Sebastian Faulks: On Green Dolphin Street

By ELSPETH SANDYS*

A new novel by the author of Birdsong is something to look forward to.

Although On Green Dolphin Street doesn't quite come up to the standard of its celebrated predecessor, it is still a highly entertaining, richly detailed story, set mainly in Washington and New York at the time of the Kennedy-Nixon election.

As with almost everything Sebastian Faulks has written there is at the heart of this story a doomed love affair.

Mary van der Linden is married to Charlie, a British career diplomat. To all intents and purposes theirs is a good marriage. Charlie's Washington posting provides them with a delightful home, a stimulating environment for their two children, a loyal maid, and ample scope for the entertaining they both enjoy so much.

Early on in the story the two children are sent to boarding school in England, providing Mary with a freedom she neither sought nor wanted.

With their departure, the first cracks in this otherwise harmonious marriage begin to appear.

At one of the regular parties hosted by the van der Lindens, Mary meets Frank Renzo, a high-flying political journalist. The attraction between them is immediate.

At first very little happens. Mary, despite her husband's heavy drinking and disastrous financial mismanagement, insists she is a happily married woman. When, inevitably, the affair does become sexual, Mary, adrift on a tide of passion, has to struggle to retain even a semblance of control over her life.

But Faulks is too subtle a writer to let the story founder under the burden of an obvious moral choice. The decision Mary finally makes is both credible and dramatically satisfying. In the course of her affair with Frank she has lived through the death of her mother; learned the truth of her husband's postwar involvement in the conflict between the French and the Vietnamese; and understood what really happened during Charlie's posting in Moscow. She has also heard Frank's story.

Growing up in the South before the war, experiencing poverty, witnessing racism, Frank has opened Mary's eyes to the injustices of the world and the continuing need to fight fascism in all its forms.

Mary, at the novel's end, is not the woman she was at the beginning.

Love has transformed her. That is Faulks' achievement: to show that love, even when doomed, can be a source of healing and enlargement.

There were times, reading On Green Dolphin Street, when I felt credibility was strained. But perhaps that says more about the cynicism of the age than the quality of the writing. Faulks writes with passion and conviction about the enduring nature of love. I hope he will continue to do so.

Random House

$34.95

* Elspeth Sandys is an Auckland writer.