On Green Dolphin Street began strongly, with all the sense of period and the kind of photographic impressionism which marks Faulks' writing at its best. He is very good at capturing a sense of the time and place in which the van der Lindens were living—Washington and New York and London in the heady days of Kennedy's race for the White House, a world of embassy parties and diplomatic intrigues and beat poets—as well as sketching out the kinds of people which they were. And yet as the novel progressed, I found it all rather... well, uninspired, I suppose, a little novel-by-numbers, which impression was not weakened by the ending. The last third of the book felt as if it tipped over more and more into a weak melodrama; some of the dialogue which he put into Mary's mouth, in particular, made me raise my eyebrows. Not Faulks' best. ( )

I have never been a huge Faulks fan - I am probably the only person in the English speaking world who hated 'Birdsong', but I did, with a passion. And I was not too keen on 'The Girl At The Lion d’Or' . But someone whose taste I can usually rely on said I should try this book. And I did.

SPOILER ALERT

There are some good things about it - Faulks has done a great job of creating an era, and also of fleshing out his characters. And the section covering Mary and her father waiting for her mother to die is a beautifully written exploration of the emotions surrounding the death of a loved one. In other words, there are redeeming features.

But there was still a lot that annoyed me about this book. Faulks has an annoying habit of over-using adjectives and metaphors - he is an author that falls into the 'over egging' school of writerly description. And he wears his historical research just a little too obviously - too many brand names and incidental details that I would not expect to be included if this was set in a contemporary period, so it comes off as showing off rather than adding to the story.

The final failure is that I finished the book just not caring about the characters. Sure, they were kind of interesting, and Faulks has given us enough background to understand their motivations and flaws. But everything became so melodramatic this reader was left thinking 'just get over yourselves people'. ( )

This is kind of a troublesome book to review. It is full of awkwardnesses and infelicities, some of them laughable, including that horrible trash-novel American thing where it's like "Jim O'Doul leaned back on his stool at O'Doul's, the eponymously named bar that had been in his family since temperamental Paddy O'Doul had come over from County Clare with his flame-haired bride, Catherine, pinched the bridge of his freckled nose with his strong working man's hands, and sighed as he looked down at the newspaper before him, which proclaimed that Vice-President Nixon would be stopping in Riverbend, their Ohio town of 1500, before the primary on Thursday, a triumph for Jım's gormless yet inexplicably successful elder som, Willie, who had embarrassed the family by becoming a Republican and held ambitions for state offıce."

Okay, it's not that bad (although that was fun). But that thing where you introduce everyone awkwardly because you want to show how true to life everything is and claim some kind of pseudo-reporter status as if that's an honour - that's here. And in general this is not a well-written book - it's workmanlike with the occasional dip into unfortunate, and in all fairness the occasional bounce into efficiently heartwrenching.

And yet, and yet . . . it s compelling. Forget Jim O'Doul - the central love triangle, Mary and Charlie and Frank, really does grab you, and you really do feel it. And the period details are all quite periody and good. Maybe it's just that I've reached, prematurely, the middle-agey point in life where you identify hard with these poor dudes, with their fear and bewilderment about how it all went wrong and determination to set ıt right and oh, the way it feels to love someone who's not yours and still yet someone who is, and to be pulled between, when you're old enough to understand a bit what love really means and what you owe them both . . . .

Faulks seems to me to be a person of great, photographic yet impressionistic insight into the human emotional makeup that is simply not matched by his powers of evocation, and with a comprehensive feel for the era, from h-bomb jitters to Formica tabletops and humble material culture, that is imperfectly displayed by his efforts at description. A very smart and observant sort, all of which is to say, but not a great writer. Which isn't a bad place to be in life, all things considered, especially if you still manage to get yourself paid for writing books. ( )

Like this author. Not my favorite of his. ( )