History lessons John Griesemer’s transatlantic cables BY CLEA SIMON

Thanks to Michel Faber, Dave Eggers, and the like, big books — sprawling novels that top 500 pages — have come back into the literary consciousness. But with all the fat reads now around, if a novel isn’t newsworthy by virtue of its being a debut (or penned by one of the Eggers clan), it can still can get lost in the mix. Just because something’s a rollicking good historical yarn, with a Dickensian range of characters (from a Midwestern beef king to a scar-faced London whore) whose adventures take them from Siberia to the American Civil War doesn’t seem enough anymore. We want to witness " the signal event of the age — ‘Of our Age for all the Ages,’  " as one of the multitude in John Griesemer’s second novel, Signal & Noise, puts it. Entertainment will not suffice.

If, however, we let ourselves relax and enjoy such a novel (which Signal & Noise is), either for its multi-faceted plot or for its intriguing characters, we may find the higher justification we seek. From the first scene in 1857, on London’s Isle of Dogs, where several of the colorful cast (a blend of fictional and real characters) come together to witness the launching of the world’s largest ship, Griesemer has re-created a time when momentous, historic acts seemed possible and the future bright. That this future is blossoming among the crowd and not on the water where everyone is focused foreshadows one of Griesemer’s themes. It’s in that crowd that a drunken Karl Marx spies some dockworkers. " You do the work of the ages with those tools, " he shouts. " They are your symbol. They are our symbol. " " It’s a bleedin’ hammer, " an Irish worker responds dismissively. Soon after, as a team is assembled to lay a transatlantic telegraph cable, we are led into the world of the title signal and noise, where communication misfires and unlikely connections are what knit life together. History, it seems, is what happens while great men are busy doing other things.

Not that any of the folks peopling this fat, lovely read would see it that way. These investors, scientists, performers, and whores may run the gamut of motive and character, but mostly they keep their eye on the big prize — history — whether they are out to make it, witness it, or simply turn a quick buck in its reflected glory. Tall, handsome Chester Ludlow, for example, sets out on the nobler side. An engineer, he believes in the power of progress to unite humanity and also in the strength of science to help bury the memory of his young daughter, who died under mysterious circumstances. Although his first scene has him standing on a rise, waiting to witness the doomed launch, it soon becomes clear that fate will pull him under.

Chester has come to London to work on the repeatedly failing cable. But in his blond good looks, showman J. Beaumol Spude sees a matinee idol — and a source of revenue. When Chester is persuaded to head up a sound-and-light fundraiser for the cable company, he’s thrown together with Katerina Lindt, a musician as beautiful and troubled as Chester’s wife, Franny (whom he has left back in America), but in a new and intriguing way. Is it any wonder that all four will find their lives complicated? Or that a dozen other characters — including Chester’s disturbed brother and Katerina’s strange genius of a husband — will cross their paths as well?

The plot lines, in Griesemer’s ornate and often funny prose, just keep getting more entwined. Viewpoints shift and voices follow suit, from the nautical-sexual imagery of the overcompensating shipbuilder (who, witnessing the launch, realizes that " fear and exhilaration have become corporeal and hang like a plumb bob between his legs " ) to the calm of Franny’s depression ( " One could slip and fall, " she observes in her calmly depersonalized way while wandering along a cliff). In one particularly moving scene, we’re caught in the insular hell of a laudanum addict. Images swirl and recur like visions as she senses " a calamity waiting offstage. " Viewing her life like a deck of cards tossed out before her, she sees that she’s lost to the drug, whose name she’s mistranslated as " praise, " that she’s " bound by praise. . . . Praise for the card she’d been dealt, the card and its terrible face. " It’s a chilling scene that works perfectly in this format: the change of viewpoint immediately afterward accentuates her tragedy. Nobody hears her, of course. Her interior monologue is lost in the sea of voices. But like the one lone cable watcher left behind on a stormy Irish shore — a solitary man who picks up strange signals from a broken wire — we keep waiting for more.

John Griesemer reads at Newtonville Books, 296 Walnut Street in Newtonville, this Wednesday, July 2, at 7:30 p.m.; call (617) 244-6619.