I really enjoyed this book. It was primarily about the characters and their relationships with each other, but it also managed some reflections about life and purpose and emotion. And without being cheesy! From a far away view, the plot was simple and revolved around very mundane events that totally took over the characters' lives. Of course that's how it feels in the middle of all this, but you get each characters' mindset as they take a step back, too. The emotions were very strong in this book, and well-written. My heart hurt at the ending for Mary and Frank, but it was the realistic outcome, which I appreciate. They didn't all come out happy or unscarred. But the little complications were so hurtful. The political/historical setting was interesting, but not overly interesting to me. I read that the details were not entirely accurate, but as someone who did not live in that time period, it didn't bother me at all. It is always an interesting juxtaposition to have one family and their relationship be the center next to such large-scale events.

While this is an early Faulks, I find it interesting that I'm reading about the Nixon/Kennedy presidential campaign, which is the backdrop of the novel, while the fiasco of the 2016 campaign is currently underway here in the U.S. Somethings never change. For a Brit, Faulks does a decent job describing NYC & DC & as always, his writing skills turn the lives & emotions of ordinary people into extraordinary.

(May contain light spoilers)


The name "On Green Dolphin Street" was taken from a Miles Davies song and just like jazz, Sebastian Faulks definitely took his time developing the plot for this book.
There aren't any sudden actions or plot twists, everything is slowly layered page after page. Although I am a fan of slow-paced books, this one got on my nerves sometimes.
The parts about Frank's past as a journalist and war veteran and Charlie's past as a diplomat provided me with the parts I liked the most about the story. Reading about Emmett Till's muder case and the Indochina war were very interesting.
I must admit most references to places in New York or the Nixon vs Kennedy political campaign didn't add much to the story in my opinion since I care zero about those subjects.
But you care enough about the main characters to find out what will happen to them in the end, which by the way made up for the lack of feelings they expressed throughout the story.

This novel takes place in the late fifties and early sixties, when Americans were leading comfortable lives and the jazz music of Miles Davis and Charlie Parker was gaining popularity. Communism was the dreaded enemy of the time and anxiety over Russian weaponry and secret agents fueled fear that America might be losing the Cold War. In this heady mix, John F. Kennedy, a young, charming and rich presidential hopeful, was in the midst of a campaign for the highest office in the land, although there were fears among many about what a Catholic presidency would mean for the country. Such is the backdrop of Sebastian Faulk’s story about two men and a woman struggling to find satisfying lives and personal happiness. All three have been affected by the experience of past wars, experience which continues to haunt their present lives.

Charles van der Linden is a British diplomat posted to Washington, a man who is a recognized expert in American politics and who some believe has close ties to the entourage surrounding Kennedy. Charles is in trouble not only with his health but with his life. His investments are worth barely a third of what they were three years ago and he has borrowed money and changed brokers twice, but to no avail. His finances remain precarious and he is quickly descending into a financial black hole from which he may never recover. Although he has three children, he wishes he had none. They are expensive, wearisome and complicate his life.

In his position as a high flying diplomat, he lives a life with swanky parties, subsidized education for his children and frequent travel to exotic and interesting locales. But airplane flights terrify him and he cannot board a plane without downing three sedatives and half a bottle of scotch. Charlie’s drinking is completely out of control and he hardly eats solid food anymore, his hangovers of the past replaced with unending days of gastric upheaval. He once had a life that interested him, but the world has disappointed him and he is now bored and disillusioned. He feels there is no point in his work, nothing he does could not be done by someone else and he has no outlet for the deep rage that lies inside him that storms and rattles him every day of his life. If it wasn’t for his wife Mary, there would be nothing left for him to live for and he would finish it all. He is quite simply on the brink of a mental and physical breakdown.

Mary is a diplomat’s gift, always the supportive wife who looks just right, can mingle with the other wives, gives wonderful parties and even converses with the most intolerable of their friends. She makes all the decisions about the children, the house and how they live. All Charlie has to do is keep his career on track, a responsibility he no longer is able to bear. Mary’s view of the world is completely different from Charlie’s. She is a woman who loves living and is devoted to her children, her parents and her husband. She knows Charlie is drinking heavily but she is quietly holding things together. Although she is his wife, these days she is acting more like a mother to him.

