Book Review: Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively

By Elizabeth Milo

Normally I find memoirs and war stories too contrite or detail-oriented to enjoy, never containing enough of a plot to keep me engrossed. Thus, when Penelope Lively’s novel Moon Tiger was recommended to me, I was skeptical about how much I would enjoy it. Not only were my assumptions proven wrong, but I was also thrilled to find a hidden maze of truly interesting philosophical questions buried within the text. Moon Tiger is the memoir of a dying woman who views the world with a self-conscious awareness of her own narcissism. Claudia, Moon Tiger’s protagonist, recognizes her inability to look at the world without the taint of her own experience. When she imagines history in relation to her own life, she remarks, “Egocentric Claudia is once again subordinating history to her own puny existence.” Claudia’s story-telling method combines facts from history into a jumble of knowledge that all revolves around her own experiences and life.

Peripheral to Claudia’s story are the lives of people who have been significant to her in some way: her daughter, her daughter’s father, her one great love, her brother. Each of these people view Claudia differently and contribute to who she is in some way. Claudia’s first-person narration lords over most of the novel, but a handful of stories told in the third-person are scattered throughout the book, making the reader question whether they are Claudia imagining somebody else’s life, or an authorial voice sharing a new perspective.

Claudia’s awareness of her own narcissism doesn’t diminish how annoying her self-absorption is. To be constantly inside Claudia’s mind can make the reader feel trapped, even suffocated by her. The way she views the relationships she has with other people, especially her daughter, does not cast her in a flattering light. And yet, as the story of her life unfolds, it becomes clear that certain events have shaped her to be this way. Claudia’s strong opinions about life are inevitably undermined by the choices that she makes, which causes the reader to question their own thoughts on these complex ideas.

Moon Tiger can be enjoyed as a memoir of one woman’s remarkable life, or it can be a challenge to the reader to engage in mental exercises that we rarely have occasion to perform. The questions that Lively opens up in Moon Tiger are essentially bottomless pits which the reader can delve deeper and deeper into until they feel the need to surface again. The themes of love, incest, and duty seem paltry and secondary next to the issues of identity and reality that Lively recklessly explores.