Signal & Noise: A Novel

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