SIGNAL & NOISE

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. (May)

Forecast:This book will be appreciated by the same audience that enjoyed Dava Sobel's Longitude.