Plain talk

By Mursi Saad El-Din

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Penelope Lively grew up in Egypt and lived in it during World War II, but settled in England after the war. She wrote a number of books, mainly novels, but in Moon Tiger, the book I am reviewing here, she devotes a good part of it to the life of the novel's main character, Claudia, in Egypt. Moon Tiger, the title of the novel is a green oil that slowly burns all night. The novel is the life story of Claudia, with the usual love affair, which was born in Egypt and which ended there with the death of the lover, an officer who died in one of the many battles in what came to be called the North African Campaign.

It seems that the despair and the uncertainty of the war drove many into the sanctuary of love. The novel has many settings but Egypt stands out in it, Egypt which is in the words of Lively "an indestructible force that has perpetuated itself in the form of enough carved stone, painted plaster, papyri, granite, gold leaf, lapis lazuli, bits of pots and fragments of wood to fill the museums of the world."

Like many people before her, Claudia had known Egypt before she ever went there. She evokes Egypt as a continuos phenomenon, the kilted pharoanic population spilling out into the Nile valley of the 20th century, the chariots and the lotuses, Horus, and Ra and Isis, alongside with the Memluke mosques, the babbling streets of Cairo, Nasser's High Dam, the khaki convoys of 1942, the Edwardian opulence of Turkish mansions.

The author gives a description of her heroine's life in Egypt, where she lived from day to day, which was, of course a banality but it had a prosaic truth about it then. Death was unmentionable, says the author and was kept at bay with code-words and the careless understated style of the playing fields. She went to the Gezira club where the wives of English officers went and frequented the swimming pool. There, the heroine says, she met all sorts of people, laughed, danced and drank.

She describes brigadiers and colonels and majors of the 8th army who flitted like medieval barons between the battlefield and Cairo. They left their tanks to come back for a few days polo or some snipe shooting down at the Fayoum.

"The very form of the war itself," says the author "seemed to stress the analogy-siege tented armies, raids and skirmishes, a seasonal ebb and flow as the desert itself dictated advance and retrenchment. And as the myth of Rommel grew, it was as though Saladin himself lived again -- the cunning but gentlemanly enemy, giving not quarter but essentially chivalrous."

Memories are thrown here and there in the novel. There is the silver filigree brooch, a bottle of scent called 'Mystery of the Orient' the brass pyramid paperweight. Then there is the complex ring: the front of which is a little compartment with a conical lid that opens on a hinge. It is called a poison ring, says the shopkeeper.

For your enemies, straight out of the Arabian Nights." Tom, Claudia's lover, fills the little box with sand from Mokattam Hills, to which they have driven in the Ford V8. It is evening, the time when the hills, seen from Cairo, are lilac coloured. Claudia says that the sand should be blue, but it is not, it is the dull buff of sand everywhere.

I like the author's description of the Nile. "The Nile, at night," she writes, is jeweled. the bridges wear the necklaces of coloured lights; all along the banks the houseboats are ablaze, festoons with gold, glowing against the dark swirling patterned water. One of these houseboats is a nightclub, it throbs with music into the small hours."

There is so much in the novel about Egypt which reflects what I venture to call love. I would like to end with her description of Memphis: "There was once a city in Egypt called Memphis. I shall devote a great deal of space to Memphis, in my history of the world; it is salutary tale, the fate of Memphis, it nicely demonstrates the fragility of places. In pharoanic times Memphis was a sprawling acreage of houses temples, workshops-an administrative and religious centre, the seat of Government, a magnet for artists and craftsmen: Washington, Paris and Rome all rolled together on the banks of the Nile. Dikes protected it from inundation of the river. It sounds paradisial -- a city of palms and greenery on the richest silt where Upper Egypt and Lower Egypt meet, with majestic temples and sphinx-lined boulevards, the hub of the intelligent complex society completely out of step with the rest of the world, recording itself in the most imaginative, impenetrable and perverse religions of all time."