A romance lies at the centre of Moon Tiger; a romance that plays out in a few days in the bizarre limbo that is colonial Cairo at the height of the desert war.
Like all respectable European capitals Cairo had a zoo.
“The hippos share a small lake with flamingos and assorted duck; a keeper stands alongside with a bucketful of potatoes - five piastres buys a couple of potatoes which you then hurl into the pink maw of the hippo. The adult hippos wallow with their mouths permanently agape while two young ones, who have not yet got the idea, cruise fretfully up and down, occasionally struck by inaccurate potatoes.
‘Like an exotic form of hoop-la,’ says Tom. ‘Do you want a go?’
‘Do you realise that potatoes are a luxury in this place?’ says Claudia. ‘ I can’t remember when I last ate a potato myself. We use yams. Mashed yam, roast yam, boiled yam….’
“Oh dear,’ says Tom. ‘Is indignation going to spoil your day? At least the hippos are happy, presumably.’
But Claudia knows that nothing can spoil her day…”
And now you will be drawn into this story. I say ‘now’ since you may not have been before. Beautiful, famous, independent Claudia, who is recalling her life as she ekes out her last days in hospital, has so far been self-absorbed, intolerant, neglectful, arrogant and frequently cruel Claudia. She is not the sort of person you’d want to know. But when she reveals what Tom has been in her life she becomes poignant, passionate, eloquent, resilient and astute.
It’s a scene that the narrator, the old Claudia, has been plunged back into. She’s seeing it with the crystalline clarity of morphine fueled vision. To achieve this effect of immediacy in distance Lively uses the present tense with a distant third person point of view. It’s risky. It can annoy a reader with its feel of a lack of sophistication. But you probably didn’t notice, because smart, acerbic Claudia is right there, being witty about yams and the English diet. Then Lively switches you right back into a first-person-type insight, but what’s on the page is still in the third person. Old and dying, Claudia is remembering this scene. She could think, ‘I knew nothing could spoil my day’, but that’s not what Lively does. She writes, “But Claudia knows that nothing can spoil her day”. All the way through this book Lively plays with tense, point of view and dialogue in a way which is thoroughly experimental but because it serves both the character and the plot you’ll probably be surprised when, and if, you notice it happening.
And while reading the passage you probably imagined it was your sensibilities that conjoured up the discomfort over the zoo-thing, and that your modern education detected the odour of colonialism. Look again and you’ll see it is Penelope Lively’s skill that put that there.
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