Penelope Lively, “Moon Tiger”

Yes. Yes, I agree with all of you who have recommended Moon Tiger. Wonderful as Penelope Lively always is, this is probably her best book to date. (It won the Booker Prize in 1987.) I actually considered going right back to the beginning to read it all over again — Moon Tiger is one of those books that deals out information artfully. Not only does Lively keep the narrative tension going this way (i.e. exactly what IS going on between Claudia and her brother Gordon?) but also she often gives us scenes that alter the meaning of what has gone before. They’re like little explosions, altering the contours of what existed before, exposing what had previously been hidden.

British M3 Tank next to burned Panzer tank in No. Africa, June 1942. Courtesy Imperial War Museum

The novel begins with the elderly Claudia Hampton in a hospital bed, proclaiming that despite her advanced age and illness, she intends to write a history of the world. Pretty nervy — open your story with a character who’s trapped in a hospital bed? But Lively’s not a practitioner of the straightforward narrative, so before long we’re plunged into Claudia’s past, then her further past, then brought back to her present. We’re in her point of view, then in a third-person narrative, then in the point of view of another character. Sometimes even the dialogue overlaps between points of view, an approach that could be annoying but somehow isn’t. As for Claudia herself, she is unrepentantly uncongenial. Brilliant, stubborn, insensitive, beautiful, she has cut a swathe through mid-twentieth century highbrow England, first as a journalist based in Cairo during World War II, and later as a popular historian. She’s opinionated, impatient, and very, very interesting.

Claudia is drawn to conflict. Her longstanding relationship with Jasper, the father of her daughter Lisa, is often contentious. She’d just as soon have a loud argument as a peaceful discussion. Social convention and other people’s feelings bore her. Yet this is not one of those novels about characters whom the author despises or dislikes. Moon Tiger doesn’t even have the detachment of Elizabeth Taylor’s Angel. We readers are implicated in Claudia’s emotions and in the end, we are sympathetic. More, we share her thought process, which is fascinating. After all, Claudia is an historian, thinking about how narrative shapes history. The narrative of this novel is pleated and twisted like origami, to expose certain aspects of Claudia’s life to view, and to create a coherent outline. We are always aware of this process, never more so than when another voice is added at the end. But Lively is artful: she can draw attention to her materials and process while still immersing us in the illusion she creates.

A “Moon Tiger” is a form of insect repellent (to be found on eBay) — a green coil that you burn. There’s a Moon Tiger alight in one of the central scenes of the book. Atmosphere? Metaphor? Anybody want to tell me?

Penelope Lively, “Passing On”

Today’s nomination for Best First Sentence of a Novel: “The coffin stuck fast at the angle of the garden path and the gateway out into the road.” Thank you, Penelope Lively, for giving us an episode and a metaphor elegantly condensed into a few lines. The paragraph continues: “The undertaker’s men shunted to and fro, their hats knocked askew by low branches, their topcoats showered with raindrops from the hedge. The mourners halted around the front door and waited in silence. Birds sang effusively.”

If you read Passing On, you’re going to want to watch those birds, which persistently sing and fly and groom their feathers. You might at first mistake this for the story of a couple of diffident, repressed middle-aged Britons who have trouble adjusting to their monstrous mother’s death. But read the title again: doesn’t it suggest we might think about our own mortality as well? Not only that — as humans die, the cycle of life continues ruthlessly. Seasons pass, we mate and die.

To go back to that metaphor and to the literal part of the story, it’s Dorothy Glover’s coffin that causes so much trouble, even though the redoubtable lady herself is theoretically dead and gone. But her children Helen and Edward have a great deal of difficulty with the “gone” part of the phrase. Dorothy was a dreadful bully and her presence, or her imprint on her children’s psyches, endures long after that funeral. Helen, attempting to bring gradual order to a house where — to give just one example of squalor — dish-towels are habitually gray rags known as “dead rabbits,” keeps tripping over ancient evidence of her mother’s meddling in her long-ago romantic life. Edward, meanwhile, comes completely undone. He has always found refuge in the natural world and his self-soothing amid the creatures occupying the family property takes on a frantic quality. Dragged through Harrod’s on an unfortunate visit to London, Edward takes on “the manic look of some animal transferred into the wrong environment, as though he might run amok, or bite.” Meanwhile the third child, Louise, who was always able to stand up to Dorothy, is having trouble with her teenage children, and rants about the perils of, well, fecundity. “Breed,” she says, “and be damned. Well, no, not damned but deprived of free will. Watch yourself join the animals.” I suppose Louise is something less than a complete character, with these slightly implausible speeches of hers, but Edward and Helen are so sensitively drawn that I didn’t mind.

It’s Lively’s ability to point at the big picture while telling the small story that I admire most in Passing On, and indeed in much of her work. Cause and effect, the passage of time, the behavior of memory lurk beneath the teacups and library books and visits to the pub. As they do in all of our lives, really.

Elizabeth Taylor, “Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont”

The cover of the Virago edition of Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont shows Rupert Friend wearing a modish blue muffler, with his head tossed back as he roars with laughter, and Joan Plowright (also mufflered, though hers is pink) in profile, looking robust and contemporary. It’s a still from the 2006 film of the book, and you can’t blame the publishers for using it, but as I read, the image got further and further from the book’s action. Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont is Elizabeth Taylor’s foray into Barbara Pym land and there’s very little in the way of full-throated laughter. In fact it’s hard to know how it could have been made into a film without being made either cutesy or sentimental.

