"Kind of blue" sums up the mood behind Sebastian Faulks's latest novel, On Green Dolphin Street. The book, inspired by a Miles Davis album and set in an urban America of the late '50s, is a risky departure for a novelist celebrated for his evocation of war-torn France. PW set out to discover where this latest book falls in the Faulks canon.
The chic London neighborhood of Holland Park borders on bohemian Notting Hill, an area Faulks and his family have lived in for some time.
Courteous and warm, Faulks welcomes PW into a dark room furnished with books, mainly nonfiction, studies of the World Wars and other conflicts. Faulks relates in measured tones the genesis of his latest novel: "There has to be an initial inspiration, a moment of excitement, a need to know more." This happened when Faulks was living in France in 1995 with his family and working on Charlotte Gray, his fifth published novel, set in Vichy France, upon which the current film, starring Cate Blanchett, is based.
Faulks was driving to the supermarket listening to Miles Davis, when it occurred to him that this particular music was written in 1959 or 1960, and the title of one track was "On Green Dolphin Street." "It was the first year I can actually remember. I was six and it was an incredibly hot summer. I remember Yuri Gagarin in space, and the Nixon and Kennedy campaign. I wanted Kennedy to win because he had the prettier wife."
On visits to New York in the late 1970s, Faulks had been intrigued by remnants of this golden period. The sophistication and glamour of the jazz and cocktail scene attracted him, but so did the political situation, the Cold War and the real threat of a nuclear attack: "The foreground might appear to be golden, but the background was dark." Domestic politics in the U.S. had its dark moments, too, with segregation in the South and the shadow of McCarthyism. Faulks's characters and the events they are caught up in are never straightforward. Dramatic tension comes, in typical Faulks style, at the juncture of the political and the personal.
In On Green Dolphin Street, Mary and Charlie van der Linden appear to lead a charmed life in the British diplomatic community in Washington, even achieving top foreign postings, including to Moscow. Charlie is brilliant but unstable, and increasingly dependent on alcohol; Mary is emotionally cast adrift when her children are sent back to England to school and her mother is diagnosed with cancer. A woman on the edge of middle age, alienated from her husband by his depression, paranoia and alcoholism, she embarks on a passionate affair with a New York—based journalist, Frank Renzo. Set against a bustling nightlife of Greenwich Village clubs and romantic trysts, the transfiguring power of love leads Mary to the moral crisis at the core of the book. Faulks regards it as his most thematically simple. "In terms of music, it is like a concerto, whereas Birdsong was a full-blown opera."
Faulks is one of Britain's most successful literary novelists, with sales at odds with the complexity and restless intelligence behind his work. Birdsong, his 1994 World War I novel, has sold 1.5 million copies in the U.K. and is still selling strongly. Faulks's descriptions of the prosaic intimacy of the trenches followed by inevitable inhuman slaughter are unforgettable. To achieve the accurate detail and subtleties of character of his tunnelers, officers and the inhabitants of northern France, Faulks steeped himself in the subject for years. He was inspired by the part his grandfather played in World War I and his father in World War II. As a child he believed that it would be his turn to fight in the third, perhaps against the background of events portrayed in On Green Dolphin Street.
Faulks started his writing career as a journalist after Cambridge, first at the Daily Telegraph and, later, as deputy editor of the Independent on Sunday. He's wanted to be a writer since the age of 14 and had written two complete novels and had three others under way before A Trick of Light was published by the Bodley Head in 1984. Far from compromising his writing, he firmly believes that journalism nourished it. Faulks researched assignments assiduously, just as he does his novels. "It's terrible advice to write about what you know about. For me what worked was writing about what I didn't know about."
Faulks's next book, in 1989, was The Girl at the Lion d'Or, his first novel set in France. He moved to Hutchinson and had the good fortune to be edited by Richard Cohen. "Richard was a brilliant editor. He taught me more about the craft of being a writer than anyone, how to frame a scene between two people so that it worked, to get the dramatic tension right." The themes that haunt Faulks's novels start to take shape with The Girl at the Lion d'Or. Anne, the heroine, suffers the humiliation of abandonment and bereavement. Her father is shot for mutiny at the end of World War I for refusing to return to the front with his exhausted men and for killing an officer. Her life is ruined through no fault of her own. Her redemption comes through her love for Hartmann, a married Jewish lawyer, whose presence links Faulks's three French novels. His moral dilemma is remarkably similar to Mary van der Linden's.
The continuity of themes and characters in Faulks's work is intriguing, moving fugue-like, perhaps, toward some grander design. In this, his "American" novel, his music has apparently struck a few dissonant chords (reviews have been tepid), but how this adventure fits into his impressively developing oeuvre will be interesting to chart.
