| Remembrance of Things Past |
May 1, 2009
Penelope Lively's book Moon Tiger won the Man Booker Prize in 1987. It is a good book, full of ideas and musings, mostly from the head of Claudia, its core narrator. The book moves back and forth in time, from Claudia's hospital bed where she is dying to events occurring during the over seventy years of her life. Claudia is a popular historian and from her hospital bed she is determined to write a history of the world, from Precambrian times to the present, interspersing her own life history into the mix. She promises to deliver her own view of events but will also allow the principal characters of her life their piece: she understands that history is a composite of "[m]any voices; all the voices that have managed to get themselves heard" and so, "since my story is also theirs", she allows others to speak in the novel: her brother, her daughter, her old lover and father of Lisa, her sister-in-law, and her adopted waif.
Lively is a skillful writer, excellent at weaving philosophical discourse about the nature of history and memory into an engaging story of a twentieth century woman. And yet this book left me cold. We were kept at a distance from the characters despite the full-bodied plot of sibling attachment, World War II romance, and modern motherhood; we witness a realization at the very end but no conversion. During the book there is no life-changing struggle, and no change. Claudia seems always to be at battle with something and never at peace; there is never a point of climax but always just Claudia, her own history and her history of the world revolving around her. People and places change around her but not Claudia herself.
Claudia is a tightly-wound, highly intelligent, competitive, exceedingly attractive, always elegant, supremely controlled and controlling individual throughout the novel and as such, she just did not engage me: she was not a genuine human being, she was a construct. We read description after description of her good looks: " brilliant in emerald green....attracting discreet looks." Never is a man untouched by her looks, never is an opportunity denied her, and rarely did I feel a real heart beat in her body: she was a creation of the author, an uber-woman and not a real woman.
Even when Claudia experiences what she calls the core event of her life, we as the readers were left out of the event. It is described to us but not felt or seen. And after the war, she is the same Claudia: the time spent in Cairo, the nights spent watching the coil of the moon tiger burn down (a mosquito repellant) and the horrors she witnessed, the losses she herself suffered, are stuck away in her memory, never to be shared. She forges on, tough as ever, and self-serving, self-protecting, and self-promoting.
Claudia claims that every person is many persons, each one from a different time in their life but she is only one Claudia: she is the same when she fights her brother to the top of the sea cliffs looking for ammonites, the same when she travels to visit her brother in America and takes on the actors in a historical village, the same when she hooks up with her ex-husband at her daughter's wedding, and the same when she takes in Lazlo as proof of her strength against the Communists. She is the same person when she falls in love in Cairo and she is the same one who never tells anyone, ever, about him. She is the same person who from beginning to end of the novel understands no one except for her brother.
Claudia and Gordon understand and love each other but their love is rarely expressed, except when young and on the edge of taboo -- "Oh bliss....Goodness what bliss....She savours the extraordinary feeling, this excitement....She has never felt like this before." It is the taboo of their attachment and its binding strength that I believe are the core of Claudia's life and the one aspect of her that seemed slightly human. Yet we are kept out of their relationship, as she and her brother keep everyone out of what happens between the two of them. Ironically, the only character from whom we receive full disclosure of feelings is one long dead (more about that, below). The other characters, for the most part, are guarded in what they reveal, and guardedness does not make for a great novel.
When we are let into Claudia's emotions, they are powerful, as when she returns finally to Cairo and finds that as much as things have changed, it is still there as it was for her forty-five years earlier: she cries "not in grief but in wonder that nothing is ever lost, that everything can be retrieved, that a lifetime is not linear but instant. That inside the head everything happens at once." Is she going to crack and let us in? No. But we get a glimpse, and we will again, when she recollects the loss of a child. But all other losses will be reported in such a way -- often in the third person -- to place distance between us and Claudia. I suppose Lively may have wanted to create that distance, it was in the character of Claudia to be hidden behind her persona. But as a reader, not an acquaintance or potential lover, I wanted more of Claudia. I think if the novel had been told exclusively in the first-person, we would have felt more connected to Claudia, her emotions would have impacted more. The third-person served to distance, sometimes at the most crucial moments of the story.
