Moon Tiger

Claudia Hampton is dying in hospital. She is a popular historian — clever and outspoken. Moon Tiger is her reflection on her own life, the times through which she has lived, and the resonances of history itself. As she says at the end, '. . . unless I am a part of everything I am nothing'.

The centre of the novel, and of Claudia's own life, is the western desert campaign in 1941. Claudia was in Cairo as a war correspondent. On a trip to the front, she met a young tank officer, Tom, with whom she fell in love. Their affair is remembered against the background of the desert war, the swimming pools and nightclubs of Cairo, the Moon Tiger that bums beside their bed in the Winter Palace in Luxor. Tom was killed; Claudia, pregnant, miscarried. Now, as an old woman, she thinks about this man who is forever half her age, who was 'picked off by history'.

Claudia's voice is intermingled with others — that of her brother; her silly, impervious sister-in-law; her later lover, and her daughter by him, Lisa, whose cool scrutiny provides some of the conflicting evidence that Claudia the historian admits must be heard. And at the end Tom himself is given a voice as Claudia reads his diary, written in the desert before he died: a moment-by-moment account of tank battles, of fear, death, and endurance.

Moon Tiger is the most ambitious and extraordinary book Penelope Lively has written. It has the historical obsession of earlier novels, but shifted into a bigger landscape and with much greater variety of perspective. It is a novel full of risk-taking, excitement, and unexpectedness.