Things change after the children leave for boarding school and Frank Renzo a newspaper reporter attends a party at Charlie and Mary’s Washington townhouse. Frank has been sent to Washington by his paper to do a piece on how people are viewing the upcoming election. When he meets Mary he feels a connection, so much so he fabricates an accident and goes back to the house once the party is over. Frank and Charlie spend the rest of the evening drinking while Mary tends Frank’s injured hand. Frank reminds Charlie they met long ago when both of them were in Indochina, but Charlie remembers nothing of that meeting.

Frank has been working to get back in the good graces of his editor after two incidents which have set back his career. His reporting during the McCarty years put him in the crosshairs of Hoover and the FBI and his editor received a warning. Things got worse when the reports he sent back from Mississippi on the racist murder of fourteen year old Emmett Till and the subsequent trial of two white men accused of his murder were out of sync with those done by other reporters and he was in trouble once again. He is outraged at people who make it impossible for those in his profession to report accurately what they see and hear without fear of reprisals. After paying his penance by reporting on low profile issues, he is hoping to restart his career by reporting on the upcoming election.

When Mary is on a visit to New York, Frank who lives in Greenwich Village offers to show her the sights. The two wander around the city, spending their time in a very different way than Mary would if she was with Charlie. They share a more bohemian experience, sampling life and food in the Bowery, Bleecker Street and the Village, going places Mary would never go by herself. Although Mary seems an unlikely candidate for infidelity, she and Frank fall into a passionate affair and Mary must ultimately make a choice between leaving her alcoholic husband or living the passionate life she has experienced only once before with her former lover David who was killed in the war. Mary battles internally with the need to support her husband, her fierce love for her children and her intense physical desire for Frank. During the affair she has periods where she feels shame, believing she is not the kind of woman who would do what she is doing. But she also realizes this is her last chance for true happiness.

Faulks, well known for his beautiful writing is not one to indulge in a romantic love story. But this novel is much more than that. Its characters are well drawn and their inner turmoil wrenchingly dramatized. Faulks uses his descriptive powers to bring the reader to the mucky trenches of the war, the off-beat smoky jazz haunts and the sights and sounds of New York City. He continues these detailed descriptions, bringing to life Mary’s nerve racking trip to Moscow with its seedy, dirty, time worn hotel rooms, complete with rust stained tubs, unadorned lightbulbs and hidden listening devices secreted but barely hidden behind the cracked covers of old light switches. The scenes of Mary’s dying mother and the time spent with her grieving father in London are especially well done and clearly the strongest in the book. At that time, Mary and her father’s exhaustion after days of staying up with Elizabeth is keenly felt and their quiet conversation after her death is poignantly rendered, easily bringing to mind a reader’s personal experience with a similar event.

Faulks reminds us of the lasting aftermath of war, how it continues to affect people after the last guns sound, never finished with those who participated in the carnage. It haunts their dreams, forces them to question their motives and explores how they felt both during and after the horrible act of killing another human being.

He also explores the commonly experienced conundrum of individual choice. Does one make choices based on one’s own needs or the needs of those who depend on you; an evocation of the age old dilemma of love versus duty.

There is an inherent sadness about this novel, a seeping melancholy that pervades its pages and hints at further sadness to come. Happiness is presented as a temporary experience, celebrated when it occurs before time pulls back to the burdens, obligations and encumbrances of everyday life.

Faulks is a celebrated and gifted story teller who continues to successfully provide the reader with fine writing. This novel is certainly no exception.

I picked this book up because the title was intriguing, I felt I'd heard of it. This is the first Sebastien Faulkes novel I've read, and to be honest maybe the last.

Basically a love-triangle, the story is set in UK/USA diplomatic circles in 1959. It was ok-ish, but it took me three false starts before I finally got engaged in the story. I found I couldn't empathise with the characters in the way that some other reviewers have said they did. The back stories got in the way, interrupted the immediacy of the narrative and I never felt the author was getting right the characterisation of Mary, the female protagonist.

The Washington/New York setting was ok, but I felt like an outsider looking in and the parts set in England didn't ring true for me. The best section was when Mary had to fly to the USSR to rescue her alcoholic husband, Charlie. Here her fear and Charlie's paranoia were well backed up by the setting.
But back to the intriguing title, Miles Davis musical version of Green Dolphin Street is superior to this novel. Maybe I should try Elizabeth Gouge's 'Green Dolphin Street' next.

