Edith Campbell Berry heading from Paris to Geneva by train meets Englishman Ambrose Westwood. She is an Australian on her way to take up a position with The League of Nations. Major Ambrose Westwood is a doctor who served in World War I, a former British Foreign Office executive he also works at the League, in the Office of the Secretary General.

The first conversation sets the tone of this central relationship in the story. Edith is altruistic, enthusiastic and eerily confident and, as she soon shows, eager to ensure that her life is rich with adventure. Westwood is urbane, bantering, smooth and experienced in ways that Edith does not, in this first encounter, even imagine.

In Geneva Edith embraces her new role. Her eagerness to live the ideals of the League races ahead of the development of good judgement. She sails through a number of scrapes that see her far exceed her authority and she amazes even herself with ability to both dissemble and improvise. Nevertheless her commitment and enterprise win her friends and support in the League.

Meanwhile, her bond with Ambrose develops and he introduces her into the gender-crossing, cabaret-loving, night dwelling world of the Molly Club – a world that leaves her intrigued and deeply aroused.

By day Edith is absorbed by the diplomatic world of the League – she ponders the need for a voting regime to express more complex views than “yes”, “no” or “abstain”; she analyses the shape of a meeting table for its obvious and implied meaning; and, she studies the standard and arrangement of the stationery for the values it might project to meeting delegates

When Edith realises that Ambrose, now her lover, “girlfriend” and mentor in diplomacy and matters of taste, is spying on the league for the British Foreign Office she turns him in, and Ambrose is sent away. Edith finds herself seduced by journalist Robert Dole, whom she marries.

Moorhouse is an extraordinary writer who constantly analyses the rules that govern human behaviour even those hidden in uncomfortable and libidinous corners of human nature. He is also fascinated by bureaucracy, so we have the charter of the League reprinted in one of the extensive appendices to the novel. Moorhouse has established a complete understanding of the operation of the “Registry”, the communication hub of the League, and describes this in a three page explanation at the end of the book which is followed by a quick discussion of the importance of the duplicating machine in the operations of the league.

Moorhouse has created a wonderfully energetic heroine in Edith; a complex and tragic anti-hero in Ambrose, and set them to work in a vividly realised organisation whose detailed and futile operations are depicted through very fine writing and mastery of considerable research and resource material.