What I did like very much about this book are Lively's wonderful and numerous insights on history and memory. This book works best as a treatise on remembrance -- what is remembered and what is lost -- and not as well as a novel. Lively herself studied history and it is clear she has thought a lot about the nature of what we know of the past, how we relate to it, and how it is related, both physically and meta-physically to us. Physically, history comes to us through words. But whose words? Recordings from the past are points of view, evidence that must compiled along with other evidence. The viewpoint of the Aztecs is different from the viewpoint of Cortez. Gathering the evidence is seeking a story of events and in putting the pieces together, a history can be written in words.
Putting history into words is vitally important, it makes history physically available, it makes remembrance possible. I myself was struck by this when Lively has Claudia list the pan-Russian victims of World War II: "the million dead of Leningrad, the three million labour slaves from Belorussia and the Ukraine, the two million prisoners of Kiev, the quarter million maimed by frostbite, the twenty million... who were simply no longer citizens of Russia or indeed of anywhere by 1945." My relatives were among the labour slaves, my father was one without a citizenship, but rarely do you see such victims mentioned in novels or popular histories. But Lively does: she uses words to signal remembrance of people from my own history and underscored, for me, the power of words.
Using the actual words recorded during a specific time in the past provide an especially powerful use of words: when Claudia gains access to the journal of her soldier-lover, she feels for the first time the savagery and foolishness and absurdity of the desert war. And so do we, the reader. Because it is only in the pages of this journal that we finally find, in the whole novel, an opening of self, a revealing of self. If only we could have gotten to know Claudia in the same way.
Words themselves are a historical artifact, a living testament to our past: "We open our mouths and out flow words whose ancestries we do not even know. We are walking lexicons. In a single sentence of idle chatter we preserve Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Norse; we carry a museum inside our heads, each day we commemorate peoples of whom we have never heard....words are more durable than anything...they blow with the wind, hibernate and reawaken, shelter parasitic on the most unlikely hosts, survive and survive." To see words in such a way really interested me: we are all unaware historians, using artifacts from the past in our everyday life. The world history is played out in the words that survive.
Then there is the meta-physical connection of history to ourselves. Claudia talks about history as both public and "private; my view of you is my own, your relevance to me is personal." She was speaking at the time of the Plymouth pilgrims but is it is true of any history. That is what makes history like a good novel: the connections and motivations that we see, learn from, identify with, admire or disdain or are horrified by. History is always our own story, translated.
At the end of the novel Claudia does make the connection between the history of the people of her life, and her own personal history. Her place in their world and in the world at large are all part of her own internal interpretation of living: "[T]he past is true, which both appalls and uplifts me. I need it; I need you, Gordon, Jasper, Lisa, all of them. And I can only explain this need by extravagance: my history and the world's. Because unless I am a part of everything I am nothing."
Everyone lives within a tangled, interwoven history of past and present connections: the future may attempt to untangle the web into columns of influences and important events and cultural norms of our time, religious and political constructs that may explain why we twenty-first century folk are the way we are. But how do we attempt in our own times to understand the whys and hows and wherefores of ourselves?
One way we try to understand is through novels and films and popular histories. Media that can engage us and make us identify with the characters provide us with insight into ourselves. Lively has presented us with a novel that gets us thinking but I wish she could have provided a narrator that moved us beyond discussion to attachment and involvement, and gave us the best that a novel can give, the big sigh of satisfaction at the end. Satsifaction comes from a catharsis reached and self-knowledge (either our own or the character's) released: Claudia finds her way to understanding history but I am not certain she yet understands herself. I gave no sigh at the end of this book, I was not satisfied. I was provoked by the many ideas presented, and for that, Moon Tiger is a good book. But it is not a great book.
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