Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively

I read this novel when it won the Booker Prize in 1987 and now it has surfaced again at the local library book club I’m reading it again. Like most novels I admire, it is short by today’s standards (208 pages) and beautifully written.
She lies awake in the small hours. On the bedside table is a Moon Tiger. The Moon Tiger is a green coil that slowly burns all night, repelling mosquitoes, dropping away into lengths of grey ash, its glowing red eye a companion of the hot insect-rasping darkness. She lies there thinking of nothing, simply being, her whole body content.
The structure is masterful. Claudia, a successful and popular historian, is dying. From her hospital bed visitors come and go; fragments of streams of consciousness criss-cross back and forth: scenes from childhood, adolescence, all that has been and might have been had history not got in the way. Her lover Tom’s journal, sent to her after his death, is particularly poignant, even more so given that a dying woman, the woman he loved so fleetingly, would want to read it one last time.
I did not particularly care for Claudia but her relationship with Tom made her seem warmer somehow and perhaps excused her behaviour there after, having lost the love of her life.
Penelope Lively writes exquisitely about the every day, in contemporary London as in war-torn Egypt.
It is a grey winter afternoon, glittering with car lights, street lights, gold, red, emerald, the black rainy pavements gleaming, the shop windows glowing Wagnerian caves. He talks of events that have not yet come about and sees light and texture, the kaleidoscope of fruit outside a greengrocer, the mist of rain on a girl's cheek.

I saw the cluttered intense life of the fields and villages – and I saw the stark textural immensity of the desert, the sand carved by the wind, the glittering mirages, It has the delicacy of a water-colour – all soft grey-greens and pale blues and fawns and bright browns. I saw it through him and with him. Now, he and that place are one, fused in the head to a single presence of his voice and his touch, those sights and those smells.

My late father spent the war years in the Middle East and I find myself thinking of him and his time spent there. One day I too will visit Egypt and take a trip down the River Nile.