Halfway through reading this I wondered whether to give up - a shame because I like "Moon Tiger", but looking back through my notes I see that I nearly abandoned her "Beyond the Blue Mountains" collection too. Passages like the following don't work for me - "She couldn't think why she was married to him. What had possessed her? The world is full of men - men of every size, shape, persuasion, clever men, funny men, charming, potentially devoted men, men who would put the rubbish out without being asked, men who would fix a dripping tap, ravishingly handsome men who would send you weak at the knees, calm authoritative men you could rely on in a crisis, men destined to become prime minister" (p.25). The plots rarely work either. "The Weekend" has the most predictable one, doomed from "The swing moved" (p.81). "Point of view" has the best ending, and is my favourite piece. "The Bridge" is ok - 3 PoVs, though the withholding of information seems too artificial in the context, and there's already been enough retrospective assessments of lives/relationships - sections like "Arthouse movie stuff, memory is. Fragmented narrative, jumpy footage, much left out, allusions you've got to be sharp enough to pick up" (p.163) are diluted by predictable material.
There's a limited range of characters, though there is variety of other sorts - one story's written from the point of view of a bird in Pompeii, another is a series of interviews by a biographer of a deceased woman. These feel like missed opportunities. Too many times the pieces return to women assessing men by how many birthdays they remembered, women marrying before it's too late, and women wondering about childlessness, being the only child, whether it's too late to have a child, etc.
She used "hove" (past of "heave") at least 3 times.
Other reviews
- Christobel Kent
- Elizabeth Wassell (The 15 stories gathered in The Purple Swamp Hen, while not her best work, continue to explore Lively’s obsessions, not only with the mystery of memory, but with the tensions that develop when characters try to sustain a discipline of work while trying to build an intimate life with another person ... Yet like many of its companions in The Purple Swamp Hen, this story ends on a note which is, in fact, fey: a complicated narrative turned simplistic on the last page, as if the author had grown impatient with her characters, and decided to finish them off in a formulaic manner reminiscent of O. Henry. Perhaps these are tales rather than stories?)
- Goodreads
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