As Cold Light opens, four years have passed since the League of Nations officially ceased to exist. It is 1950, and Edith and Ambrose are newly back in her home country of Australia, staying at the Hotel Canberra; Ambrose is acting as Counsellor for the British High Commission, and Edith is confident that a woman of her experience and expertise will be, as she puts it, ‘snapped up’ for some plum position in the new national capital. What she really wants is to become Australia’s first female ambassador.

But this is postwar, pre-feminist Australia. Edith, who has fibbed about her age in both directions on a number of occasions, now has a little trouble remembering it, but she is roughly the same age as the century, which makes her fiftyish as well as being a married woman: not a likely candidate for important work, or indeed for work at all, despite her obvious sophistication and extensive experience. So she is already floundering a little when, not long after her arrival back in Australia, her entire sense of her own personal and professional self is tipped off balance when she receives an unexpected visitor at her hotel. And this is the point at which the novel begins: ‘“I’m your brother,” he said, holding his cap in both hands.’

For anyone who had forgotten that Moorhouse is a master of narrative, this opening line is a sharp reminder; the wealth of untold back-story in a sentence like that makes it almost a short story in itself. Into Edith’s life, willy-nilly, comes the brother she has not seen for more than a quarter of a century, since he was seventeen and she was twenty-two. By the time they have exchanged a few tentative sentences, it is clear that her brother Frederick has the power to change the course of her life. For Frederick has for many years been a member of the Communist Party of Australia; estranged from the family since his late teens, he is now a potential threat to Edith’s diplomatic ambitions. They have never had an adult relationship: should she now embrace her only sibling or reject him? From the first page, Moorhouse sets up the third act of a drama that has shaped Edith’s entire adult life: the friction between private and public life, and the constant need for negotiation and rebalancing between them.

Edith has found equilibrium of a kind in marriage to her longstanding colleague and ally, the mercurial and enigmatic Ambrose, after a disappointing first marriage ended in divorce. Ambrose has played and continues to play many roles in life: medical doctor, officer in the British Army, bisexual cross-dresser, spy. He has been Edith’s friend, lover, and now husband, their life together defying labels: ‘And the word husband, she knew, was a lid, which, with Ambrose, did not screw on properly. A lavender marriage … Maybe there was no description for what they had. She should find another flower with which to describe it.’

Neither her marriage with Ambrose nor the job she is eventually offered in Canberra can be easily defined, and neither, as it turns out, is permanent. Unlike most women of her age, Edith continues to explore new ways of being in the world. In the meantime, she must now also negotiate the process of ageing, and some of the strange desires and disillusionments that ageing brings. She finds herself hankering for something for which she has never before felt the need – a family – and it causes her to make one of the biggest mistakes of her life.

The end of the book finds her ambition fulfilled in a way she could not have foreseen; building on her university education in science, she has become something of an expert on uranium. She finds herself travelling in the mid-1970s to Vienna and then to Israel on an unofficial fact-finding mission about international policies on uranium and its uses at the behest of Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, who has named her role as ‘eminent person’, though she prefers ‘special envoy’. Even now, her role in public life is influential but ill-defined.

Edith prides herself on her ability to negotiate the liminal zones between defined or absolute states: she is a collaborator and partner with Ambrose in his sexual tastes while continuing to cultivate the era’s idea of stylish womanliness, and she can entertain substantial sympathies with her communist brother while continuing to work for the conservative government, and betraying, she hopes, neither. Edith’s adroitness at negotiating borders in private and intellectual life mirrors her sense of self as an internationalist: if I had to say in one phrase what this book is about, the answer would be ‘the art of living without borders’. 

In the great tradition of the ‘novel of ideas’, Moorhouse creates a vehicle for ideas through the use of highly articulate and educated characters who spend much of their life thinking and talking about such things and in whose mouths the conversations about them seem natural. In Edith’s case, this extends to her habit of lively and unstinting self-interrogation and reflection:

She had argued with herself about commerce. It did produce innovation and efficiency, which was for the public good, but more often than not it was driven by simple-minded infantile need for profit, which blinded businesses to the public good and the welfare of their workers. They did not ask themselves whether what they manufactured and sold was harmful.

The phrase ‘historical fiction’ – at least in the Australian context – generally brings to mind convicts and bonnets, and these things have an honourable place in our literature; but in this novel Moorhouse is exploring the comparatively recent past. The 1950s in Australia were chronicled at the time by some of the writers who lived through them, but there is relatively little treatment of that era in contemporary Australian fiction. Moorhouse does not labour the question of dates, except where specific historical events are important to the plot, as with Robert Menzies’ failed attempts in 1951 to outlaw the Communist Party of Australia. There is a sense in which this novel’s landscape is as much the intellectual history of Australia as its social and political history.

So the ‘Who is Who’ section at the end of the book shows that most of the named characters, though none of the major ones, were or are actual people. There are memorable cameo appearances by Menzies and Whitlam, discussion among the characters of the influence of communist historians Ian Turner and Stephen Murray-Smith and writers Judah Waten and Frank Hardy, and much musing on Edith’s part about the influence of the Bloomsbury Group on the way that she and Ambrose have developed their ideas about sexual love and friendship, and on the way their own complex relationship has evolved. As with much of the best historical fiction, the main characters are invented creations who act out their fates in the interstices of a recorded history brought back to life by the drama of their story. Moorhouse is very specific, in a short foreword and again in the detailed notes at the end, about the difference between history and fiction, and clearly doesn’t want to cause a re-ignition of the acrimonious debates in Australia from a few years back about the proper relationship between the two.

This novel is many other things besides, and contains elements of such fundamental storytelling categories as romance, adventure, and quest. In the scope and depth with which it explores both the era at the level of international relations and the workings of the inner life in all its tiny nuance and fleeting detail, this novel would be an extraordinary achievement on its own; as the third instalment of the massive project that is ‘the Edith Trilogy’, it may be unique in the history of Australian fiction. Or perhaps not quite: it kept reminding me of that other great historical Australian trilogy, The Fortunes of Richard Mahony. In the imagination of Australian readers, Edith Campbell Berry may come to stand for her country and her century in the same way that Richard Mahony does for his.