Love, briefly glimpsed, in an otherwise unremarkable life.

Mary, the diplomat's wife leads a dull, but fulfilling life, taking care of her drunkard husband and kids, when she encounters Frank and falls in love.

Ultimately she chooses duty over desire, and they both regret it.

It's not a new story, nor are there any overly unexpected plot twists, but Faulks manages to give meaning to the mundane and charisma to his characters.

I'm not familiar with Miles Davis, or the song with the same title as the book, but I still enjoyed it.

Birdsong, another book by this author, was one of my favorite books of all time so when I saw this book in a thrift store, I grabbed it. I found myself being mildly disappointed by this novel, set during the Kennedy-Nixon campaign, and against a background of the US-Soviet cold war. This book was about an affair between the wife of a British diplomat and an American news reporter. I wanted to care deeply about these characters, who dealt with pressures both from the outside and from within. But by the time the conclusion was approaching, I really didn’t care very much about either of them – whether they stayed together or went their separate ways – she back to her broken down drunken husband and two children, and he to the loneliness of living with his post-war demons. *** October 21, 2014

I’m a big fan of Sebastian Faulks, but this one just didn’t do it for me. I enjoyed his stories about WWI so much more. I think in this one it was too much love affair and too little Cold War. Still, he’s a beautiful writer, as will be seen from the quotes I pulled to post below.

Quotes that caught my eye
Among the row of new Cadillacs, their tail-fins glinting like a rumour of sharks…. (3)t

…maybe not exactly happy, not in the facile way the word itself suggested, but who in these circumstances could not at least be touched from time to time by the ridiculous joy of existing? (8)

“By refusing to move they’re preventing customers being served.”
“But they are the customers.” (9)

The closest he had come to political action was to go with his brother Louis one night in Chicago, at the age of sixteen, to a meeting of the Young People’s Socialist League in the basement on California Avenue, because Louis had promised him they would meet hot girls in low heels and leather jackets. (80-81)

The speeches and the broadcasts that encouraged volunteers at the start of 1942 appealed to ideas of freedom and tyranny, to homeland and to the right to live in peace. They did talk of courage and the idea of ‘sacrifice’, so that those who enlisted were aware that they might not return, what they did not mention was that the purpose of being a soldier was to kill other soldiers, and that, for most men, each killing would have an individual flavor. (80)

The closest he had come to political action was to go with his brother Louis one night in Chicago, at the age of sixteen, to a meeting of the Young People’s Socialist League in a basement on California Avenue, because Louis had promised him they would meet hot girls in low heels and leather jackets. (80-81)

Yet despite what he said, Frank felt uneasy; he felt the hatred which pressed into his skin like the airless heat. (112)

But the case of Emmett Till looks like an exception….
He quoted from the comments of the foreign press to show how the case had caused American’s stock to fall in the eyes of the free world, and, more shamingly, the unfree world. The war against the Russians was apparently being lost in space and in the development of arms; the United States was now in danger of squandering its only unassailable advantage: the moral superiority conferred by constitutional rights.
Ten days later his editor received a visit from two agents of the FBI, who were compiling reports which would, unofficially, be handed over to the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee’s investigation six employees of the New York Times alleged to be Communists; even the music and the dance3 reviewers of the Times were on an FBI Security Index that permitted them to be deported to detention camps if an ‘internal security emergency’ occurred. (118)

“Does she know enough about suburban adultery?” said Edward.
“I’m sure I could find out, Eddie.” (123-24)

Her husband’s hobbies are drinking liquor, taking barbiturates and Benzedrine tablets, smoking cigarettes and misquoting poetry. She wrote this book so she could pursue a platonic but passionate adulterous love affair in New York City with a newspaperman she barely knows, who is mostly out of town. (124)

…matters that had seemed provisional or capable of endless procrastination had acquired the dull imminence of fact: death happened, death was coming and she herself was going to die, inexplicably, unsatisfactorily, like her mother, like everyone else, with burial, extinction, no questions answered and no ends tied off. (125)

Some men are born relaxed, some achieve relaxation through Yoga or Zen and some find relaxation thrust upon them via suits of Folkweave Tweed. The gentleman in the picture had certainly achieved a self-assured air; so much so, Mary noticed, that next to his folk weave tweed suit he was clutching a nine-inch upright model of a US Navy Polaris missile. (127)

