Grand Days by Frank Moorhouse
Sydney: Vintage, 2000 (first published 1993) ISBN 1740510372
I remember when this book was first published thinking what an odd thing for an Australian writer to choose as subject matter, and as a student of history and politics myself, thinking "I must read that". It's hard to believe that it's taken more than thirty years since publication before I managed to get between the covers.
Frank Moorhouse is a writer I've never really warmed to - a part of the Sydney Push that produced many opinionated males (and females) who seemed to spend most of their time in print showing us all how superior they were to other Australians. Some of them, like Clive James, became bigger fish in bigger ponds and lost their strident nature, others like Robert Hughes went overseas and became even more strident. Moorhouse mostly stayed home, and became a raconteur and part of that part of the establishment establishment that are fashionably anti-establishment.
But, just to confound me, in 1993 he published this book about a young brash ingenue from Australia who travels to Geneva to join the secretariat of the League of Nations. Edith Campbell Berry is a wonderful literary creation - not without flaws for sure - and a great achievement.
Moorhouse has skilfully entwined real history with his story, capturing the spirit of the times in which it was hoped that the League presaged a change in how states would deal with other after the Great War. Edith is a true believer in the power of the League and the book follows, not exactly a disillusionment, but a growing understanding by her of the limits of ideology, of power, and of cooperation when it comes to changing how the world works.
The novel also follows Edith's personal growth, learning about friendship and love. Moorhouse puts her in several unusual positions throughout the book, positions which make her question what sort of person she is, and where she wants to go with her life. She has two main romantic entanglements during the book, the first with Ambrose Westwood, who turns out to be a cross-dressing spy, and then with Robert Dole, a cynical reporter.
It took me a while to get in to this book as I found Edith at first a hard character to warm to, with her rigid ways of thinking and acting. Eventually I came to realise that was part of Moorhouse's art - we first see Edith as a rather stiff and priggish colonial who over the course of the novel becomes a more mature woman and, as she had hoped from the opening pages, an "internationalist".
Moorhouse doesn't pull any punches in terms of Edith's sexual experiences either, and personally this is the part of Edith's character that seemed at times to be forced on to her by the author. The things that she gets up to, and that occur to her sometimes seem like they've been tacked on, rather than things that drive the story forward. Her scatological thoughts also seem out of place.
These are only minor quibbles - Edith Campbell Berry is a multi-faceted character, and Grand Days is a kaleidoscope of a book. The 700 pages went by much faster than I thought they would, and it left me wanting more. Thankfully there are two more books to go in what has become known as the Edith Trilogy, and it won't take me long to start the next, Dark Palace.
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