BOOK REVIEW / NOVEL : A Haunting Journey Back to an Era When Doves Cried : GRAND DAYS <i> by Frank Moorhouse</i> ; Pantheon $24, 592 pages

Edith Berry Campbell, beginning her diplomatic career at the newly formed League of Nations in the mid-1920s, has received a letter from one Annie Dickinson, founder of an orphanage in Yugoslavia populated by victims of the Great War.

Dickinson wishes the League great success and wants to donate to the organization a beautiful, dove-emblazoned chair made by children in the orphanage’s workshop.

Although Edith knows that gifts are problematic for the League, she takes matters into her own hands and agrees, through unauthorized correspondence, to accept the chair. Edith strongly believes in principles and policies and accepted rules of conduct but, as she explains to a colleague when the chair arrives in Geneva, exceptions must sometimes be made.

“That chair has to have a place in our lives or we are living our lives wrongly and running this League wrongly,” she says. “This chair is a test of us all!”

The chair incident is a minor but emblematic moment in “Grand Days,” the first volume in the League-based Palais des Nations series produced by Australian writer Frank Moorhouse. It would be a striking novel set in any period, well-written and peopled with engaging characters, but Moorhouse’s choice of time frame makes “Grand Days” especially poignant; the hopes and idealism expressed in Geneva in the 1920s are shadowed by the reader’s knowledge that the League of Nations is destined to be a noble failure.

League representatives acquit themselves splendidly in “Grand Days,” its admirable heroine Edith prominently among them, yet it’s apparent the international conflicts that eventually destroyed the organization--and seem to paralyze its successor even today--are far beyond their powers of control.

It would be a mistake to label “Grand Days” a novel of diplomacy, however, for although it touches on international relations, Moorhouse’s main interest is in personal negotiations of everyday life.

Edith, an Australian, is a born diplomat, but what she negotiates in Geneva isn’t so much seating arrangements and executive statements as the differences between individuals. She takes diplomacy personally, and “Grand Days” chronicles the various levels of intimacy she seeks, permits and occasionally discourages, with friends and co-workers, acquaintances and strangers.

There is, in short, much of Henry James in this novel--the emphasis on the complexities of social interaction, on the overlooked details of life, on the clash of manners and cultures. Moorhouse, naturally, is more modern than James--one of Edith’s great friends is transsexual--but also more arch, giving “Grand Days” a humor and drollery absent from most of the master’s work.

Like James, too, Moorhouse isn’t overly concerned with surface plot. When Edith, early in the novel, accepts the gift of a revolver from an odd American named Col. Strongbow, the reader expects the gun to reappear at some point; it never does, though, for few of the charged, apparently significant incidents in “Grand Days” have external consequences.

For a time these episodes feel like untied loose ends, but eventually one senses that Moorhouse (perhaps best known in this country for writing the story filmed as “The Coca-Cola Kid”) is simply being lifelike--showing us that Edith, whatever risks she takes and whatever mistakes she makes, ultimately controls her destiny.

And, as it turns out, others’ destinies as well: In the closest thing this book has to a turning point, Edith must decide whether to ruin her mentor’s career by telling superiors that he has communicated unimportant but classified League information to his native country.

Given that “Grand Days” follows an idealistic young woman’s rise in a cosmopolitan but doomed organization, one expects it to conclude with some conspicuous realization. That’s not what happens, however--in part because the novel is the first in a series, but also because Edith has enormous confidence.

She rarely doubts her talents and is so wedded to the League’s goal that she is perfectly willing to be changed by her experiences there--to the point of admitting unapologetically to herself that she “wanted only to associate with people who were robust and undefeated.” Edith’s cause requires that of her, and she regards the loss of old friends, and the seeking of new and more powerful ones, as a necessary sacrifice.

Such willfulness, oddly, only adds to our admiration for Edith, for we know her motivations are never selfish--that her thoughts, words and acts are on the same continuum, are directed at the same benevolent end.

When a suitor repeats to Edith the old joke about the League being the “wastepaper basket of the world,” she’s ready to call off the relationship right then . . . but willing to see, too, that “Variations of cynicism were perhaps youthful standbys until one of the wisdoms was reached.”