But it is a love story with scant hope of resolution. And at 40, she feels that 'the slipped responsibilities of the old and young were hers alone to bear'. To my mind, Faulks's writing is at its best when he allows metaphor to convey this sense of emotion's pressure against possibility's limit. And the island of Manhattan is as useful a metaphor as any. The lovers' dream of insularity is entirely subject to the waking reality of the world's physical and political landscape.
Manhattan is far from being a blessed isle, after all.
There are traffic jams and delayed flights to contend with. My main reservation is that Faulks takes no risks. He never falls into what V.S. Pritchett called 'the determined stupor out of which great novelists work'. Having said this, he successfully renders the trope of passion as a circular descent into the underworld. Mary crosses the Delaware, thinking more of the Styx than the first state of the Union.