The Silence Factory

Collins (The Betrayals) suffuses this skillful tale of industry’s conveniences and curses in mid-19th-century England with fantastical elements. At the story’s center is a magical fabric spun from spider silk that, when worn around one’s head or draped over a stagecoach, suppresses the increasingly nettlesome cacophony of everyday life. Colllins gradually reveals the story of the fabric, beginning with widower Henry Latimer, who’s working as a hearing-aid salesman when he’s dispatched to the home of Sir Edward Ashmore-Percy, who’s seeking to ameliorate his daughter’s congenital deafness. There, Henry learns Sir Edward’s fortune is tied up in the silk’s manufacture. Enjoined by Sir Edward to help him promote the silk’s commercial value, Henry becomes its avid salesman—even though he sees the tragic toll its production takes on the factory workers, many of them young children who are being deafened by the noise deflected by the fabric. By the novel’s end, the silk produces even greater dangers. Though Collins answers the provocative questions she raises about the relationship between industry and nature with a too-convenient deus ex machina, she brings a Dickensian richness to her depiction of the grim factory conditions. Thanks to its clever speculative twist, this stands out from the pack of Victorian historicals. Agent: Eleanor Jackson, Dunow, Carlson & Lerner Literary. (Aug.)