On Green Dolphin Street

Sebastian Faulks

I picked this one up assuming it was going to be Birdsong for the Cold War. Boy, was I disappointed. Sure it's set partly in Washington and partly in Moscow and it's 1960 and paranoia stalks Washington's streets but overshadowing the novel's Cold War setting is a limp love affair. And overshadowing the love affair ... well, nothing really. No "is my lover a spy?", no "is my husband a spy?", not even a "are the Russians bugging us while my lover shags me?", just the usual stuff, the "what am I doing having an affair? I'm supposed to be a respectable married woman" stuff. Over and over and over again.

Its main characters are three. Charlie van der Linden is a British diplomat based in Washington. His wife, Mary is posted out there with him. And friend of the pair, Frank Renzo, is an American journalist covering the Nixon-Kennedy presidential race.

It starts at a cracking pace with a mysterious injury to a party guest at the van der Lindens inside the first two pages and then goes downhill from there. Mary begins the slowest burning affair in the history of literature and, just as her knickers finally come off and you start to settle down and wait for something more interesting to happen, Mary's mother back in England starts dying (and at the same speed as the affair travelled at, ie. very slowly). And that's about it. Don't get me wrong, I don't want Guns and Gadgets going off in all directions in my novels. I like gentle novels. But nothing in this book works at all. Her affair is supposed to be a gigantic emotional crisis in Mary's life but the characters she's torn between are so one-dimensional it's impossible to care.

The scenes set away from Mary's personal emotional battlefield are sometimes better done but not always. The obligatory Sebastian Faulks visit to one of France's wars (this time it's a flashback to Charlie's and Frank's time at Dien Bien Phu) is there. There's a nice description of 1960s Moscow but just as you think Moscow is going to play a pivotal role in the story, it ends up getting about five pages and plays host to a minor plot development which ends up by fizzling out completely. And the Nixon-Kennedy race, one of the most exciting in American political history, is written up in the dullest manner imaginable. Nixon's five o'clock shadow makes a cameo appearance.

And then there is the research. I was wondering how Frank managed to serve in the American army both at Guadalcanal and in Western Europe but I figured Faulks must know what he's doing and maybe some GIs served in both theatres... until, late in the book, he places Charlie in Florence with the British army in 1943 a full year before the city was taken by the Allies.

Oh, never mind. Avoid this book, not because of a few goofs in the timeline but because it's a complete and utter disappointment almost from start to finish.