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The main fault of this book is that it's too true to life - it's not in any way 'novelistic'. This means that the main characters act out their lives solipsistically. They skid over the top of the momentous events of their time hardly noticing what is happening around them, even though one of them is close to the epicentre of the Presidential election and the another is a reluctant pawn in the Cold War.
This may make for realism but it lacks the excitement that a less literary writer would have injected. One example of this is when, towards the end of the book, the main character, Mary, wonders to herself whether the interplay between her, her husband and her lover could have been engineered by one of the clandestine agencies that around them. The thought occurs and then is lost in the more important concern of lighting a cigarette or pouring a drink. Another novelist would have grabbed the opportunity and put it at the heart of the plot that these people were puppets of forces with agendas beyond the confines of the love stories played out here.
In staying true to life and having world-changing events bubbling away like magma beneath the volcano of the characters' passions Faulks has persuaded me that he is a classier writer than I gave him credit for after Human Traces and A Possible Life but still this book left me feeling that, with this material, he could have given his readers a tad more excitement.
This may make for realism but it lacks the excitement that a less literary writer would have injected. One example of this is when, towards the end of the book, the main character, Mary, wonders to herself whether the interplay between her, her husband and her lover could have been engineered by one of the clandestine agencies that around them. The thought occurs and then is lost in the more important concern of lighting a cigarette or pouring a drink. Another novelist would have grabbed the opportunity and put it at the heart of the plot that these people were puppets of forces with agendas beyond the confines of the love stories played out here.
In staying true to life and having world-changing events bubbling away like magma beneath the volcano of the characters' passions Faulks has persuaded me that he is a classier writer than I gave him credit for after Human Traces and A Possible Life but still this book left me feeling that, with this material, he could have given his readers a tad more excitement.
