Grand Days

Grand Days is a entertaining and insightful book which is in equal parts a coming of age story, a political thriller and a how-to guide for bureaucrats. The book tells the story of the grandly named Edith Campbell Berry, who arrives in Geneva in the mid 1920s as an impractical idealist and ends up as a somewhat jaded, but still idealistic, international bureaucrat. Moorhouse is very successful in drawing out Berry's transitions and changing views of the world and despite its length the book is a very easy and entertaining read. I did feel, however, that the last third of the book gets bogged down a little as Berry struggles to reconcile her changing ideology with her relationships. All up, Grand Days is a very worthwhile novel and manages to be both entertaining and educational.

Moorhouse, better known as a writer of experimental fiction in Australia, takes a stab at historical fiction with brilliant results. The basic story--the education of a young Australian woman at the League of Nations in Geneva in the 1920s--barely hints at all the strange, insightful, and moving places the novel goes. This is a story about idealism and corruption--both personal and on the world stage--that it unlike anything else you've read. It's long and it's very very smart--still the fact that it's not better known and aclaimed is very puzzling.

This novel is about Edith Campbell Berry, a bright young lady who joins the League of Nations and sets about to reform the world. She has a strong, but undisciplined intellect, able to view her mundane tasks, such as seeing that delegates get a pencil holder at a conference, as matters of world shaking importance. She is even able to intellectualize the act of defecation. Thinking herself a modern woman, she engages in lots of kinky sex. In all of this, the author manages to recreate the intellectual passions of the age. Indeed, Edith's superiors do not seem to be any more effective than she is. And then, somewhere along the way, Edith is no longer the innocent Candide, but becomes something much more sinister, destroying a lover without giving him a chance to explain himself and developing a passion for eugenics to reduce the numbers of the "lower classes" (interestingly, she shows no concern with the huge election gains of the Nazi Party in Germany at this time). Yet there is no abrupt transition: Edith, like many 20th Century intellectuals, has developed along logical lines unhampered by morality, a route which leads to tyranny. If you want keen insight into how civilized countries developed death camps and gulags and how leading intellectuals supported them every step of the way, read this book. That the author avoids having his message overwhelm the generally comic tone is a tribute to his skill. This book is a classic. It even has appendices in the back to provide the reader with information ranging from the constitution of the League of Nations to a summary of many of the intellectual developments of the 1920s.