except that of course I have the last word. The historian’s privilege.’ So she begins in childhood on the Dorset coast fossil-hunting with her brother Gordon, ‘an unkempt, unruly pair’, while on their mother’s dressing table stands a photograph of their father, a fatality of the Somme, ‘picked off by history’. As a narrator she proves to be strong meat: arrogant, abrasive, opinionated, never afraid of being disliked. She believes she has people worked out, like Jasper, her ambitious, selfish lover; her plump, submissive sister-in-law, Sylvia; her only child, Lisa, apparently stolid and disapproving of her flamboyant mother. But in one of the novel’s quicksilver shifts of perspective we find that Lisa isn’t the dull daughter we imagine her to be, that she too has a hinterland unsuspected by the parent. We are mysteries to one another. How else could it be, when the self – ‘the varieties of ourselves’ – is the long, baffling accretion of years spent on earth? The tragicomedy of misunderstanding is strongest here, for in turn Lisa knows nothing of Claudia’s great love Tom, a young tank officer who met his fate in the Western Desert. ‘Very likely she has never loved anyone,’ thinks Lisa. And so we ripple-dissolve to wartime Egypt, where thirtyish Claudia is keen to prove she can do a man’s job, reporting from the front line for a newspaper and then kicking her heels in the unreal society of cosmopolitan Cairo, its jolly parties, swimming-pools and drinks on the terrace a world away from the searing heat and peril of the desert. At night, in ‘the hot insect-rasping darkness’, a green coil known as a Moon Tiger burns away to ash, repelling mosquitoes and measuring out the narrow time Tom and Claudia have together. Penelope Lively (b.1933) spent her childhood in Cairo and acquired intimate knowledge of its sights and sounds, its babble of languages and mongrel textures. Her writing here is saturated in colour, brilliant and eye-poppingly intense as the lovers watch the line of hills on the far side of the Nile ‘go from pink to amber and the water turn a sapphire blue’, in contrast with the ominous colours of the desert where ‘a silver glitter of tracer fire’ or a ‘jewelled explosion of Very lights’ crests the horizon. And more in monochrome: ‘Burned-out vehicles stream grey in the wind, the sky-line erupts with white puffs, a black column towers away to their right where captured enemy ammunition has been blown up.’ So vivid is the conjuring of landscape that Moon Tiger is likely to be recalled as a novel of place – ‘the one about Egypt’ – and yet it also comprises a novel of ideas, principally about the distortions and elisions of history. It celebrates marginal heroes like the Victorian civil engineer William Smith, whose canal excavations through rock highlighted the significance of stratification, and John Aubrey, who as well as writing Brief Lives was a pioneering archaeologist. On her hospital bed Claudia ponders her professional research into the Pilgrim Fathers, the ancient, vanished city of Memphis, Cortez and Montezuma; and then considers the way history again broke upon her own life in the form of Laszlo, a refugee from the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. We are at the mercy of chaos: our understanding of what has gone before can only be elliptical, fragmentary, partial, reflecting the principle on which Lively has put together this jagged mosaic of a narrative. As a historian Claudia has courted offence, mainly for being popular, but it’s in her swagger and self-awareness that she becomes winning. (She would probably have called her memoir I, Claudia.) History in Lively’s fiction is a subject deserving of profound respect; historians, much less so. They tend towards the pompous (Henry Peters in How It All Began), the selfishly aloof (Charles in Family Album), the self-important (Glyn in The Photograph). Perhaps the slimiest exemplar is Maurice in her 1996 novel Heatwave – one of her very best – who writes glib, TV-friendly books about the making of myths. Appropriately enough he’s also an unfaithful husband whose lies to his wife will receive a shocking comeuppance. The character of the slick opportunist, a favourite of Lively’s, is embodied in Moon Tiger by Jasper, the spoilt, egotistical lover who gave Claudia a child and very little else. (Q. D. Leavis once made the point that the name ‘Jasper’ in British fiction usually signifies a cad.) The more complicated figure in Claudia’s life is her brother Gordon; their close, rivalrous relationship – ‘he was my sense of identity, my mirror, my critic’ – shades towards incestuous love. It is the single dramatic sidelight in the book that I found less than convincing. Thirty-four years on Moon Tiger feels a weightier, more intricate novel than I remembered. My admiration for it has deepened, as has my awe at the accomplishment of those closing pages. They constitute a brief front-line diary that evokes so much of the horror of war and, in the mind of one man fighting it, the pathos of duty and endurance and longing. It becomes, at moments, a kind of prayer flung out into the darkness, to his lover waiting back in Cairo:

May she be tolerant and understanding, may she perceive the extravagance into which one is pitched by war, the suspension of ordinary common sense except that aspect of common sense needed for doing what has to be done, for telling other people what to do, for moving a lot of heavy metal around and trying to kill people with it while avoiding being killed oneself. May we, eventually, contemplate all this together.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 78 © Anthony Quinn 2023