Moon Tiger Read online

  MOON TIGER

  PENELOPE LIVELY grew up in Egypt but settled in England after the war and took a degree in history at St Anne’s College, Oxford. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and a member of PEN and the Society of Authors. She was married to the late Professor Jack Lively, has a daughter, a son and four grandchildren, and lives in London. Penelope Lively is the author of many prize-winning novels and short-story collections for both adults and children. She has twice been shortlisted for the Booker Prize; once in 1977 for her first novel, The Road to Lichfield, and again in 1994 for According to Mark. She later won the 1987 Booker Prize for her highly acclaimed novel Moon Tiger. Her other books include Cleopatra’s Sister, Beyond the Blue Mountains, a collection of short stories; Oleander, Jacaranda, a memoir of her childhood days in Egypt; Spiderweb; A House Unlocked, a second autobiographical work; and Heatwave. Penelope Lively has also written radio and television scripts and has acted as presenter for a BBC Radio 4 programme on children’s literature. She is a popular writer for children and has won both the Carnegie Medal and the Whitbread Award. She was appointed CBE in the 2001 New Year’s Honours list.

  ANTHONY THWAITE has published fourteen books of poems, including a selection in the first series of Penguin Modern Poets (1970) and, most recently, A Move in the Weather (2003, reprinted 2004). He has taught in universities in Japan, Libya, England and the United States, worked as a BBC radio producer and in publishing, was the literary editor of The Listener and New Statesman, and co-editor of Encounter. He is married to the biographer Ann Thwaite, and lives in Norfolk. In 1990 he received an OBE for services to poetry.

  PENELOPE LIVELY

  Moon Tiger

  with an introduction by ANTHONY THWAITE

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  First published by André Deutsch Ltd 1987

  Published in Penguin Books 1988

  Published in Penguin Classics 2006

  3

  Copyright © Penelope Lively, 1987

  Introduction copyright © Anthony Thwaite, 2006

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  ISBN: 978-0-14-190271-5

  Introduction

  ‘I’m writing a history of the world… And in the process, my own’. The very first page of Moon Tiger contains these peremptory, stark, even one might say arrogant words. They are spoken by Claudia Hampton, who reveals herself, and is revealed, as clever, outspoken, uncomfortable.

  As the book begins, this central character is seen as old, ill, lying in hospital, gently condescended to by the nurse at her bedside. Quickly Claudia takes on a voice, indeed becomes the book’s chief character. But as she reviews her life as a paradigm of human history, she does so in a shifting, kaleidoscopic pattern of ‘voices’ – voices from her own past and present, who are allowed (through Penelope Lively’s extraordinarily original but never pressingly ‘experimental’ range of techniques) to make their own presences felt, their own separate points of view clear.

  There is her gentle mother, ‘retired from history’; her father, killed on the Somme, unknown to her; her brother Gordon, to whom she has sometimes been frighteningly close; Sylvia, Jasper, Lisa… As the presences accumulate, they sometimes tease Claudia, in her ill exhaustion, by becoming blurred on the edge of her mind, just as language can abandon her. She forgets the word ‘curtain’, and then:

  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. Shakespeare and the Authorised Version surface in supermarkets, on buses, chatter on radio and television. I find this miraculous. I never cease to wonder at it. That words are more durable than anything, that they blow with the wind, hibernate and reawaken, shelter parasitic on the most unlikely hosts, survive and survive and survive. (pp. 41–42)

  Lively makes Claudia of an earlier generation than her own (born 1910, not 1933): ‘I’ve grown old with the century; there’s not much left of either of us. The century of wars. All history, of course, is the history of wars, but this hundred years has excelled itself’. Claudia’s memory re-creates wartime North Africa in which she was a war correspondent in Egypt during the Rommel campaign of 1942. This central part of the novel’s story is an impressive blend of evocative memory and highly intelligent research. Lively uses her own childhood memories of Egypt and weaves them into the mass of material (letters, journals, film, official records) on which she worked at the Imperial War Museum and elsewhere.

