| Description |
310 pages ; 24 cm |
| Summary |
"Opening in England at the turn of the twentieth century, C is the story of a boy named Serge Carrefax, whose father spends his time experimenting with wireless communication while running a school for deaf children. Serge grows up amid the noise and silence with his brilliant but troubled older sister, Sophie: an intense sibling relationship that stays with him as he heads off into an equally troubled larger world. After a fling with a nurse at a Bohemian spa, Serge serves in World War I as a radio operator for reconnaissance planes. When his plane is shot down, Serge is taken to a German prison camp, from which he escapes. Back in London, he's recruited for a mission to Cairo on behalf of the shadowy Empire Wireless Chain. All of which eventually carries Serge to a fitful, and perhaps fateful, climax at the bottom of an Egyptian tomb ..."--Jacket |
| Notes |
"C follows the short, intense life of Serge Carrefax, a man who, as his name suggests, surges into the electric modernity of the early twentieth century, transfixed by the technologies that will obliterate him. Born to the sound of one of the very first experimental wireless stations, Serge finds himself steeped in a weird world of transmissions, whose very air seems filled with cryptic and poetic signals of all kinds. When personal loss strikes him in his adolescence, this world takes on a darker and more morbid aspect. What follows is atour de force in which the eerily idyllic settings of pre-war Europe give way to the exhilarating flight-paths of the frontline aeroplane radio operator, then the prison camps of Germany, the drug-fuelled London of the roaring twenties and finally, the ancient tombs of Egypt."--Publisher |
| Subject |
Radio operators -- Fiction.
|
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Radio waves -- Fiction.
|
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Self-actualization (Psychology) -- Fiction.
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Technology -- Fiction.
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World War, 1914-1918 -- Fiction.
|
| SUBJECT |
Europe -- History -- 1871-1918 http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh85045713 -- Fiction.
http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh99001562
|
| Genre/Form |
Fiction.
|
| LC no. |
2011453813 |
| ISBN |
0224090208 |
|
9780224090209 |
|
