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January 05, 2007

Moon Tiger - Penelope Lively

I've made pretty good progress through the Booker prize winners recently, and have just finished this winner from 1987.

I really liked the book, though it was lucky no razor blades were handy when I finished it as it has possibly one of the most depressing and downbeat endings I've ever encountered.

It tells the story of a woman called Claudia, and the narrative jumps about through various stages in her life. It begins as she is lying in a hospital, dying from cancer. She tells us she is going to give us a history of the world, and she proceeeds to tell us about the major events in her life.

As a young woman, Claudia was clever, beautiful, confident. She was irrestible to men, and we find out about the relationships she has had, some shocking, some sad, none really fulfilling. In her prime she went to Egypt during the Second World War as a journalist, one of the few women to be allowed this kind of posting. There is quite a lot of history lesson, so I learnt a bit about the North African campaign that I didn't know before.

During these flashbacks to her previous life, people from her life come and visit Claudia in her hospital room. Her daughter, her brother's wife, her adopted refugee friend. They all think they know her, they think she has gone senile. But she is still a lucid and intelligent person, it's just that her body isn't working properly any more. She drifts in and out of consciousness, and occasionally forgets the names of common household objects. And they don't really know her, they have no idea about the biggest secret of her life.

A few literary tricks are used, sometimes to better effect than others. When an incident is described by Claudia, sometimes the other people involved also get a go to explain what they were thinking, and why they reacted in a particular way. This reveals useful insights sometimes, but at other times adds very little. And rather than just finding out about what Claudia knows, we also discover in first person narrative from her daughter that there are secrets here too.

The sadness of the end is inevitable, and is only tempered a little by a new discovery revealed in a stack of old diary entries from a former lover.

It's a dense book, short and profound, thoughtful and philosophical. What is a life all about anyway? Who are we but a collection of memories in other peoples heads? How different is the person I was yesterday to the one I am today? Why do we have to get old? Oh, can someone pass the Wilkinson Swords please.

Posted by se71 at January 5, 2007 12:40 PM

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