  The love story of Claudia and Tom Southern, a young tank commander in the Western Desert, is at the heart of the novel, as is the image conjured up by the title: Moon Tiger, the brand-name of the coil of mosquito repellent, burning on the bedside table by Claudia and Tom during their passionate nights together, then leaving a cylinder of ash – ‘memory and desire’, as T. S. Eliot put it. But Claudia’s later relationships are important too: Jasper the charming F.O. diplomat, their conventional child Lisa with whom she finds distressingly little in common, Laszlo the Hungarian student who is bidden to find in Claudia’s bureau drawer the packet that contains Tom Southern’s final diary… All these, and others, are cunningly set into the complex of mosaic of Claudia’s (or Lively’s) design. Flashbacks and contrasting points of view are used as brilliant – and seldom bewildering – tactics. Along with these go the varied and individual voices of Lively’s characters.

  Moon Tiger was Penelope Lively’s seventh novel for adults. (She had already established a high reputation as a writer for children.) Its early reviews in 1987 were warm and appreciative; but it was an unforeseen triumph when it won the Booker Prize that year, competing with a strong short list – novels by Chinua Achebe, Peter Ackroyd, Nina Bawden, Brian Moore and Iris Murdoch. (Totally excluded that year were books by William Boyd, Bruce Chatwin, Ian McEwan and V. S. Naipaul.) The Booker marked the recognition in both critical and large-scale public terms of a notable talent that had been building up a devoted readership for the fifteen or so years leading up to it.

  There has, perhaps, been a conventional view of Lively’s fiction, held by some people who have read it carelessly, or not
at all, that it is indeed ‘conventional’: middlebrow, undemanding, even cosy, and primarily intended for women. This is a travesty of the truth; and of all her many adult novels (including seven published since Moon Tiger), it is Moon Tiger that most radically and most successfully exemplifies her astringent and powerful flavour.

  Anthony Thwaite

  Acknowledgements

  I am grateful to Tim Tindall and to Andrew Wilson for correcting me on military matters.

  For material on the desert war I acknowledge the help of Alan Moorehead, African Trilogy; Barrie Pitt, The Crucible of War; Correlli Barnett, The Desert Generals; Keith Douglas, Alamein to Zem Zem; Cyril Joly, Take These Men; and the photographic, film and art archives of the Imperial War Museum.

  I was born in Cairo and spent my childhood there during the war. I have also to acknowledge the contribution of that alter ego, understanding little but seeing a great deal.

  1

  ‘I’m writing a history of the world,’ she says. And the hands of the nurse are arrested for a moment; she looks down at this old woman, this old ill woman. ‘Well, my goodness,’ the nurse says. ‘That’s quite a thing to be doing, isn’t it?’ And then she becomes busy again, she heaves and tucks and smooths – ‘Upsy a bit, dear, that’s a good girl – then we’ll get you a cup of tea.’

  A history of the world. To round things off. I may as well – no more nit-picking stuff about Napoleon, Tito, the battle of Edgehill, Hernando Cortez… The works, this time. The whole triumphant murderous unstoppable chute – from the mud to the stars, universal and particular, your story and mine. I’m equipped, I consider; eclecticism has always been my hallmark. That’s what they’ve said, though it has been given other names. Claudia Hampton’s range is ambitious, some might say imprudent: my enemies. Miss Hampton’s bold conceptual sweep: my friends.

  A history of the world, yes. And in the process, my own. The Life and Times of Claudia H. The bit of the twentieth century to which I’ve been shackled, willy-nilly, like it or not. Let me contemplate myself within my context: everything and nothing. The history of the world as selected by Claudia: fact and fiction, myth and evidence, images and documents.

  ‘Was she someone?’ enquires the nurse. Her shoes squeak on the shiny floor; the doctor’s shoes crunch. ‘I mean, the things she comes out with…’ And the doctor glances at his notes and says that yes, she does seem to have been someone, evidently she’s written books and newspaper articles and… um… been in the Middle East at one time… typhoid, malaria… unmarried (one miscarriage, one child he sees but does not say)… yes, the records do suggest she was someone, probably.

