What an astonishing book she has given us. There is scarcely a murky thought in it though it was written by a woman who was exhausted and poisoned by the toxins generated by her dying liver. Consistently clear and acute in its perceptions, disciplined in its resistance to pathos and sentimentality, energetically in love with a language that unfailingly rewards her love, it is wonderfully responsive to life. One assumes, of course, that it was rewritten and polished – indeed, she thanks Michael Heyward, her publisher and editor, for being ‘probably the only person in Australia who could have forced [her] to see sense buried in what often seemed self-indulgent jottings’. Even so, hers is an achievement to marvel at.

Clendinnen had more than one reason to write. Illness left her feeling betrayed by her body, humiliated and bewildered by it. ‘Being able to make a story from nothing instead of concocting it out of elusive memories made me happy. It also relieved my fear of being trapped “inside”. My labelled body might be lying on my labelled bed, but my mind could be anywhere, keeping whatever company I chose.’ Writing about her illness, about her past and her parents brought unnerving discoveries.

While I have always known [memory] to be slippery (historians make a living from distrusting it) it was only when the unnatural solitude of illness made memory my full time companion that I came to appreciate the depths of its character defects – its unreliability, its affront at being questioned, its rage at being impugned, its incorrigible complacency even when caught out.

So she reflected on memory as it functions in memoir and history and finding more fiction in both than either would acknowledge, she reflected on fiction.

Tiger’s Eye gives us her thoughts about these matters, and also fiction and history she wrote when she was grievously ill. The fiction is in many voices and styles. The history is a fine study of Mr G.A. Robinson, ‘protector of Aborigines in Tasmania in the early days … somehow mixed up with Trugganini’. Readers will disagree, I’m sure, about whether the memoir, fiction and history illuminate one another, and especially about whether the mix illuminates the memoir. I was disappointed on both counts.

Suspicion of memory becomes most eloquent when Clendinnen writes about her mother. ‘I would like to understand her, to pay her that last courtesy; to see her, just for a moment, as she saw herself’, she says, but she surrenders that hope to despair, defeated while probing her mother’s ‘obdurate opacity’. ‘Writing mother’ is what she calls the section about her mother invoking, I think, the hope that she will discover her mother in the act of writing about her and the fear that she will merely concoct fictions.

Angry, resentful, tender, forgiving – Clendinnen is all of these things and always passionate. If those responses, including the anger, are not quite forms of love, they are informed by a grief-stricken (and aggrieved) love that stitches together almost every sentence she writes about her mother. In ‘Writing mother’, Clendinnen is troubled, passionate, stricken with unreconciled emotions. Exposing her mother’s vulnerability she reveals her own. In ‘Reading father’, she is calm, the writing is more episodic, but, she seems to say, not more reliable.

As though true to her own suspicion that we construct ourselves out of serial identities, Clendinnen speaks in many voices. And it is sometimes hard to put together in one person, the collected, wise late middle-aged woman whose sympathy for a desperately frightened middle-aged Greek with a handsome moustache, ‘desolate as a lost child’, ‘unmanned’ ‘by the loneliness of the long hospital night’ tempted her to ‘move over and pull over the bedclothes and tell him to hop in [because] all he needed was a bit of physical contact’; the passionate, torn, late middle-aged daughter, grieving for her mother, dead, and for what her mother might have been and fearful that she might yet become like her; and the cool, detached historian who tells the story of Mr Robinson. She says she likes Robinson and clearly she does, but with a touch of condescension.

I find it hard to find the right words for what makes me uneasy about the way Clendinnen sometimes takes the measure of Robinson (and others). They must describe an attitude that is consistent – as the haughtiness and arrogance she is sometimes accused of are not – with her profoundly humane perception of the often troubled, often bodily, need people have of one another. That perception shows in many ways throughout this book and often graces it with a tender beauty.

An answer suggests itself to me when I reflect on her explanation of the book’s title. She tells of an experience that enabled her to resist ‘the threat of the violations of self’ by the humiliations of hospital life – an experience which ‘emancipated her from the terror of shrivelling death’. It was not moral nor religious, nor metaphysical, she says, but aesthetic. Grace came by way of the ‘beauty and completeness of [the tiger’s] natural being’.

She is right to believe that ‘moral’ and ‘religious’ would be misleading words to describe her experience, at least as we ordinarily mean them. But so is ‘aesthetic’ in its ordinary meaning. This is, after all an experience that transformed her understanding of some of the deepest aspects of her life. ‘Ethical’ has its virtues but they are compromised because it is often used interchangeably with ‘moral’, and when it is not it is spoiled by an unfortunate and inconsistent history of pedantry that tries to explain the difference. Because of its essential connection to vulnerability and suffering, ‘spiritual’ would be a good word if only we could think of what it might refer to (the love of truth, for example) apart from religion or the shallow fascination with spiritualism that was fashionable the nineteenth century and is again today. Lacking a language that lives for us in a way that would enable her to appropriate the concepts she needs, Clendinnen, passionately moral but ferociously hostile to moralising, seems attracted to throwing in her lot with aesthetes. She doesn’t really belong, but their distinctive complacency is sometimes faintly recognisable in her urbanity, and Mr Robinson is occasionally its victim.

Clendinnen writes with delicate insight about the way others are mysterious to us and (differently) we to ourselves. Occasionally, however, she flirts with – sometimes she embraces – radical theses about the impossibility of reliable memory of the kind that must inform memoir and about the illusory nature of the self that is assumed to be remembered.

To put it more elaborately: it may not only be a question of whether I state my memories truthfully (sometimes), or whether I remember accurately (I do and I don’t), but whether the ‘I’ is sufficiently continuous to claim possession of these early memories at all.

Nothing she writes supports that. Nor would ways of putting together her memoir, history and fiction support it. On these matters Clendinnen’s fluency betrays her judgment and seduces her into writing sentences I doubt that she means and that are sometimes irredeemably obscure. Perhaps that is why she doesn’t see that she has left these radical claims unsupported and, more interestingly, that nothing of the kind she says or does could support them. They require conceptual clarification and argument that only philosophy in partnership with literature can deliver.

Be that as it may: whatever one makes of her speculations about history, memoir, and fiction, in this book she conscientiously separates them. Were I to discover that she hadn’t I would cease to find it wonderful. More even than the account of her illness, it is her account of her parents and of their sad life together that moves me most. The way it moves me depends on my trust in its truthfulness – a kind of truthfulness inconsistent with memoir that is mixed with fiction. Drusilla Modjeska mixes them and it doesn’t trouble me. Poppy is one kind of book, Tiger’s Eye is another and I have nothing much of a general nature of to say that would explain my sense of their difference. But nothing Clendinnen says, directly or by way of putting memoir, fiction and history between the same covers, makes me think I am naïve to trust her; still less that I am naïve to believe that there is something substantial that truth, truthfulness and the effort to seeing things as they are come to here.

Again and again while reading Tiger’s Eye, I wanted to read passages aloud, to myself and to others – to savour the writing, to share the pleasure and to assure myself that it really is as fine as it seemed. It is, page after page. When I did read it aloud – especially when I read about her mother about her dying father and her beautiful elegy to her brother, dead for thirty years (‘Now he rests quietly enough, just below the breastbone, where grief has hollowed a place for him’) – my voice betrayed my efforts to control my tears.