Cold light

Cold Light is about power, secrecy, the mortal struggle between capitalism and communism, – and urban planning. This compelling story is set in the still largely empty spaces of Canberra, a mere 23 years after its founding.

Edith Campbell Berry, the heroine of two earlier novels by Frank Moorhouse, worked at the League of Nations in Geneva. Now she is back in Australia, in search of a good job. But she is a woman in 1950s Canberra, and as the newly elected Menzies Government is introducing a bill to ban the Communist Party, she discovers that her brother, Frederick, is an active communist. Edith gets a job, but is denied her ambition to become Australia’s first female ambassador. Instead, she is caught up with the planners designing the capital and the dream that it should be “a city like no other.”

Frank Moorhouse once lamented the fact that, despite all their riches of human experience, Australian novelists had disdained the realms of government and business as ciphers too corrupt and foul for their art. But writing by journalists, academics and policy wonks cannot provide a complete understanding of our society. Fiction also has a vital role; for some readers, the vital role. Hopefully Australian culture is broad and rich enough to produce more novels like Cold Light.

From the Grattan Institute's 2011 summer reading list for the Prime Minister.