  There are plenty who would point to it as a typical presumption to align my own life with the history of the world. Let them. I’ve always had my followers, also. My readers know the story, of course. They know the general tendency. They know how it goes. I shall omit the narrative. What I shall do is flesh it out; give it life and colour, add the screams and the rhetoric. Oh, I shan’t spare them a thing. The question is, shall it or shall it not be linear history? I’ve always thought a kaleidoscopic view might be an interesting heresy. Shake the tube and see what comes out. Chronology irritates me. There is no chronology inside my head. I am composed of a myriad Claudias who spin and mix and part like sparks of sunlight on water. The pack of cards I carry around is forever shuffled and re-shuffled; there is no sequence, everything happens at once. The machines of the new technology, I understand, perform in much the same way: all knowledge is stored, to be summoned up at the flick of a key. They sound, in theory, more efficient. Some of my keys don’t work; others demand pass-words, codes, random unlocking sequences. The collective past, curiously, provides these. It is public property, but it is also deeply private. We all look differently at it. My Victorians are not your Victorians. My seventeenth century is not yours. The voice of John Aubrey, of Darwin, of whoever you like, speaks in one tone to me, in another to you. The signals of my own past come from the received past. The lives of others slot into my own life: I, me, Claudia H.

  Self-centred? Probably. Aren’t we all? Why is it a term of accusation? That is what it was when I was a child. I was considered difficult. Impossible, indeed, was the word sometimes used. I didn’t think I was impossible at all; it was mother and nurse who were impossible, with their injunctions and their warnings, their obsessions with milk puddings and curled hair and their terror of all that was inviting about the natural world – high trees and deeper water and the texture of wet grass on bare feet, the allure of mud and snow and fire. I always ached – burned – to go higher and faster and further. They admonished; I disobeyed.

  Gordon, too. My brother Gordon. We were birds of a feather.

  My beginnings; the universal beginning. From the mud to the stars, I said. So… the primordial soup. Now since I have never been a conventional historian, never the expected archetypal chronicler, never like that dried-up bone of a woman who taught me about the Papacy at Oxford time out of mind ago, since I’m known for my maverick line, since I’ve infuriated more colleagues than you’ve had hot dinners, we’ll set out to shock. Tell it from the point of view of the soup, maybe? Have one of those drifting floating feathery crustaceans narrate. Or an ammonite? Yes, an ammonite, I think. An ammonite with a sense of destiny. A spokesperson for the streaming Jurassic seas, to tell it how it was.

  But here the kaleidoscope shakes. The Palaeolithic, for me, is just one shake of the pattern away from the nineteenth century – which first effectively noticed it, noticed upon what they were walking. Who could not be attracted to those majestic figures, striding about beaches and hillsides, overdressed and bewhiskered, pondering immensities? Poor misguided Philip Gosse, Hugh Miller and Lyell and Darwin himself. There seems a natural affinity between frock coats and beards and the resonances of the rocks – Mesozoic and Triassic, oolite and lias, Cornbrash and Greensand.

  But Gordon and I, aged eleven and ten, had never heard of Darwin; our concept of time was personal and semantic (tea-time, dinner-time, last time, wasting time…); our interest in Asteroceras and Primocroceras was acquisitive and competitive. For the sake of beating Gordon to a choice-looking seam of Jurassic mud I was prepared to bash a hundred and fifty million years to pieces with my shiny new hammer and if necessary break my own arm or leg falling off a vertical section of Blue Lias on Charmouth beach in 1920.

  She climbs a little higher, on to another sliding shelving plateau of the cliff, and squats searching furiously the blue grey fragments of rock around her, hunting for those enticing curls and ribbed whorls, pouncing once with a hiss of triumph – an ammonite, almost whole. The beach, now, is quite far below; its shrill cries, its barkings, its calls are clear and loud but from another world, of no account.

