Tring Book Club - Stuart a life backwards and Moon Tiger

Someone at book club suggested we might try a biography for a change, and we settled on the life story of Stuart Shorter by Alexander Masters. This is his first book, and at the very end, there is an excellent article by Josh Lacey about how the author got to know an ex-homeless, ex?-druggie, chaotic man called Stuart. It was only through a growing friendship that Masters was able to tell the whole life story after years of interviews with family and friends, and many conversations with his subject.

Stuart Shorter is a complex character. An explanation for his descent into crime, drugs and mental instability only comes later as we travel back in time to his youth and childhood. For me, the book stirred many emotions, anger, sympathy and everything in between. If I saw him on the street, I would probably cross the road to avoid him. Although he would probably not blame me for doing so. On the one hand he is a vile, unscrupulous layabout who has hardly ever had a job and relies on the state to maintain his drug habit. But the causes of his chaotic lifestyle are too heavy for us to be judgemental, and Stuart clearly has some intelligence, humour and goodness that is not always apparent.

The years of research and putting together the novel way of telling the story backwards has certainly paid off in what is a moving account of one of life's losers. Or is he? Alexander Masters lets us make up our own minds.

None of us had ever read a book by Penelope Lively, although she is a very prolific and gifted writer. Moon Tiger won the Booker Prize in 1987, and I am not surprised. Claudia is an ill old woman, in hospital, and is writing "a history of the world ..... and in the process my own". She is visited by family and friends, and she looks back on her life with them. But they have their own point of view, and the author cleverly uses the third person, sometimes from more than one person's perspective to complement Claudia's first person (and amazingly third person) memories.

Lively's writing is therefore technically very interesting, but more than that it is high class and is so modern, it could have been written today. She has a wonderful way with words:

History is of course crammed with people like Mother, who are just sitting it out. It is the front liners who are the exception.

..... of  course, intelligence is always a disadvantage. Parental hearts should sink at the first signs of it.

There are times when I thought things got a little tedious. The visit to Plymouth Plantation and some exploration in Egypt come to mind. But apart from that, this is a terrific story, and the final third is brilliant. I shall be reading another of her novels soon.