MUTE TELEMETRY

This second installment in Gosselin’s Narravox saga blends experimental fiction with hard SF, thriller, and literary fiction elements.

After serving only one year of a 20-year sentence, Dr. Gregory Grahn is a free man bent on retribution against Dr. Emma Prescott, whom he blames for his incarceration. Prescott, who was falsely accused of murdering her husband in the previous entry in the series, suspects Grahn will pursue vengeance through the manipulation of algorithms that, when used correctly, can not only effect quantum teleportation between processors but also manipulate memory, time, and, ultimately, reality. Prescott, with the help of a small group of friends (including detective Samantha “Sam” Calloway), uses a top-secret containment chamber in Boston to try to stop Grahn. By turning language and cadence into signals, the various characters find themselves in different time periods, such as 1937 Nanjing, 1941 Russia, and Dealey Plaza in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963. When a Russian soldier becomes entangled with one of these time shifts, ethical complications arise; Dmitri Sergeyevich Volkov believes he was gone from his family for a month, but four years have passed (“The chamber cut him out of time and dropped him into a life already lived”). Does Prescott intervene, or do nothing—and possibly put the Russian and his family in danger?

Gosselin’s novel has a nontraditional structure—this is not an easy or predictable read. It’s a literary puzzle that gives the reader very little insight into its backstory or even premise. Expected elements like character depth and dynamism, worldbuilding, and overall narrative clarity are all but nonexistent. The first few sentences provide an eye-opening indication of what readers are in for: “Three inputs register: bone, blur, nothing. The latch is wrong. Emma takes the contradiction and moves. Pen clicks. Doubt for a breath. Training holds. Hand off the latch. Door shut. Palm to steel. A tremor answers. Latch down. Two controlled breaths. Console steady. Occupied means sealed. Red stays red.” Unravelling the story is certainly challenging, and the lack of vital information throughout—such as characters’ full names, careers, and motivations—can make for a frustrating and confusing reading experience. But those who are able to follow the nebulous storyline will be rewarded with passages of austere literary beauty: “Lanes pinched toward water. Roofs rimed. Tar and fish in the air. A ropewalk unrolled like a long thought. Tar caulk in the seams. Windows dead. Quay boards whitened, frost in grain.” When the author (infrequently) moves to a more traditional storytelling style, the world comes alive with powerful imagery and descriptions: “Past the city: trenches iced over, birch peeled white by shelling, telegraph poles with missing teeth, chimneys like graves. Snow sifted from a low sky and melted into cinders. Barns leaned. Fields showed black ribs where tanks had turned the earth.” The thematic ingenuity here is that the characters can potentially change reality through language, cadence, and silence—and the novel itself serves as a mechanism to facilitate that change.

Challenging and original—to paraphrase a line, narrative is structure and structure is everything.