Cold Light
It is 1950, the League of Nations has collapsed and the United Nations has rejected all those who worked and fought for the League.
Edith Campbell Berry, who joined the League in Geneva before the war, is out of a job. With her sexually unconventional husband, Ambrose, she comes back to Australia to live in Canberra.
Edith now has ambitions to become Australia’s first female ambassador, but while she waits for a Call from On High, she gets caught up in the planning of the national capital and the dream that it should be ‘a city like no other’. When her communist brother, Frederick, turns up after many years of absence, she becomes concerned that he may jeopardise her chances of becoming a diplomat. It is not a safe time to be a communist in Australia or to be related to one, but she refuses to be cowed by the anticommunist sentiment sweeping the country.
It is also not a safe time or place to be ‘a wife with a lavender husband’. After pursuing the Bloomsbury life for many years, Edith finds herself fearful of being exposed. Unexpectedly, in mid-life she also realises that she yearns for children. When she meets a man who could offer not only security but a ready-made family, she consults the Book of Crossroads and the answer changes the course of her life.
Intelligent, poignant and absorbing,
Cold Light
is a remarkable novel, which can also be read as a companion to the earlier Edith novels
Grand Days
and
Dark Palace
.
Lunch or Luncheon or Dinner or
Obed
Two Footmen in Crimson Livery with Powdered Wigs, Carried on a Silken Cushion
Dinner at the Lodge, and Adam Lindsay Gordon
‘Let us despair; let us despair awfully and enormously’
Mistress of the Capitolium: Spinning the World on One’s Thumb
Arthur Circle – Householders, Homemakers, Homebodies
‘And we have done those things we ought not to have done / And there is no health in us’
Dilemmas of Her Own: the Test at Alpha Island
The British Secret Intelligence Service
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights
The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty
The Communist Party of Australia
The Name of the Communist Party
The Communist Party and Espionage
The Art of Living in Australia
The Lampshade Shop Case Dishonour Roll
A City Like No Other – The Planning of Canberra
To DAVID ELLIOTT GYGER, OAM, editor, opera critic – my first mentor, who, when I was young, introduced me to all that is best in traditional American liberal values, arts, thought and manners – and much more.
And to OWEN HARRIES, professor, foreign affairs analyst, editor, ambassador, friend and advisor over many years and, together with his wife, Dorothy, charming dinner table companions.
The International Atomic Energy Agency’s fortunes are uniquely geared to those of a single, relatively new and controversial technology that can be used either as a weapon or as a practical and useful tool, that has almost infinite capacity to inflict harm but that also has an almost infinite potential to generate the energy on which the world will increasingly depend in the coming centuries to improve the conditions of life of its growing population.
History of the International Atomic Energy Agency – The First Forty Years
, David Fischer, 1997.
*
Circe: . . . we’ll breed deep trust between us . . .
Ulysses: . . . not until you consent to swear, goddess, a blinding oath you’ll never plot some new intrigue to harm me!
Straightway she began to swear the oath that I required –
never, she’d never do me harm . . .
Homer,
The Odyssey
, Book 10, translated by Robert Fagles, 1966.
*
Twirl went pale. Nierenstein blurted, ‘How can the Congress of the World do without this valuable material I’ve collected with so much love?’
‘The Congress of the World?’ said don Alejandro. He laughed scornfully. I had never before heard him laugh.
‘There is a mysterious pleasure in destruction,’ he said.
The Congress
, Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Norman Thomas di Giovanni in collaboration with the author, from a special issue of fifty copies by Enitharmon Press, London, 1974.
*
A similar movement is going on before our own eyes. Modern bourgeois society, with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spell . . .
The Communist Manifesto
, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, 1848, translated by Samuel Moore in cooperation with Frederick Engels, 1888.
*
What’s this war in the heart of nature?
Why does nature vie with itself?
The land contend with the sea?
Is there an avenging power in nature?
The Thin Red Line
, James Jones, 1962.
*
The past is unpredictable.
Old joke from the Soviet Union.
This book is, in part, based on the dramatic reconstruction of real people, identified by their actual names, and on fictional characters, who sometimes embody features of people who existed at the time (see Who is Who in the Book). Where people who actually existed say anything substantial, their words are taken from documentary sources or constructed within the context of existing evidence or from the author’s personal knowledge of the person.
All the substantial events depicted (and quite a few of the insubstantial events) are inspired by documentary sources.
The book is about how things were or might have been: but, above all, it is a work of the imagination. It is a novel.
