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

Tools

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Discussion Questions

Chapters 7-10Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 7 Summary

Chapter 7 opens with Claudia thinking that time is layered differently in Egypt, where the evidence of ancient culture is present in modern life. She then recalls a visit to Egypt many years after the war. In a hotel bar, she meets an American businessman and spends a few days with him, visiting historical sites. The two don’t have a lot in common but enjoy each other’s company. Claudia cannot remember the man’s name.

During the war, Claudia used her feminine wiles and her journalist credentials to visit the desert outside of Cairo, closer to the front lines of battle. It was almost unheard of for a woman to do so. She remembers traveling into the desert in a Jeep with a few other journalists, all of them men. The conditions in the desert are harsh, and the driver is worried about getting them to their destination before the sun sets. As they drive, they see evidence of battle: burned-out vehicles, barbed wire, and shell cases.

Eventually, a sandstorm forces them to camp overnight. Claudia is undeterred and pulls out her typewriter to work on her story. Another Jeep arrives, driven by Tom Southern. As Tom drives the group the rest of the way to their destination, Claudia drifts in and out of sleep in the front seat, drowsily looking at his hand on the wheel. Decades later, she can still picture his hand.

Late at night, Claudia and Tom chat while the other journalists write or sleep. Claudia mentions hunting for fossils with her brother, and Tom gives her a fossil of a starfish that he found there in Egypt. Tom tells Claudia that he keeps a diary. At the end of the novel, Claudia will read Tom’s diary while she is in the hospital.

The next day, as Tom is driving Claudia and the other journalists, Claudia sees a line of prisoners of war. She wonders at how ordinary they look. Claudia describes the busy desert, full of planes flying overhead and trucks, tanks, and men on the ground. Claudia meets some soldiers living in trenches. At one point, Claudia steps away from the truck to go to the bathroom. Over a sand dune, she sees a wrecked vehicle and a body lying beside it. When she goes to investigate, she finds a wounded soldier. Their truck had driven over a mine.

Thinking again of her tourist visit to Egypt with the American businessman, Claudia recalls their tour bus stopping in the desert. Everyone else gets off to look around, and the American is surprised when Claudia doesn’t want to. She tells him that she’s already seen enough of the desert.

Chapter 8 Summary

Back in the hospital, Sylvia has brought Claudia a poinsettia. Claudia thinks, rather ungratefully, that Sylvia would scold her if she let the flower die. Claudia also dislikes the gift because the flower reminds her of her time in the Egyptian desert. She remembers seeing such flowers growing in the ruins of a town when she was riding with Tom. He told her that the seeds lie dormant until it rains.

Claudia asks Tom to describe what it is like to be a soldier in Egypt. He struggles to do so, saying that it is a combination of mundane boredom, long stretches of inactivity, and stunning moments of terror or stress. He also reflects on how quickly death can strike, how someone can be alive one moment and gone the next. Tom thinks that historians gloss over the brutality of war, and that statistics hide the gruesomeness as well. Claudia tells him that she writes history books.

Some weeks later, Tom calls Claudia when he is on leave in Cairo. They go to the zoo. Claudia is caught up by the strength of her feelings for Tom, even though she has only known him for a short time. They spend Tom’s whole leave together. Tom tells Claudia that he wants to see something of Egypt aside from the English culture that has been transplanted there. In the market, he buys her a ring that has a small compartment, like a locket. The shopkeeper tells her that the compartment is meant to hold poison. They fill the compartment with sand. Claudia asks Tom what he’ll do after the war. He puts off the conversation.

Chapter 9 Summary

Chapter 9 begins with Claudia in Egypt with the American businessman. She notices how the intervening decades have changed the area: People are no longer allowed to climb the Great Pyramid, there are no longer houseboats docked along the river, and the polo fields that the British army had built are gone. These changes feel right to Claudia, who thinks that those old surroundings belong in the unreachable past with that past version of herself.

Following Claudia’s train of thought, the narrative moves quickly from contemplating the ancient Egyptian city of Memphis to considering the impossibility of unknowing what we know, the racism and xenophobia of the Brits and French.

Claudia then remembers a conversation with her roommate in Cairo, Camilla. Tom had been away on assignment for three weeks, and Camilla observed that Claudia was looking sick. Claudia is worried about Tom; the war feels more personal and threatening to her now that she is romantically involved with a soldier. It is early 1942, and things are tense in Cairo as Rommel’s army advances.

When they next see each other, Tom tells Claudia that he is happy despite the war because he is in love with her. Again, Claudia raises the question of his plans after the war. This time, Tom answers: He wants to marry her and wants them to have a child.

Chapter 10 Summary

Lisa is back at the hospital to pay her mother another visit. The nurse tells Lisa that Claudia had a bad night, in which she was confused and thought she was in childbirth again. The nurse mistook this for a hallucination of Lisa’s birth, but in fact, Claudia was remembering her earlier pregnancy in Egypt and the ensuing loss.

While Claudia is sleeping, Lisa muses that Claudia has probably never felt love like Lisa feels for her lover. Lisa is confident that Claudia never loved Jasper in that way. Lisa’s eyes fall on her mother’s rings on the bedside stand. The rings stir up a childhood memory of finding her mother’s ring from Egypt, with its small compartment full of sand. Lisa, a young girl, did not understand her mother’s hot anger when she asked for the ring or threatened to clean the “dirt” out of the compartment.

