Penelope Lively, Moon Tiger

light-switches & deviled eggs

“We went to some café and drank dense reeking tea out of those cups half an inch thick.”

Early in a project the writer toggles, like a bored kid playing with a light switch, between first and third person. I left the house in a tremendous hurry or He left the house in a tremendous hurry?

Which is brighter? Is the intimacy and urgency of the first person worth the slightly smothering feeling of closeness, the diminishment of freedom? (How am I going to smuggle a scene not witnessed by the narrator into this book? A letter?)

Is the perspective and cool professionalism of the third person (Tolstoy, Flaubert … and me??) worth the potential lapse into the language of SAT word problems, the feeling of narrative arbitrariness? (Who is telling this story? Why do I feel like I’m sitting on a tree stump, addressing a group of children?)

In Moon Tiger — a dreamy, ingenious, Booker-winning novel from 1987 — Penelope Lively sidesteps this entire morass. She gives us a scene in the first person, and then gives us the same scene in third, and then later she might give it to us again from yet another character’s third person. She makes light-switch-toggling an integral part of the performance.

She isn’t the first writer to try to have it both ways, of course. But usually this perspectival unsteadiness comes with a whiff of transgression, of smoke rising from a literary chemistry set. Think of Denis Johnson’s famous and mysteriously powerful lurch into the second person at the end of “Car Crash While Hitchhiking” (“And you, you ridiculous people…”) or the dizzying opening pages of Barry Hannah’s Ray (“Ray is thirty-three… Ray, you are a doctor… I have magnificent children.”)

In Moon Tiger the shifts between first and third, third and first, feel more like someone shuffling handwritten pages on a pleasantly cluttered wooden desk. You notice it, of course, but you’re never jarred by it. You’re refreshed, actually. It feels like the natural, fluid movements of a mind just on the edge of sleep.

And it ought to feel like that, because Moon Tiger is about a seventy-something historian, Claudia, sketching out a history of the world (in the course of which she can’t help but recollect her life) while dying in a hospital bed.

But I’m making the book sound awfully gauzy, when it is in fact wonderfully sharp.

Here’s Claudia remembering her blinkered, private mother, who could never quite bear to discuss Claudia’s father, killed in the Battle of the Somme:

On her dressing-table stood a photograph of Father, trim in his uniform, eternally young, his hair recently clipped, his moustache a neat shadow on his upper lip; no red hole in his stomach, no shit no screams no white singing pain.

(Singing!)

And here she is on Mexico (one of the pleasures of the history-of-the-world conceit is that we get lots of these lecturer-after-a-few-drinks sketches):

I wrote my Mexico book out of incredulity. Hernando Cortez cannot be true. There cannot have been a human being so brave, so charismatic, obstinate and apparently indestructible. How could anyone be so greedy, fanatical, and unimaginative as to lead a few hundred men into an alien continent of whose topography he was ignorant, swarming with a race devoted to the slaughter and sacrifice of strangers, in order to take prisoner their leader in his own capital city? And succeed.

But watch how expertly Lively manages the shifts between the third and first person; how she turns each movement into a little canteen sip of pleasure for the reader.

Two thirds of the way through, we’re watching Claudia, who’s spent World War II reporting on battles in Egypt, reunite with her brother Gordon. She and Gordon have, at various points, been almost scandalously close.

And then she steps forward and kisses him… She smells foreign and expensive… Claudia is talking about a mark on his face.

‘That’s my war wound. Some repellent Indian skin disease. Is it that conspicuous? You, I’m glad to see, are quite unscarred.’

‘Am I?’ she says. ‘Good.’

‘But your hair’s red. I remembered it brown.’

‘My hair was always considered red. It was one of the things Mother held against me, from infancy. How is she?’

We get a line break. And then this:

We went to some café and drank dense reeking tea out of those cups half an inch thick. I kept staring round me; London, the buildings, the people, the buses and taxes, had the same unreal quality as Gordon himself…

See that? The action is so seamless — she and Gordon are talking on the train platform and then they’re going out for tea — that the shift barely registers. The reader and Lively are a pair engaged in conversation, stepping mid-sentence off the curb and onto the cobblestone street, pace unaltered.

But that We, after all those she’s and he’s, does feel quietly intimate. We went to some café and drank dense reeking tea out of those cups half an inch thick. I experience it like the underwater fullness of the moment when, after listening to something on speakerphone for a while, you put in your AirPods and the voices are suddenly here. (And notice how Lively enhances the effect by accelerating through the transition: dense reeking tea — no comma; those cups half an inch thick — short words from which all the ordinary chatty interpolations (those cups, seen so often in cafés catering to commuters, with little handles so inhospitable to platform-chilled fingers…) have been trimmed).

You could, I think, write a fairly creditable English paper about how these shifts in perspective represent Claudia’s mental processes as she lets go of her identity, or the subjectivity of history. But I’m most interested in them as technical feats, as hosting moves to be copied. Readers, like party-guests, appreciate change. First we’re in the kitchen, then we’re in the living room. We’re eating crackers and then we’re eating deviled eggs. The overhead lights go off and the lamps come on. We register the pleasure but not the cause.