There is certainly humor in the novel: Taylor’s sharp observations can be very funny. But by the end, this is an unflinching look at the loneliness and humiliation of old age  that tallies in many particulars with Penelope Lively’s How It All Began. The difference is that Laura Palfrey, the heroine — yes, I think we can call her a heroine — of Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont is a woman of a different era from Charlotte Rainsford of How It All Began. Like Charlotte, she’s a widow with a middle-aged daughter. We glean that she spent a great deal of time abroad as a Foreign Service wife. Stoicism and patience are her strengths. She certainly needs them at the Claremont, a dreary London hotel where she takes up residence. We get to know a core of other long-term boarders  and at first we might be in E.F. Benson territory, with the bibulous Mrs. Burton, the mousy Mrs. Post, the wicked Mrs. Arbuthnot on her crutches and ludicrous Mr. Osmond with his perpetual letters to the newspapers. Taylor isn’t above poking fun at them — even Mrs. Palfrey is described amusingly: “She would have made a distinguished-looking man and, sometimes, wearing evening dress, looked like some famous general in drag.”

Funny is too easy, though. One day Mrs. Palfrey trips and falls outside the basement flat of the charming young Ludovic Myers, who takes her in and cleans her up and gives her a cup of tea. This, obviously, is the Rupert Friend part. The two form a desultory friendship and at the Claremont Ludovic is taken for Mrs. Palfrey’s grandson. Possession of an attractive young person does wonders for her status, and Taylor could have played this for laughs: the real and impostor grandsons, the jealous old ladies, the hand-knit sweater with the too-long sleeves, intended for Desmond (real) but given to Ludo (fake). Instead, with the lightest of touches, Taylor indicates Ludovic’s own loneliness and his own sense of honor and independence. It’s honest and touching, but far from heart-warming. Much more interesting than that.

Penelope Lively, “The Photograph”

What a great premise for a novel: a character comes across an old photograph of his wife. She is surreptitiously holding hands with another man — her brother-in-law, actually. Our protagonist realizes, for the first time, that the two were having an affair. Now what?

A few years ago I heard Tom Stoppard, in a radio interview, say that doling out information in the right order and at the right pace is a major element of drama. Well, he would know — and so does Penelope Lively. I often think that sheer curiosity is what keeps most of us flicking over the pages of most books. Lively has structured The Photograph so that each chapter is told from the point of view of a different character. Glyn, the husband who finds the photo of his wife Kath, is a driven academic. Kath is obviously no longer in his life. Why not? Elaine, Kath’s equally driven sister, feels slightly guilty about Kath. Why? Nick, Elaine’s husband, the one who had the affair with Kath, remembers his sudden, feverish need to possess Kath who, we learn, was beautiful. Was. Hmmm.

Photo Dr. Tom Moore, Durham University

But Penelope Lively is too good a writer to occupy herself merely with a tale of a marriage that wasn’t all it seemed to be. She is also concerned with time. Glyn is a landscape historian: his subject is the way time operates on the land over thousands of years. Elaine, a landscape architect, works in the same field but on a shorter framework: again and again, Lively has Elaine assess a garden in terms of how it will look a few years hence. The other characters are preoccupied with time, too. They think about how they use it, where it goes, how you track it. Nick, Elaine’s husband, a feckless perpetual boy, is unconcerned at the passage of time until he suddenly perceives himself looking older. These characters have known each other for years, and as Glyn tries to find out more about Kath’s infidelity, chronology matters, too. When was this trip, what year did we go to the Roman villa?

Memory, of course, is time’s lodging in our minds. It’s were we keep our perceptions and our private narratives. But Lively shows us how erratic memory is. As Elaine examines the telltale photograph, she thinks, “It is as though both Kath and Nick have undergone some hideous metamorphosis. A stone has been cast into the reliable, immutable pond of the past, and as the ripples subside, everything appears different. The reflections are quite other; everything has swung and shattered, it is all beyond recovery. What was, is now something else.”

Eventually we put together a portrait of Kath, the girl in the photograph. Glyn’s view of her changes. Elaine’s, too. Perception and reality are measured against each other. Self-absorption is somewhat shaken. A new equilibrium emerges. Life goes on, as “something else.”

Penelope Lively, “Consequences”

Last time I read this book, Joanna Trollope had written it, and the title was Legacy of Love. Okay, I’m being flippant, but there is a Trollope book that links the love stories of three generations of women. And if Consequences is set more recently (the first section opens in the 1930s), Lively shares with Trollope a view of romantic love as a game-changing force.  We start with upper-class Lorna who meets artist Matt on a bench in a London park. Her daughter Molly doesn’t meet her Great Love until mid-life, and Molly’s daughter Ruth shares a similar fate. Further, there’s an element of luck in most of these connections. I would have found it all a little mawkish if it weren’t for Lively’s wonderful prose and her musing, throughout, about the curious behavior of time and our stubborn but inconclusive attempts to grapple with it.

What Matt's work looked like?

Cleverly, Lively makes Matt Faraday a wood-engraver, that is to say a man whose art-form involves both fiddly technical effort and a confusing series of transmutations as images are positive (the drawing), negative (the carving on the surface of the block), then positive again (the print). They are single (the drawing) and multiple (the print). And they are both of a certain period (1930s nostalgic graphic work) and eternal (country subjects like daffodils and church towers). This indeterminate looping structure persists through the book as various characters ruminate on the time/space dimensions in a way that actually seems quite natural.

And of course in writing about artistry of any time, Lively is also writing about narrative. One of her characters works for a spell in a library. “It sometimes seemed to Molly that the library was a place of silent discord and anarchy, its superficial tranquility concealing a babel of assertion and dispute. Fiction is one strident lie — or rather, many competing lies; history is a long narrative of argument and reassessment; travel shouts of self-promotion; biography is pushing a project… And all this is just fine. That is the function of books…” I had no idea it was strident lies I was addicted to, but I quite like the notion.