Moon Tiger

“The question is, shall it or shall it not be linear history? I’ve always thought a kaleidoscopic view might be an interesting heresy. Shake the tube and see what comes out. Chronology irritates me.”

The structure of Moon Tiger is itself “kaleidoscopic,” rather than chronological. This structure, and Claudia’s defense of it, reinforces the novel’s thematic exploration of Linear Time Versus Lived Time; the author conceives of lived time as a simultaneous, “kaleidoscopic” experience.

“And when you and I talk about history we don’t mean what actually happened, do we? The cosmic chaos of everywhere, all time? We mean the tidying up of this into books, the concentration of the benign historical eye upon years and places and persons.”

Claudia contemplates what it means to be an author, and a historian, acknowledging that writing a story necessarily involves biased decisions about what to include and when. The Subjective Nature of Memory and storytelling are key concerns in the novel.

“Jasper never dominated my life. He was significant, but that is another matter. He was central to the structure, but that is all. Most lives have their core, their kernel, their vital centre. We will get to mine in due course, when I’m ready. At the moment, I’m dealing with the strata.”

Tom, Claudia’s central love interest, is felt as an absence for much of the novel. He is the “core” to which Claudia refers here, although readers will not know his name until Chapter 6. This quotation also exemplifies Claudia’s consideration of The Impact of Relationships on Self-Identity as she looks back on her life and weighs how much different people have shaped it.

“[A]ll those mundane travellers preoccupied with personal gain or seized by congenital restlessness, studying compasses and dealing with the natives while they make themselves immortal.”

This characteristic quip from Claudia demonstrates her wry sense of humor and her somewhat cynical view of history. This passage reinforces the novel’s thematic interest in The Intersection of Personal and Global Histories, calling attention to the ways in which individuals both shape and are shaped by history, as well as vice versa. In particular, Claudia is considering all the personal, selfish motivations that drove historical figures.

“I know what you ate and drank, how you furnished your houses, which of you were men of conscience and application and which were not. And I know, also, nothing. Because I cannot shed my skin and put on yours, cannot strip my mind of its knowledge and its prejudices.”

Claudia is addressing these remarks to early European settlers in America. She considers the personal details of their lives—their need for food and housing—which led them to behave as they did. She is fascinated that history has documented so many such details. She also admits to her bias and limitations because she cannot consider their story from outside her own modern context.

“I have never ceased to wonder at that. That words are more durable than anything, that they blow with the wind, hibernate and reawaken, shelter parasitic on the most unlikely of hosts, survive and survive and survive.”

This passage is demonstrative of the vivid imagery that Lively employs throughout Moon Tiger. The novel is deeply interested in how language works to shape our understanding of the world and of ourselves. Here, Claudia marvels at how history can linger inside language, carrying traces of ancient cultures into the future.

“Lisa is a better name. Claudia bangs, like the gong in the hall at Sotleigh. Bang—whoom! Lisa makes a nice silky noise, like streams or rain. Lisa. Lisa. If you say it over and over again it is not you any more, not me Lisa, I, me, but a word you never heard before. Lisa. Lisa.”

This passage comes in a section devoted to Lisa’s perspective of a scene shared with her mother. The style shifts to match Lisa’s youthful perspective, using devices like repetition and onomatopoeia. The novel’s interest in the power of language and naming is at play here—Lisa considers how her name is a good fit for her personality and how Claudia’s is a good fit for hers.

“You are not, as you think, omniscient. You do not know everything; you certainly do not know me. You judge and pronounce; you are never wrong. I do not argue with you; I simply watch you, knowing what I know. Knowing what you do not.”

Here, the novel dips into Lisa’s perspective. In these thoughts addressed to her mother, Lisa calls out Claudia’s bias. This moment, as well as Lisa as a character overall, reinforces Claudia’s unreliability and speaks to the theme of The Subjective Nature of Memory.

“I know how I felt—richer, happier, more alive than ever before or ever since. It is the feeling that survives; feeling and the place.”