There was no fight number for the press plane, no check-in; you walked across the airfield apron, left your bag beneath the open hold if you wanted it stowed, then climbed aboard, found a seat and, when the attendant had shut the cabin door, you took off. There were seat belts, but no one wore them because they prevented you from turning round and sharing drinks and notes with the reporters in the row behind. (128)

There was a murmur of anticipation as the small aircraft reached the steepest angle of its climb. The curtain at the front parted, Senator Kennedy emerged and sat down on a wooden tray; he joined his hands round his feet and tobogganed down the aisle into the restraining arms of his junior press secretary at the rear of the plane. (128)

Forgive me my sins, his wild gaze seemed to say, forget my reckless love of women, overlook my wealth and East Coast homes, because at heart I am like you. (129)

Frank noticed the stitching in his clothes, his manicured hands and the easy manner that came from years of parties in Hyannisport and Martha’s Vineyar4d, of dating debutantes and making furtive love also to their mothers; of yacht clubs and dinner parties, cigars and tennis; of law school and oak-panelled rooms and charge accounts on which you bought shirts by the dozen. Frank found they raised in him an instinctive distrust – a reaction he could no more control than the reflex of a struck knee. (129)

She tried not to hurry as she went through the turnstile but to keep some dignity; the fact that Franck had called to say he was back in New York did not mean to say she had to lose all sense of her own freedom of action. (131)

He sometimes pictured the workings of his mind as the jeweled movement of a Swiss watch, trembling with expensive fibrillation, into which he had poured sand. Yet what had he or the world lost by this wantonness? There was no sign that a careful husbanding of the machinery would have produced anything that would have helped to give value or meaning to his or any other existence. (135)

The thing about being forty, she thought, was that while you had the feelings of a twenty-five year old, at least you had some dignity. (145)

She could squeeze the minutes; with seconds of such intensity, she could knead them into days. (147)

…overcoming her unease with American coins, she bought a paraffined-paper cup from a vending machine for a penny and filled it from a drinking fountain…. (148)

We’re pouring money in to help the French. They’ve got some crazy plan to lure the Vietminh out of the bush and blow them away once and for all. (151)

The French government had long since stopped paying for its army, which was now funded by the United States; American planes and material followed the dollars, and naturally they needed mechanics to service them. The point at which engineers became troops was a matter of intense concern, since it would then become an American war, something not even Dulles wanted. (153)
…supporters of the nationalist Vietminh were Marxist in their belief, the State Department argument ran; therefore the French must not be defeated. (153)
Dulles turned the full force of his persuasions on to Winston Churchill, a man with some record in conflict, but received in return only a lecture on colonialism and the loss of India. (153)

Nowhere could a war zone have been more torpid, Frank thought, as he walked down the dusty streets with their Second Empire facades and backyard chicken runs. America was there and not there in this humid and beautiful backwater; the wishes of the Dulles brothers, the tense edicts of Langley and ‘Foggy Bottom, the phrases such as ‘line of dominoes’ were discounted and absorbed by the air in which they were uttered, with the smoke of opium and the steam of noodle soup from the open-backed kitchens. (154)

He drank quickly, to quell his misgivings and to catch up with Charlie. He started to grow used to the strange nature of his situation; the guilt began to ebb. It reminded him of what he had told Roxanne about killing a man. After a while it feels like everything you do: it feels like nothing at all. (156)

…there was something profoundly strange about this clearing in the jungle where the flower of St Cyr officers, their heads full of European gunnery tactics, had brought a collection of troops to provoke a people they hardly knew in the colony that had been returned to them after the disgrace of Vichy only because the Americans and British had not use for it. this giant folly of pride, greed and quixotic ambition was about to receive, as far as Charlie could see, a cataclysmic judgement. (162)

Behind a floral curtain on a wire, she discovered a fridge with a levered handle like those on the door of a butcher’s cold room. It was admirably cold inside, but empty except for a swollen ice-tray dusted with frost crystals of an age to grace a mammoth’s tomb. (189)

She had once felt that what she loved and valued was made eternal or innumerable by her passion for it, but in the last few months – belatedly, perhaps – she had come to recognize that the instances of bliss were numbered as unforgivingly as the streets of the city, and that the edge of the island, once only a dream of explorers, was now in plain view. (215)

