Signal & Noise
A Novel
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Signal & Noise is the epic page-turning story of the laying of the trans-Atlantic cable, and the men and women who are caught in its monumental tide. It is also a novel about the collision of worlds seen and unseen: the present and the future; the living and the dead; the real and the imagined.
On a wet London morning in 1857, American engineer Chester Ludlow arrives on the muddy banks of the Isle of Dogs to witness the launch of the largest steamship ever built, the Great Eastern. Also amidst the tumultuous throng is Jack Trace, a lonely bachelor and sketch artist hoping to make his name as an illustrator and journalist in the hurly burly of Fleet Street. Other witnesses include a drunken German by the name of Marx; the child who will christen the massive vessel by the wrong name; and Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the ship's apoplectic and dwarfish architect who will soon die in ignominy. As chief engineer for the Atlantic Cable Company, the charismatic Chester enters the orbit of business and showmanship embodied by J. Beaumol Spude, the bombastic Western beef magnate who will mastermind the funding of the project; Joachim Lindt, creator of the Phantasmagorium, an animated tableaux vivant; and his beautiful wife, the musician Katerina Lindt. Drawn by the demands and adventure of creating the first transoceanic telegraph, Chester leaves behind his fragile wife, Franny, at the family estate of Willing Mind in Maine.
Abandoned and still mourning the accidental death of their four-year-old daughter, Franny finds solace in the company of Chester's troubled brother, Otis, who introduces her to the mysteries of the world of spiritualism just as séancing is becoming all the rage in the jittery times leading up to the Civil War. As Chester achieves renown as the glamorous engineer of the trans-Atlantic project, Franny, desperate to contact her dead child, becomes the preeminent spirit conjuror of a war-torn America.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A starred or boxed review indicates a book of outstanding quality. A review with a blue-tinted title indicates a book of exceptional importance that hasn't received a starred or boxed review.SIGNAL & NOISEJohn Griesemer. Picador, $26 (640p) Griesemer's vast historical novel, his follow-up to No One Thinks of Greenland, follows the attempts of engineers to lay a transatlantic telegraph cable in the 1850s and '60s. Chester Ludlow is the chief American engineer on the cable project. An investor in the cable syndicate persuades him to raise more money for the venture by doing a lecture tour; the main attraction of the tour is a new kind of mechanical diorama, the Phantasmagoria, that enacts the story of the transatlantic cable project for patrons as Chester narrates it and musician Katerina Lindt, the wife of the diorama's creator, Joachim, provides the accompaniment. While on tour, Chester's charisma so arouses Katerina that she stows away on his ship when he embarks on the next cable-laying expedition; the two become lovers, and Katerina leaves Joachim. Meanwhile, at the Ludlow family's house in Maine, Chester's brother, Otis, an engineer and mystic, is teaching Chester's wife, Franny, how to communicate with the dead. Franny is a former actress mourning the death of her four-year-old daughter; with Otis's help she becomes a renowned spiritualist. As Chester attempts to communicate across the ocean, Otis and Fanny are wiring up to the infinite. The story clips along through the exciting process of laying the actual cable, immerses us in the horrors of the American Civil War (during which Chester is recruited for war work) and climaxes with Chester's final expedition in 1865, when he must work with Katerina's ex-husband. Though Otis, who becomes pivotal in the novel, is somewhat underdeveloped, this is an accomplished, gripping work.