  And all the time out of the corner of her eye she watches Gordon, who is higher yet, tap-tapping at an outcrop. He ceases to tap; she can see him examining something. What has he got? Suspicion and rivalry burn her up. She scrambles through little bushy plants, hauls herself over a ledge.

  ‘This is my bit,’ cries Gordon. ‘You can’t come here. I’ve bagged it.’

  ‘I don’t care,’ yells Claudia. ‘Anyway I’m going up higher – it’s much better further up.’ And she hurls herself upwards over skinny plants and dry stony soil that cascades away downwards under her feet, up towards a wonderfully promising enticing grey expanse she has spotted where surely Asteroceras is lurking by the hundred.

  Below, on the beach, unnoticed, figures scurry to and fro; faint bird-like cries of alarm waft up.

  She must pass Gordon to reach that alluring upper shelf. ‘Mind…’ she says. ‘Move your leg…’

  ‘Don’t shove,’ he grumbles. ‘Anyway you can’t come here. I said this is my bit, you find your own.’

  ‘Don’t shove yourself. I don’t want your stupid bit…’

  His leg is in her way – it thrashes, she thrusts, and a piece of cliff, of the solid world which evidently is not so solid after all, shifts under her clutch
ing hands… crumbles… and she is falling thwack backwards on her shoulders, her head, her outflung arm, she is skidding rolling thumping downwards. And comes to rest gasping in a thorn bush, hammered by pain, too affronted even to yell.

  He can feel her getting closer, encroaching, she is coming here on to his bit, she will take all the best fossils. He protests. He sticks out a foot to impede. Her hot infuriating limbs are mixed up with his.

  ‘You’re pushing me,’ she shrieks.

  ‘I’m not,’ he snarls. ‘It’s you that’s shoving. Anyway this is my place so go somewhere else.’

  ‘It’s not your stupid place,’ she says. ‘It’s anyone’s place. Anyway I don’t…’

  And suddenly there are awful tearing noises and thumps and she is gone, sliding and hurtling down, and in horror and satisfaction he stares.

  ‘He pushed me.’

  ‘I didn’t. Honestly mother, I didn’t. She slipped.’

  ‘He pushed me.’

  And even amid the commotion – the clucking mothers and nurses, the improvised sling, the proffered smelling salts – Edith Hampton can marvel at the furious tenacity of her children.

  ‘Don’t argue. Keep still, Claudia.’

  ‘Those are my ammonites. Don’t let him get them, mother.’

  ‘I don’t want your ammonites.’

  ‘Gordon, be quiet!’

  Her head aches; she tries to quell the children and respond to advice and sympathy; she blames the perilous world, so unreliable, so malevolent. And the intransigence of her offspring whose emotions seem the loudest sound on the beach.

  The voice of history, of course, is composite. Many voices; all the voices that have managed to get themselves heard. Some louder than others, naturally. My story is tangled with the stories of others – Mother, Gordon, Jasper, Lisa, and one other person above all; their voices must be heard also, thus shall I abide by the conventions of history. I shall respect the laws of evidence. Of truth, whatever that may be. But truth is tied to words, to print, to the testimony of the page. Moments shower away; the days of our lives vanish utterly, more insubstantial than if they had been invented. Fiction can seem more enduring than reality. Pierre on the field of battle, the Bennet girls at their sewing, Tess on the threshing machine – all these are nailed down for ever, on the page and in a million heads. What happened to me on Charmouth beach in 1920, on the other hand, is thistledown. And when you and I talk about history we don’t mean what actually happened, do we? The cosmic chaos of everywhere, all time? We mean the tidying up of this into books, the concentration of the benign historical eye upon years and places and persons. History unravels; circumstances, following their natural inclination, prefer to remain ravelled. So, since my story is also theirs, they too must speak – Mother, Gordon, Jasper… Except that of course I have the last word. The historian’s privilege.