If you say that only what lasts is worthwhile, then nothing is valuable, because everything passes. Isn’t it enough that something should have existed, just once? Don’t you think it continues to exist in some world where the pettiness of time is not so important? (216)

Something like that, but not just a convenient solution. An explanation, a way of properly ordering value. An eternity that is more than just time without ending. A place where time runs in a different way. (216)

She felt that she could not secure the bliss that should be hers because of some verbal shortcoming, the unwillingness of what she passionately felt to made itself available to words. It was hard to bear. (217)

…the walnut sideboard held its usual load of unread newspapers, orphaned keys and post too dull or intimidating to be opened. (218)

I feel suddenly very Republican. Nixon’s not such a bad man, is he? (260)

They mounted the steps to the doors of the Ukraina. It was a building of gross imperial intent, in which considerations of design or beauty had been sacrificed to a display of skyscraping power, constructed by the slave labour of defeated Germans to the glory of the Soviet Union, one of seven Stalin monuments that lowered over the city. (286)

Hell might be this reeking grey corridor, with its straight lines that converged to a never-realized vanishing point. (303)

I tried but no thanks, is what I shall say to this book. After about 50 pages I thought to myself 'I don't really care' but I carried on, maybe it will get better, right? WRONG! I struggled on to page 202 and then stopped. I still didn't care. And I have loads of better books i'm itching to start reading. This was the plot. Mary had an affaire with Frank. Her husband drinks to much. Both her husband and Frank move in political circles. Blah blah blah! Maybe something happens in the next half of the book but I really can't be assed to stick around and find out!

I feel like I should be enjoying this author more than I am. Perhaps it’s because I started with A Week in December, and then this one. Faulks is obviously a strong writer and develops characters well. But A Week in December fetishized perspective by choosing a different one every chapter, making it a gimmick. On Green Dolphin Street had some great characters — Charlie and Mary, of course, as 2 of the 3 main characters — but Frank Renzo was a cartoon of a character. That would be fine if he wasn’t, oh I don’t know — the main love interest that tempted Mary to (perhaps, maybe, should she, shouldn’t she) leave her husband and family. For what? A two dimensional news reporter who couldn’t be more ripped from an Ellery Queen mystery novel if he actually wore a porkpie hat, had an apartment over a Chinese restaurant, and called her baby and kiddo. Puh-leeze. All of which is to say I’m about to read Birdsong in the hopes that the good reviews on Faulks — and the regular comparisons to Wm Boyd — have some factual basis, some where.

Mary is married to an alcoholic PTSD sufferer. She has an affair with a reporter who seems to have some narcissistic tendencies. Her children are sent to boarding school, and she has her own existential crisis when her mother dies.
It's genuinely one of the most depressing books I have ever read. Additionally, I'm glad I read this on a Kindle as I spent a lot of time looking up what certain words meant, and it's not as though I have a limited vocabulary.
Would not recommend it, and it would have been a DNF had it not been a book club read.

Another solid Sebastian Faulks novel. Set in America in 1959 against the backdrop of the Cold War and the Nixon/Kennedy election nominations. The story revolves around an English couple with two children living in Washington DC where the husband, Charlie is working as a foreign ambassador working at the British Embassy. Their world is one of social obligations, often throwing parties long into the night, entertaining politicians, press and other assorted embassy types.

There are two main parts to the book: the political and world situation as it is in the world, and especially America at the time - this is covered in great detail and Faulks really tries to capture what it was like to be there at that time, almost to the point of it becoming cliched at times when he details the current music, fashions, language and trends. The second part of the novel is all about the stresses and stains of work and about relationships. Charlie's loving wife Mary, who has always been supportive of him and cared lovingly for their children, is swept of her feet by a visiting journalist. She attempts to balance her life around frequent visits to New York to see her lover, whilst trying to deal with the situation of her mother slowly dying from cancer back in England, Charlie finds his life closing in as his dependence on alcohol and barbiturates increase and the FBI start asking questions.

It's a complex novel and packs a lot in, rather too much of the socio/political situation for me but probably necessary to capture the world in which the action takes place. Well written as you would expect from Sebastian Faulks who is one of the best current UK authors.