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    Signal & Noise: A Novel
    Signal & Noise: A Novel
    Signal & Noise: A Novel
    Ebook872 pages12 hours

    Signal & Noise: A Novel

    By John Griesemer

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    About this ebook

    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.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateApr 1, 2004
    ISBN9781429961301
    Signal & Noise: A Novel
    Author

    John Griesemer

    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.

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    • 4/5
      Die Verlegung des ersten Transatlantikkabels und das Auslaufen der Great Eastern, des langezeit größten Schiffes der Welt, bilden den historischen Hintergrund für Griesemers Roman. Sie stehen für den Fortschritt, die „Wunder des Zeitalters“, wie es am Ende des Buches heißen wird. Wie der titelgebende „Rausch“ reißen die neue Zeit und ihre Möglichkeiten die Menschen mit. Im Englischen heißt der Titel des Buches allerdings „Signals and Noise“ und das passt noch viel besser! Denn es sind leise Signale, die unentwegt gesendet und empfangen werden: Signale durch das Kabel, Signale der Liebe und des Begehrens, Signale aus dem Jenseits. Lärm lässt uns unempfindlich werden für diese Signale - heute ist es gang und gäbe, dass wir über den Atlantik Kontakt haben, ist Lärm allerorten. Chester Ludlow, der Ingenieur des Transatlantikkabels ist verheiratet mit Franny. Sie haben vor kurzem ihre kleine Tochter Betty verloren. Augenzeuge war Chesters Bruder Otis,ein genialischer Mann mit vielen Talenten und ohne Richtung. Franny tauert sehr und versucht mit Otis Hilfe Kontakt zu Betty aufzunehmen, während Chester mit einer Show Geld für die Fortführung des Kabelprojektes eintreibt. Begleitet wird er dabei von der Musikerin Katharina, in die er sich verliebt und mit der er eine Beziehung eingeht. Eine weitere Hauptperson ist der Maler Trace, der sowohl das Schiffsprojekt als auch das Kabelprojekt für Zeitungen abbildet.Das Buch hat also viele Handlungsstränge und vor allem anfangs gefiel es mir nicht so recht. Ich war oft versucht, aufzuhören oder querzulesen. Zwar war der historische Hintergrund gut recherchiert und interessant, doch die Verknüpfung mit den eigentümlichen persönlichen Geschichten wirkte irgendwie einerseits trivial und andererseits künstlich. Allerdings zog mich das Buch dann mehr und mehr in Bann. Ich mochte Jack Trace immer mehr, fand immer mehr Gefallen an Frannys neuer Karriere, konnte der Symbolik der Signale einiges abgewinnen. Alte und neue Welt, Signals and Noise. Im Endeffekt gefiel mir das Buch dann doch sehr gut und die letzten 350 Seiten las ich fast in einem Zug und sehr zufrieden durch.
    • 4/5
      A big, ambitious book with lots of symbol & metaphor (particularly related to the words of the title), much of which undoubtedly went over my head, but also with masterful storytelling & a few really brilliantly renedered scenes (including one in which one of the main characters walks out as far as he can on a collapsed railroad bridge over a gorge; reading it I had the same feeling in my bowels as I do when I'm in a situation that triggers my fear of heights). The characters are wonderfully drawn: the chief engineer on several failed attempts to lay a transatlantic cable; his wife, a former actress who becomes a traveling spiritualist lecturer just before, during, & after the Civil War; the musician with whom the engineer has an affair; the journalist/artist who documents the cable venture; the London prostitute he loves; the cable company promoter; the engineer's brother; and other lesser characters, including President & Mrs. Lincoln. They're all, as I said, richly drawn, though the women less so than the men. The book is set mostly in the years leading up to the Civil War, & the third of the 4 "books" (the shortest one) is set during the Civil War, but this feels less like a Civil War novel (though in that section it had strong similarities to Gob's Grief, in its focus on spiritualism & its relationship to those who lost loved ones in the war), than an introduction to a world on the verge of the Gilded Age, the Age of Science, the Age of Communication. Yet, as with the best historical fiction, it showed how those grand themes played out in the most intimate details of the lives of its characters.

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    Signal & Noise - John Griesemer

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