Claudia recalls her time with Tom, remembering that they made each other feel happy and alive. There is a tragedy at the heart of Moon Tiger, namely that this central relationship in Claudia’s life was over so soon and that she never found the same type of companionship again. Claudia notes the “kaleidoscopic” nature of lived time when she observes that what she remembers from those moments are her feelings and the sense of place, not clear sequences of events.

“The Moon Tiger is almost entirely burned away now; its green spiral is mirrored by a grey ash spiral in the saucer. The shutters are striped with light; the world has turned again.”

The Moon Tiger incense is the symbol for which the novel is named. A setting-specific object that ties Claudia’s memories of Tom to Egypt in the 1940s, the Moon Tiger represents the passage of time and how that passage of time renders fleeting moments priceless.

“Past and present do not so much co-exist in the Nile valley as cease to have any meaning. What is buried under the sand is reflected above, not just in the souvenirs hawked by the descendants of tomb robbers but in the eternal, deliberate cycle of the landscape—the sun rising from the desert of the east to sink into the desert of the west, the spring surge of the river, the regeneration of creatures.”

Lively’s descriptions of the Egyptian setting are rich with vivid sensory details. For Claudia, Egypt embodies the tension of Linear Time Versus Lived Time, as the past feels immediate and current in the Egyptian culture and landscape. This depiction of the landscape also reflects Claudia’s growing perception of the “kaleidoscopic” nature of memory, in which past blurs with present and the mind tends to move in a cyclical fashion.

“The day is refracted, and the next, and the one after that, all of them broken up into a hundred juggled segments, each brilliant and self-contained so that the hours are no longer linear but assorted like bright sweets in a jar.”

Claudia reflects on her time in Cairo with Tom. She describes the state of her memories, due to the passage of time and the frailty of memory, as well as the experience of the non-chronological nature of lived time. The metaphor itself, comparing the fragments of memory to “bright sweets,” speaks to the warmth that Claudia still feels toward Tom and, in particular, to this period of time they spent together.

“And each time he went back again the lion snarled on the horizon, my scrutiny of communiques and cultivating of press attaches took on an extra urgency. I tried again and again to get myself another trip to the desert—not because I would be anywhere near him but because I wanted to experience what he saw and heard and felt.”

Claudia feels The Intersection of Personal and Global Histories acutely while Tom is away on the front line and she is reporting on the action from the safety of Cairo. Because she loves him now, her perception of war has changed. She longs to be close to him and to understand what he is experiencing; even as she helps to generate global history, assessing events at a macro level, she longs to see the personal side of war as he does.

“She cannot reply. No one, she thinks, has ever spoken to me like this before. I have never made anyone happy before. I have made people angry, restless, jealous, lecherous…never, I think, happy.”

Tom redefines Claudia’s concept of herself when he helps her realize that she can make others happy. This moment underscores The Impact of Relationships on Self-Identity. Claudia begins the novel aware of how others have affected and continue to affect her. However, part of Claudia’s character arc is her acceptance of this influence as integral to a person’s sense of self. This moment, both in the past and in the present, as she reflects on it, pushes Claudia toward that acceptance.

“Figures dance on bits of paper, tenuously related to machines, to flesh and blood. There is out there, where these things or something like them are supposedly happening, and back here, where ice chinks in glasses at six and hoses play on the gardens of Gezira.”

Moon Tiger is interested in the absurdity of war. This interest is demonstrated in part through the tension that Claudia often describes between the grittiness and deadliness of the war in the Western Desert and the cosmopolitan poshness of the British expatriate community in Cairo. She also feels the tension between the impersonal distance that history and journalism create between readers and the events of war.

“Incest is closely related to narcissism. When Gordon and I were at our most self-conscious—afire with the sexuality and egotism of late adolescence—we looked at one another and saw ourselves translated. I saw in Gordon’s maleness an erotic flicker of myself […] We confronted each other like mirrors.”

