On Green Dolphin Street Sebastian Faulks Hutchinson, 341pp, £16.99 ISBN 0091802105

Mary, a British diplomat's wife in Washington DC, has an affair with Frank, an American journalist. Deep down, she believes that marriage is a greater adventure than adultery, but somehow she can't help herself. She and Frank are soulmates, each is the other's missing half and so on. Mary initiates things by telling him: "I want you to know for today, tomorrow, for the rest of your life, how much you have meant to me . . . I think you're wonderful."

Frank, being a journalist, is a bit more to the point - "Have you finished? . . . I'm in love with you too" - but he is equally highminded. This is all for real. Sebastian Faulks is not engaged in a study of self-excusal. Mary and Frank really are caught up in something bigger than both of them.

Mary's words "today, tomorrow, for the rest of your life" echo Rick's great renunciation speech in Casablanca, where the whole point is that the characters put duty before passion, not the other way round. But if this is intentional, it is not ironic; it is simply meant to sound the note of old-fashioned romance. Besides, for all their stolen moments of bliss, Mary and Frank are certain to face the duty v passion problem in the end, and the difficult decisions that go with it.

Frank lives in New York, and Mary pops up on the train to meet him, but they cannot manage this as often as they'd like. It is 1960, election year, and Frank is mostly away, following the rival presidential candidates around the country. Mary's husband, Charlie, is also on the campaign trail with a watching brief, because his bosses at the embassy are convinced that he knows the Democrat hopeful, John F Kennedy. Charlie, however, doesn't recall ever meeting the man.

Then again, he doesn't recall meeting Frank at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 and, as we are shown in a rather good flashback, that certainly happened. A lot of things are gradually escaping Charlie's notice on account of the booze.

One of Charlie's problems is that he is too bright - "He generally knew what people were going to say from the first few words of their sentences" - and, lacking any particular talent to provide an outlet for his mental energy, he suffers from cosmic boredom. Another problem is that, like Frank, he is a Second World War veteran and, unlike Frank, he has never quite got over it.

All the same, while swopping anecdotes with Frank at a Minneapolis hotel, Charlie slips in a few casual remarks about Mary's steady nature, and her importance to him, suggesting that he still has a clue or two.

The love story provides the novel with a beginning and an end, but it cannot sustain the middle. When affairs go well, there's not much to tell, and Faulks has wisely decided to tone down and cut down on the sex scenes, which got somewhat purple in his previous two books. Instead, we find ourselves on board JFK's campaign aircraft, in the Democrat convention hall, or at the TV studio where the crucial debate between Kennedy and Richard Nixon is going on.

This is all interesting, but inessential: background material pushed into the foreground. Both candidates are depicted as fairly shallow and useless, so there is not much of a sense that the election is even important. Frank's recollections of Vietnam, and of a racist murder in the Deep South, suggest policy issues that dominated the later Sixties, but in the scheme of this novel they are digressions, albeit well-written ones.

The level of historical detail is sometimes startling: magazine ads, menus, political itineraries, the exact decor of the new BOAC lounge at Idlewild airport. But one of the most successful sequences, a ghastly holiday taken by Mary and Charlie in a run-down Breton farmhouse, could have been set in the present day. Faulks takes his eye off the period ball - the couple rent a Citroen with the famous swivelling headlights that weren't introduced until almost a decade later - and thereby frees himself to concentrate on what he does best, which is painful social comedy.

The big emotional conclusion is very effective. Readers will weep buckets. But the romance genre does restrict Faulks's potential. Although Frank and Charlie are portrayed with some astute anthropological observation, Mary has to remain a benignly blank space into which the reader can step. And there can be no attempt to examine the nature of love, in case any murky motivation shows up. When a Raymond Chandler character talks about "the wild mysterious improbable kind of love that comes but once", you know she is a dangerous nutter. Here, that kind of thing is taken purely at face value.

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