In Claudia’s memories, heavy fighting erupts in the desert. Claudia is busy reporting on the events and searching for news of Tom. First, Tom is reported missing. Claudia prays for him to be found, or at least to have died a quick death. Then, Claudia receives a call informing her that Tom has died. She is distraught to not know how it happened. As the shock of Tom’s death fades, Claudia realizes that she is pregnant.

Time passes. The next memory is of Claudia arriving at the nursing home in Egypt, where she plans to give birth to Tom’s baby. She is unwell and in great pain. The hospital staff inform her that she is losing her pregnancy. She yells at them when they imply that it might be for the best because she is not married.

Chapters 7-10 Analysis

Chapters 7-10 are largely dedicated to Claudia’s relationship with Tom. Tom’s death and Claudia’s pregnancy loss mark the climax of the novel; Tom is the great love of Claudia’s life and had a powerful impact on her choices and worldview after the war. Their relationship underscores the theme of The Impact of Relationships on Self-Identity. Tom helps Claudia recognize softer, more thoughtful sides of herself, as captured in the moment when he tells her that she makes him happy. At his words, Claudia realizes that no one has ever told her that before.

In their conversations about history and the lived experience of the war, Tom expresses many opinions that align closely with the opinions that Claudia expresses elsewhere in the book. This overlap indicates that Tom has shaped (or at the very least reinforced) many of Claudia’s ideas about history. Tom’s conversation with Claudia about “chroniclers” (by which he means historians) emphasizes The Intersection of Personal and Global Histories. Tom emphasizes the detachment of historians from his on-the-ground perception: “The chroniclers, not having been in the thick of things, concentrate on justice and valour and all that. And statistics. When you find yourself in a position of a statistic it looks rather different” (103). Tom is highlighting the tension between the personal experience of being part of history and the abstract experience of reading or writing about it later. The tension lies not only in the difference between those two bodies of sensations but also in the necessity of merging many personal experiences to generate the global series of events that is “history.” “I’m beginning to see that,” Claudia responds as Tom outlines this tension for her, and it is a lesson that she carries with her for the rest of her life. The intersection between personal and global history also emerges in the way Claudia relates differently to the war once she is involved with Tom. The stakes, the emotions, and the stress are all more apparent and more powerful for her once she is personally invested in a soldier’s safety.

Unlike many of the other characters, Tom does not have sections of narration that are dedicated to his perspective. Until Claudia re-reads Tom’s diary at the end of the novel, readers are not privy to his thoughts; for now, we can access Tom only through Claudia’s recollection of him. This deviation from the narrative structure of the novel emphasizes Tom’s importance in Claudia’s story; in other words, Lively sets Tom apart by treating him differently than the other characters. Tom is also distinct from the other characters in that he is dead. The stylistic decision to not offer Tom’s perspective highlights his inaccessibility, reinforcing that his life was cut short.

Chapter 8 introduces the symbol of The Locket Ring. This ring, a gift from Tom, represents their time together. Tom tells Claudia that giving gifts is “the way we keep a hold on other people. Plant ourselves in their lives” (110). Even though the couple’s hopes for the future are, at that moment, unspoken, the ring indicates Tom’s desire to be a more permanent part of Claudia’s life. They fill the ring’s compartment with sand from the Egyptian hills, a symbolic gesture emphasizing the role that Egypt plays in their relationship; they would not be together had they been in any other time or place. It turns out, however, that they will never be together in any place other than Egypt.

The symbol of the Ammonite appears in Chapter 7. This time, the fossil of a starfish is also introduced. In contrasting the ammonites on the British beaches to the starfish found in the Egyptian desert, the author contrasts Claudia’s relationship with Gordon with her relationship with Tom. The ammonite comes to represent not only the deep history of the earth, but also Claudia’s “deep history” with her brother, a history that informs, but that feels separate from, her relationship with Tom. Tom and Claudia comment on how the fossil “puts one in one’s place” (93), reflecting on the bizarre thought that the desert before them was once a sea. The two of them appreciate and even enjoy the idea of being placed in the context of the history of the world.

Throughout the novel, Lively juxtaposes Claudia in the hospital, as a stationary and prone body, with the long reach and fluidity of Claudia’s inner thoughts. This juxtaposition provides context for Claudia’s ongoing attempt to define herself. It also emphasizes the importance of our consciousness in shaping our experiences. The hospital staff often think that Claudia is hallucinating, out of touch with reality and incapable of coherent thought. Yet Claudia’s mind is full of sharp, coherent ideas, ones that the reader can observe because of Lively’s use of perspective. The episode at the opening of Chapter 10 is a poignant example of this juxtaposition. The nurse believes that Claudia is confused and imagining herself to be giving birth to Lisa. In reality, Claudia is remembering losing her pregnancy in Egypt. Lisa accurately notes that her mother is “somewhere a long way away” (124). Claudia’s ability to revisit her memories so vividly, and the different ways that this process is perceived by Lisa and the hospital staff, underscores the concept of Linear Time Versus Lived Time.