A friend loaned this to me. Didn't know what to expect.

It started out in Washington with people and places I was familiar with. But that's not what this is about. It is about America and the Kennedy-Nixon campaign. It is about British diplomats in Washington. It is about alcoholism and the nightmares of those who fought in World War II. It is about the early '60s. And before all is said and done is about a love affair. A deep, powerful, almost destructive joining of two people who met quite by chance.

Faulks's sense of detail and mastery of description are fine-tuned. I would never have thought I would find this type of book would pull me in so effectively. But it did.

I REALLY liked this book.

Engaging, although I got a little lost in some of the historic details and preferred the more human parts. Not as good as Engleby.

Faulks is, without doubt, a brilliant writer. However, I wouldn't say I loved this book. It was not a heavy read, and, with the exception of quite a number of bits and pieces, there was nothing outstanding about it. That being said, the bits and pieces make it worth the read. His ability to describe very amorphous emotions is impressive. I'd re-read it for those passages.

Hmmm. If I could give 3 and a half I'd give it. I liked the beginning and the ending but got a bit lost somewhere in the middle, just after married heroine starts her doomed love affair. Then it all got a bit wallowy/thinky, interspersed with politics. Then it started getting better again when she had to go to horrible late fifties/sixties Commie Russia to rescue her husband. War, (cold and vietnam), doomed love affairs - maybe I've just read a bit too much Mr Faulks in too close a dose recently. But ending was v v sad - though I hasten to add not Anna Karenina throwing herself under a train sad. Just realistic sad.

I enjoyed the first half of this book, but became more disinterested after that and skimmed till the end.

There's something really lyrical about Sebastian Faulk's writing, and a lovely reality to the characters. But the novels always leave me wondering what the point of it all was. Not in the sense that I necessarily need lots of plot, but in the sense that there is no clear theme, no clear issue being explored, and no exploration of character per se, just a nice presentation of some episodes of people's lives which are quite nice to read about. Thus, I can't complain, but nor can I really say I'll remember anything at all about the experience!

when it was good it was good, when it was bad... well

This book was far too slow for me.
Set against the backdrop of the Kennedy/Nixon contest of the 1960s it follows the relationships between 3 main characters – an alcoholic, unstable English diplomat, his wife and the American newspaperman with whom she develops a passionate affair.
I was drawn to the book by its cover description which promised “the terror of the cold war”, but there’s precious little of that. I found myself skimming paragraphs, unusual for me, in an attempt to move on to something more engaging than the continuous “I love you so much” stuff that I found gruelling.
I was disappointed because I have read other stuff by Sebastian Faulks – Engleby was, in my view, excellent.
I am giving my stars for the unnervingly accurate picture of a functioning alcoholic’s relationship with the bottle. Some lessons there, if nothing else.

This is a book which I read mainly because my dad thought it might interest me, otherwise I probably never would have read it. The characters and plot are fairly predictable but what made it more interesting for me was the setting, which is around the Cold War and the election of Kennedy, which is a period I don't know much about. That gave it all a weird feeling of dread somehow but didn't have as much impact on the plot or characters as I expected. Overall it's a book which I'm not sure I'd read again and I occasionally struggled to work up any enthusiasm about but it wasn't a complete waste of time.

Faulks is best known for "Birdsong" and "Charlotte Gray" both of which I enjoyed. I’ve also read, but found disappointing, "A Fool’s Alphabet" so I was keen to see what I thought of this book.

Blurb from back cover:
America, 1959. With two young children she adores and an admired husband, Charlie, working at the British Embassy in Washington, the world seems an effervescent place of parties, jazz and family happiness to Mary Van der Linden. But when Frank, an American newspaper reporter, enters their lives they are forced to confront the terror of the Cold War that is the dark background of their carefree existence.

This synopsis could easily fool you into thinking it's a spy story, but there is very little in it that made me think of 'the terror of the Cold War'! Nope, it is a plain old love story, with the American presidential elections as the background. It also contains a thread about dealing with (or, in fact, mostly ignoring) alcoholism.

I enjoyed the book, though sad at times, and found that the memory stayed with me for a couple of days after finishing it. Can't say more without introducing spoilers!

You could never accuse Sebastian Faulks of playing on past successes or staying to mine a particularly profitable seam. The diversity of his stories, set in a variety of periods and locations, with their different styles and themes, means you never know what his next work will be like. I came to Faulks through his 'Engelby' of 2007, an unusual and gripping story set in Cambridge University in the 1970s and told from the first person perspective of a disordered mind - while the central mystery of the story (the disappearance of a female student) was easily solved by the reader, the tension lay in resolving the unreliable narrator's perception of the truth.

