Sebastian Faulks writes about men and women falling in love and he sets the passionate affairs they embark on against the backdrop of a particular dramatic moment in history. His best-loved novel, Birdsong (one million copies sold in paperback), takes place during the Great War and Charlotte Gray, his last novel, during the Second World War. Now he turns to the America of 1959-60, a period which casts its shadow forward to the violence and political upheaval of the next ten years. We are in the last days of the Eisenhower presidency, Nixon and Kennedy are embarking on their battle for the White House, the country is still suffering from the scars inflicted by McCarthyism, and the Cold War is hotting up.
In Washington, a youngish English diplomat called Charlie van der Linden is falling apart, drinking himself into a stupor as he parties the nights away.
His wife Mary, a mother of two, doesn't seem to mind too much and seems happy to party along with him.
Then Frank Renzo, an out-of-town reporter, walks into her life and, in the manner of a Faulks hero, he no sooner looks than he loves. Honour holds him back until Mary, missing her children who are gone home to a boarding school and worried about her dying mother, takes the initiative and a passionate affair ensues.
Faulks writes well about sexual love because he is not embarrassed by it. He is neither self-consciously jaunty nor crude and only occasionally sentimental. The domestic dimensions of the novel are expanded by being embedded in the political happenings of the day and this is achieved without strain because the respective careers of Charlie and Frank put them at the centre of the action, surrounded by the politicians and in the sights of a twitchy FBI.
Sebastian Faulks also knows how to write a novel. His plots always work, his research and period detail are impeccable. He can get the texture of sex, convey the bleakness of boarding school life, the sensation of downward spiralling as Charlie's life spins out of control. But oh the longueurs as we find ourselves, supposedly, inside the minds of Frank or Mary or Charlie, listening to their musings. They ponder sex and death, or rather, Faulks does. "There is a battle going on for my soul, I cannot give it to the highest bidder . . . I am a player as well as an arbiter", Mary thinks, but it is Faulks's voice we hear. And how long they go on - for pages and pages.
There is no doubt that Faulks is capable of powerful writing. The scenes in Birdsong in the trenches and under the trenches during the Great War are among the most vivid ever written about that period. In his new novel, he catches the authentic atmosphere of the political convention, its excitement and boredom. But at some stage he seems to stop imagining properly and his characters go limp on the page - mere circus animals.
The problem is that he spends too much time giving us the thoughts of the characters. Eudora Welty said that success for her came when she attempted to translate every thought and feeling of her characters into action and speech. Faulks has achieved success without attempting this; if he were to attempt it I think he could produce seriously fine writing. He can handle the big scenes with ease, he's an excellent plotter, he's intelligent. He should trust more to the intelligence of the reader and stop dotting every single "i" and crossing every single "t".
Ita Daly is a fiction writer and critic. Her most recent book, Irish Myths & Legends Retold, has just been published by O.U.P.