Signal & Noise: A Novel - Softcover

Griesemer, John

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0312423349 ISBN 13: 9780312423346

Publisher: Picador, 2004

Synopsis

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. The two men, along with Ludlow's wife Franny, his imposing brother Otis, the bombastic entrepreneur J. Beaumol Spude, the dwarfish inventor of the Great Eastern, the creator of the modern sewer system, his adulterous wife, and a wily prostitute will all become involved with various modes of communication, with the realization of the Victorian age. They will witness and participate in the creation of the first transoceanic telegraph cable. It is the thread that will connect worlds and break apart lives.

About this title

Review:

Many readers will find it difficult to believe that the laying of the transatlantic telegraph cable in the 1860s can be a riveting subject for a novel. But John Griesemer's Signal & Noise is also a story of adultery, spiritualism, madness, and the Civil War: a vertiginous combination that beautifully evokes the contradictions of the mid-Victorian period. The world Griesemer describes ranges from New England drawing rooms to scientific meetings to the stench of the Thames at low-tide. He is good with sensory details (smells and textures, especially), and likes to linger in places that a Victorian novelist would have rushed past without mentioning. Almost nothing, even the tap-tap of telegraph signals, moves quickly in this novel, and the patient reader will be rewarded with gorgeous and unexpectedly moving set-pieces that remind one of the time it would have taken, each morning, just to fasten a corset or button a child's boot. Despite a slow beginning, crowded with characters of unequal interest, Signal & Noise turns into a page-turner, its several story-lines neatly dovetailing and continuing to surprise and delight, long after we have (perhaps, perhaps not) given up hope in that elusive copper connection between continents. --Regina Marler

About the Author:

John Griesemer is also the author of No One Thinks of Greenland, Signal & Noise, and Hearts of Men. Griesemer lives with his family in Lyme, New Hampshire.

About this edition

• Publisher: Picador
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0312423349
• ISBN 13: 9780312423346
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 608