Moon Tiger

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1987

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-3

Chapters 4-6

Chapters 7-10

Chapters 11-13

Chapters 14-17

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Discussion Questions

Background

Historical Context: Egypt and the Western Desert Campaign in World War 2

In Moon Tiger, the main character, Claudia, lives for a time in Cairo, Egypt during World War 2 (WWII), where she works as a journalist, reporting on the war for British newspapers. Claudia’s main romantic interest, Tom Southern, is a British soldier killed in action during the Western Desert Campaign.

Although some fighting took place elsewhere in Northern Africa during WWII, the deserts of Egypt and Libya were the site of most of the conflict. The battles waged there are known collectively as the Western Desert Campaign. The area was important to both sides largely because the Suez Canal, located in Egypt, was vital for the British to have shipping access to India and Australia.

The Western Desert Campaign began in 1940, after Italy entered the war in alliance with Germany. Libya was, at the time, an Italian colony. Libya was bordered by French Tunisia to the northwest and by Egypt (which gained independence from England in 1922) to the east. For two years, between 1940 and 1942, the Italian and German forces fought to defend Libya from the Allies while the British forces fought to keep the Axis forces out of Egypt.

Tank battles were a hallmark of the Western Desert Campaign. The Italian and German forces were led by the Nazi field marshal Erwin Rommel, a figure mentioned in the novel, who had a fearsome reputation for his battle tactics in Africa as well as during the 1940 invasion of France.

The Allied forces defeated the Axis forces in Egypt in the fall of 1942. During the Western Desert Campaign, each side sustained losses of more than 30,000 people. Hundreds of thousands of combatants were injured on each side.

Authorial Context: Penelope Lively

Penelope Lively was born in Cairo, Egypt, in 1933. She lived in Cairo with her family, where her father worked for the National Bank of Egypt, until she was 12 years old. The author draws on her childhood memories of Cairo to describe the rich setting where the novel’s main character, Claudia, lives during the war. In interviews, Lively recalls the Moon Tiger incense coils beside her bedside while she slept (Scholes, Lucy. “Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively Speaks to Readers Now More Strongly Than Ever.” The Booker Prizes, 12 Dec. 2022). The author’s recollection of the long-standing influence of British occupation on Cairo informs her descriptions of the polo fields, clubs, swimming pools, and happy hours that the character Claudia frequents while she is there.

Lively was awarded the Booker Prize for Moon Tiger in 1987. This honor came after the author had been shortlisted for the prize twice before, once for each of her earlier novels: The Road to Lichfield and According to Mark.

Literary Context: Postmodernism

Postmodern literature is often characterized by fragmented narrative structures, self-referential elements, intertextuality, and other stylistic choices that draw the reader’s awareness to the fact that they are reading a constructed piece of literature. Postmodern texts tend to highlight different perspectives, rather than adhering to one perspective or one interpretation of a story. Postmodern authors also frequently employ humor like irony, parody, or playful experimentation with words or formatting. These stylistic attributes of postmodern literature reflect the movement’s philosophical underpinnings: Postmodernism is skeptical about the idea of grand truths or overarching narratives that claim to have all the answers.

The literary movement of postmodernism is a departure from the style of modernist literature, which was characterized by heavy use of symbolism, allegory, and myth to explore larger truths. Although modernist literature often includes fragmented narratives and stream-of-consciousness writing, modernist novels tend to emphasize the individual as capable of making meaning or uncovering great truths.

Postmodernism is often considered a reaction to the widespread human rights violations of WWII and significant events in the decades that followed, like the Cold War, the civil rights movement, and even the development of personal computers. Postmodernism adapts and defies modernist literary conventions, like the artistic drive to impose order or synthesize disparate parts to find meaning. Postmodernism, rather than turning to the individual artist to make meaning out of chaos, refutes the concept of absolute meaning, instead preferring playfulness, unreliability, and disorder.

Moon Tiger is a postmodern novel, making use of the literary movement’s emphasis on unreliability and disorder to replicate a dying woman’s reminiscing on her life. As one critic puts it, the novel’s “interest in psychological time, the subjective nature of experience, and the relationship between language and reality places her squarely in the postmodernist tradition” (Moran, Mary Hurley. “Penelope Lively’s ‘Moon Tiger’: A Feminist ‘History of the World.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, vol. 11, no. 2/3, 1990, pp. 89-95). Of course, many authors draw stylistic inspiration from multiple literary movements, and Lively is no exception. The influence of modernism, on which postmodernism is built, is also present in the novel’s fragmented structure.