Penelope Lively won the 1987 Booker Prize for this interesting, eminently readable but ultimately unsatisfying novel. It tells the story of Claudia Hampton, a 76-year-old historian. As Claudia lays dying in hospital she narrates the story of her life in an internal monologue. The narrative is complex, with the point of view changing constantly, and with time and place jumping across the decades and across the continents.

The novel’s title is romantic and mysterious, but the explanation when it comes – a moon tiger is a rather absurd name for an anti-mosquito candle (see picture) which burns slowly through the night – is disappointingly prosaic, involving neither moons nor tigers. The moon tiger is co-opted as a rather heavy handed symbol for the human experience – we all glow brightly and then end up as ashes – but I was still disappointed that something so romantic-sounding could be such an everyday utilitarian object.

Lively creates some vivid characters in this narrative. Claudia’s brother Gordon is for a while her incestuous lover – this is their closely-held for the rest of their lives, but is not portrayed as a damaging or harmful experience.  At the outbreak of the second world war Claudia becomes a war correspondent (as one does) and travels to Cairo, where she meets and begins an intense relationship with Tom Southern, captain of an English armoured tank division. This, we know from the comments of contemporary Claudia looking back on their time together, (although it is narrated in real time) is a doomed war-time affair, and inevitably Tom is killed at El Alamein. 

After the war Claudia meets Jasper, an artistic aristocrat with whom she goes on to have a long-term but sporadic relationship from which she has her only child, Lisa. Lisa is not the free spirit her mother considers herself to be, and their relationship is strained. Later a gay Hungarian student, Lazlo, has a walk-on part in the narrative, although one has the impression that all of life’s events for Claudia after the loss of Tom are an afterthought. This is reinforced by the novel’s finale, when Claudia is sent Tom’s wartime diary which re-emphasises the intensity of his feelings for her. Regret for what might have been her life had he survived is one of her last thoughts before the novel closes.

Despite its innovative structure, this is a very traditional novel. It is a romance, albeit an exceptionally well-written one. There’s nothing wrong with that – Pride and Prejudice is a romance, and it is one of the best novels of all time. But has Moon Tiger got anything interesting to say about human relationships? I’m not sure. Do the characters come alive at all; do they ever go beyond being characters in a novel about whom one never really cares? At one point Claudia reminisces about Lazlo going for a walk in London, and bringing home a nice bunch of flowers, which, it later transpires, he unwittingly picked from a public park. At a dinner party this might be a short, not particularly funny about how foreigners don’t understand English social conventions. But here it is an awkward anecdote, intended to illustrate  Lazlo’s naivety, but never escaping the sense that it is a made-up story intended to play a role in a narrative, rather than something that genuinely happened to someone.

The death-bed format plays a factor here, depriving the narrative of any true surprises. It is probably my failure to engage with the text fully that stopped me caring about Gordon, Lazlo, or Jasper – they felt like background characters in the play of Claudia’s life – and it was only really Claudia and Tom, in the vivid chapters telling the story of their brief moments together, where the story truly felt real. It’s worth reading for that story alone.