Claudia’s incestuous affair with her brother is a key moment of characterization; through observations like this, the author reveals Claudia’s selfishness, passion, unwavering desire to consider all aspects of her life, and disregard for societal norms. This reflection interacts with the novel’s exploration of how relationships shape identity, speaking to Claudia’s rejection of that fact for much of her life. Her perception of her incestuous relationship with her brother, whom she perceives as merely another version of herself, dramatizes Claudia’s wish to be completely self-defined, and utterly unaffected by others.

“History is disorder, I wanted to scream at them—death and muddle and waste. And here you sit cashing in on it and making patterns in the sand.”

Having experienced the immediacy of war, and having lost Tom to war, Claudia becomes enraged by the idea of diplomats philosophizing about war from the safety of meeting rooms. Her emphasis on the chaos of actual history playing out in real-time underscores the thematic discussion of The Intersection of Personal and Global Histories; she longs for historians, journalists, and diplomats to acknowledge the millions of personal moments that combine to make global history.

“My body reveals certain events; an autopsy would show that I have had a child, broken some ribs, lost my appendix. Other physical assaults have left no trace; measles, mumps, malaria, suppurations and infections, coughs and colds, upheavals of the digestive system.”

In a novel obsessed with the process of storytelling and history-writing, Claudia considers her body as the medium through which a story could be told. She concludes that her body, like other forms of storytelling, would tell a partial account but not a complete one.

“Claudia asks him to translate the letter for her because it will give him something to do. As he does so she thinks intensely of this woman who is a whole life for Laszlo but just a voice for her, and of this faceless man, another whole unimaginable life.”

Lively asserts that, because everyone’s experiences are biased and subjective, the most complete history is the one that includes the most perspectives. The structure of the novel mirrors this assertion. Claudia realizes the impossibility of writing a comprehensive history of the world, because of the perspectives that would always be left on the periphery.

“I love you, she thinks. Always have. More than I’ve loved anyone, bar one. That word is overstretched; it cannot be made to do service for so many different things—love of children, love of friends, love of God, carnal love and cupidity and saintliness. I do not need to tell you, any more than you need to tell me.”

Claudia directs these thoughts at Gordon while he is dying. Contemplating the limitations of words to convey the full depth of meaning, Claudia hopes that a life full of actions and shared memories will fill in where language cannot. Claudia’s love for her brother, given her perception of their incestuous relationship, speaks in part to her love for her sense of self. Nonetheless, Gordon’s death, both within the past and as it emerges within Claudia’s present exploration of memories, marks a shift in Claudia’s acceptance of how relationships with others are integral to that sense of self.

“Even if it were expedient, I couldn’t say now what came before what, where we were when, how this happened or that, in the mind it’s not a sequence just a single event without beginning or end in any proper sense simply a continuity spiked by moments of intensity that ring in the head still.”

This is an excerpt from Tom’s diary, which Claudia rereads just before she dies. Tom considers the tension of Linear Time Versus Lived Time, noting that he does not experience his memories as a chronological sequence of events. Notably, his metaphoric language contrasts with Claudia’s earlier description of her lived time with Tom spent in peace: “the hours are […] assorted like bright sweets in a jar” (108).

“Thought of the gazelle I saw, flicking its tail carefree amid heaps of rusty metal, that I envied for a moment; but the gazelle has no story, that is the difference. Pinned down and shit-scared, I have a story, which makes me a man, and therefore set apart.”

This is an excerpt from Tom’s diary. Tom’s words underscore the novel’s interest in story-making, considering the idea that what makes a human life meaningful is that we can reflect on our lives and construct stories about them.

“Death is total absence, you said. Yes and no. You are not absent so long as you are in my head. That, of course, is not what you meant; you were thinking of the extinction of the flesh. But it is true; I preserve you, as others will preserve me. For a while.”

Claudia directs these thoughts at Tom, thinking of him in her final moments. As a historian, she believes in the power of memory to preserve people’s stories beyond death. She also emphasizes The Impact of Relationships on Self-Identity, asserting that our relationships with our loved ones are what keeps us from being absent after we die.