On Green Dolphin Street
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- For the 1947 MGM movie, see Green Dolphin Street
On Green Dolphin Street is a 2001 novel by the author Sebastian Faulks and published by Hutchinson. The title of the novel comes from a 1947 composition by Bronislau Kaper and Ned Washington -- written for the Hollywood film Green Dolphin Street -- and later recorded by jazz musicians Miles Davis (1958), and Bill Evans (1959), among others.
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[edit] Plot Summary
On Green Dolphin Street represents a departure from Faulks' former French trilogy. The novel's physical setting is Washington and New York, and briefly in Moscow (where Mary is sent to bring back Charlie after his mental breakdown). Its temporal setting is in the Fifties during the Cold War. Mary van der Linden is the central character. Her husband Charlie also features strongly (he is modeled on the English spy Jeremy Wolfenden), as do her two children - they are an English family accustomed to the transience of the diplomat's life, the current posting for Charlie is Washington. Charlie is a talented and successful diplomat, but is also an alcoholic. The cause of this alcoholism arises largely out of his sense of futility and existential angst; Charlie sees little point in his life, and thinks it worthless.
The apathetic Charlie is strongly contrasted by Frank Renzo, an American journalist. Renzo enters the novel at a party hosted by the van der Lindens, his role as a journalist is important in the election of John Kennedy in 1960, thus, he and Charlie have a mutual interest in politics - and drinking. Mary, while still in love with Charlie, becomes restless and when Frank shows interest in her, she is flattered and a relationship develops. The affair troubles Mary profoundly as she is torn between the love of two men. Faulks explores what it takes to stay married - against formidable odds.
The novel is also a meditation on middle age and its double vantage point of looking at youth and age. Charlie - the diplomat -is an attractive casualty, representative of the type of men who in middle age wonder whether they are any good at anything.
He writes, too, about what it feels like to be a middle-aged child, losing a parent. Mary returns to England to look after her dying mother, and the description of her mother's death is powerful and based, as Faulks himself says in a 2001 interview, on his own father's death:
| “ | I was unprepared for the positive aspects ... I found a sense of grandeur in death as I have in love. It is an odd feeling, seldom written about except perhaps in Tolstoy ... the futility, the awful retrospective, looking through family photographs and feeling time collapse. You think 'God, that was all just a joke...'[1] | ” |
Faulks also looks at transcendent moments - those of extreme sexual passion - where people stand outside themselves and their normal existence but he himself admits that sex is difficult to write about. Describing love, on the other hand, comes more easily and in the novel he describes a love which is seeking its own extinction and needing to forget itself.
[edit] Literary Themes
On Green Dolphin Street narrates the troubles, fears, dilemmas, problems and happiness of its main characters. There is an implicit feeling of nostalgia in the novel, a nostalgia for the past when everything seemed possible and life was full of hope and expectations. This, of course, also denotes the idea of disillusionment. This is encapsulated by Mary and Charlie. Charlie has seemingly lost the will to live, or at least he lacks the enthusiasim that he had as a younger man. He has a depressing outlook on life, Mary recognises this sentiment and agrees that life is largely irrational - in that death takes everyone eventually, a theme explored through Mary's Mother's death - but sees hope in love. Her relationship with Frank reinvigorates her outlook.
Apart from describing personal problems like drink, adultery and love, the novel also deals with the theme of politics, and political concepts like democracy and freedom. The United States is portrayed from the beginning as a territory facing problems, both internal as well as external. The Civil Rights Movement - that causes some contreversy between the characters in the first chapter - and the Cold War contribute to an unstable and threatening atmosphere. U.S. citizens are living in fear of being questioned about.
The concepts of freedom and democracy are thus questioned and doubted and it seems as if the novel indirectly compares the state of affairs in the 'democratic' United States with communist Russia. The American citizens are blackmailed (Charlie), driven to commit suicide (Frank's friend, Billy Foy) and deprived of their freedom of speech (Frank).
[edit] Source
- ^ The Observer, July 15, 2001, 'After the war was over'
[edit] External links
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