I had high hopes therefore of 'On Green Dolphin Street'. Faulks' seventh novel is set mainly in the United States during the months leading up to the 1960 Presidential election. Against this backdrop Faulk's follows the development of an affair between the wife of a British diplomat and an American journalist. It is very much a character-based novel, exploring the perspectives of its three protagonists, although it is the female character Mary who takes centre stage.

Charlie van der Linden is a British diplomat based in Washington in 1959 and assigned to report on the Presidential election campaigns. His dutiful wife Mary plays hostess to whoever needs to be socially integrated into this diplomatic network. This includes an American journalist, Frank Renzo, now rehabilitated after falling victim to the McCarthy-style witch hunts of the 1950s on account of his relatively liberal view of civil rights in America. It is not long before Mary has started an affair with Frank, despite her professed love still for Charlie and their two children, conveniently absent at boarding-school in England.

The 1960 Presidential election presents us with a great nation on the cusp of change, with the opportunity to sweep away the insidious and oppressive subterfuge that had characterised the country's politics throughout the previous decade. However, the overriding feel of this novel is essentially that of stasis, of people's desire to stop the march of time (Mary wants Frank to prove there was "a world outside time"); and how as individuals they fail to take opportunities for real change in their lives. At first Mary manages to keep her affair and her marriage apart, as she tries to live two separate lives and avoid full commitment to either. Inevitably her longing to suspend reality cannot be fulfilled and she is forced to make a choice as to where her future lies.

I cannot help thinking that the book is a little like one of those tours of New York on which Frank takes Mary during their early, chaste times together. It picks out a few peculiar places of personal interest along the way, but fails to enthral the visitor or really go anywhere. Taking its title from a piece by Miles Davis that Frank plays when he first consummates his relationship with Mary, the story unfolds in the restless, languid form of jazz music. It moves slowly and amiably, although with little direction, occasionally turning back to give us some backstory to each of the characters.

Faulks has clearly researched the time and places of this novel and gives us detailed descriptions of the minutiae of life in Washington and particularly New York that seem aimed to impress the reader. I have, however, read one American reviewer who delighted in picking up a few anachronisms and factual errors in Faulks' account (not that these in any way spoiled my reading of the book):

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2001/...

For me, the main problem with this book is that you spend all of it in the company of three people that I would not care to spend much time with. Another problem is the difficulty I had understanding and accepting the mutual attraction between Mary and Frank. Faulks gives the reader no motivation for Mary's adultery, which we must believe is based on love at first sight. Her first meeting with Frank is a perfunctory note to a routinely dull social gathering at the van der Linden's house; only later, as the protagonists describe their first impressions of each other, do we learn of the immediate, passionate attraction each had for the other at the time. I have tried to imagine Frank as someone Robert Mitchum might have played in a black-and-white film of that period, whose "come to bed" eyes could explain why Mary fell for him. But Frank does not come off the page in that way, and I never really believed in their affair.

I therefore was puzzled by the number of positive reviews - mostly from women readers, I should add - which say how profoundly moving they found Mary's situation. Take Julie Myerson of The Observer, for example, who declared that this book "is one of the most heart-shakingly accurate depictions of how it feels to be female and in love that I have ever read". Really? It seems Faulks may have struck a chord with women looking for something beyond the security of a stable marriage, well-adjusted children, good employment and a relatively affluent financial position. This is clearly too conventional and unfulfilling for Mary - a viewpoint shared, apparently, by many female readers of this book. Are we to conclude that what women really want is the danger and excitement of a dalliance with a bit of rough like Frank? I wonder if these readers would have been so sympathetic, let alone moved, had the adultery been committed by a male character.

Perhaps due to its period and setting, I kept thinking of the book as being filmed by someone like Douglas Sirk - notable as a director of 'women's pictures' in the 1950s. Sirk, however, subverted this genre with his barbed ironies and sub-texts revealing social hypocrisies, and I kept hoping in vain for Faulks to deliver something as incisive or unsettling as that.

Nevertheless, I still found 'On Green Dolphin Street' a pleasant enough book to read, and Faulks rewards the reader's perseverance by delivering some of the beautiful prose he is capable of at times. Developments and revelations in the closing chapters propel the narrative towards some kind of a conclusion. Along the way, Faulks gives us a few amusing anecdotes and interesting improvisations, as minor diversions from the central relationships in his story. I smiled and shook my head at a few paragraphs describing Charlie van der Linden's belief that life is too long for the literature available and there are not enough great books to fill it.

There are more great novels than I can hope to read in my lifetime. My late father discovered Dostoevsky when in his nineties. When he died age 91 years he was reading 'The Idiot' which he had borrowed from me; I have it now with his bookmark still at page 195 marking how far he managed to read in the time he had left. There is never enough time for the classics and all the great books of the world, and perhaps for that reason we should not waste our time on mediocrity.

Ahh, moral lesson of this book is not to entertain the opposite sex when you're married. Do not fall into temptation. Just saying