moon tiger spirals of memory

 Moon Tiger.  What an evocative title for a novel set in Egypt during the Second World War.  But it's  only deep in the heart of this book, in a love scene between protagonist Claudia and British army officer Tom, that we learn what moon tiger is.  Turns out a moon tiger is a mosquito repellent burning in a spiral, and gradually turning to ash.  When we discover this, we realize that this spiral corresponds to the overlapping memories in Claudia's life,  as she has recounted them in the novel.  She is with her lover Tom only briefly. But he is at the heart of her personal narrative, and we as readers understand this, even as nobody in her life understands.

Is personal history mostly a narrative carried in your head, independent of time and space?  Is destiny just what you make of it?   Claudia is an unconventional historian. In fact, chronology annoys her.  The novel unfolds as she is dying, as she reviews her life in a tumble of thoughts and disconnected associations. There are several voices, different narratives and many streams of thought in this remarkably spare novel.  But reading it feels like experiencing a whole life, a "myriad of Claudias".

There's Claudia's complicated relationship with her brother Gordon, to whom she measures every subsequent man in her life. There's her relationship with daughter Lisa,  a disappointment because, as we learn in other narratives,  Lisa hides her complexity from her mother as much as her mother hides her complexity from Lisa. Then there's Claudia's husband Jasper: "lover, sparing partner, father of her child."

The central section of the novel is set in Egypt - with her lover Tom in Claudia's narrative of her own life - and her losses connected to him.  Thus a difficult, overbearing and contentious personality becomes for the reader a lovable person with heartaches and complexity.

Then there's Claudia's relationship with Laslow - a Hungarian refugee who she takes on much later and who accepts her as she accepts him. Their relationship comes at the end of the book, and it's so  different to the one she has with her daughter.    "Laslow had always allowed his soul to hang out like coat tails and Gordon (her brother)  found this uncongenial.  He did not object to people having souls but preferred them tucked out of sight where they ought to be."

In the end, we find Claudia reading the diary of her lost lover. She has grown old without him.  He died so many years before so she left him in a different time and space.  Tom writes in the diary of the immediacy of life during the war, but  Claudia reflects, "Eventually we contemplate this apart. Years apart we are no longer in the same story...You are left behind in another place and other time....you are in some ways unreachable."

Oh, the inner lives we carry and then let go!  All those inner narratives! They're very different from the lives others conceive for us.  Things that are important to us, are unimportant to others.  Things we care about may matter not one bit, even to those who are closest in our lives.

It's as if we all are islands.  But as Penelope Lively writes, "we all act as hinges, fortuitous links between other people."