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By ALEXANDER THEROUX

The year is 1912. Serge Carrefax, the focus of “C,” Tom McCarthy’s compelling if demanding second novel, is growing up on a pastoral estate in the south of England. There, with his precocious but troubled sister, Sophie, he leads a life of joyous agitation, at least for a while, their days filled with youthful intellectual adventures—botanical, electrical and literary. Although tutors, nannies and gardeners see to the imaginative youngsters, a twilight sense of trouble seems never far away. There are rumors of war. “The Krauts are gearing up to let loose at us, make no mistake,” warns a friend of the family. It is the sense of a world on the verge of social upheaval that gives “C” a certain momentous quality, allowing Mr. McCarthy a chance to play with themes of family disaffiliation, sexual relations and, indeed, war.

Daniel Pelavin

And yet “C” is not a gloomy novel. Its principal narrative amounts to a biography of Serge, whose short life (1898-1922) and innate interests coincide with a period of technological excitement in the world at large. It is a time of electronic experiment, not only basic Morse Code but the deeper, more complex creative theories, devices and field tests of Marconi and Tesla, along with early radio, encryption and code breaking. Another theme in “C” is the sending and receiving of facts and truths on all sorts of levels, not excluding the many nontechnological ways humans try (and fail) to communicate.

As it happens, Serge and Sophie are the children of an eccentric inventor who, with his drug-addled wife, runs a school for the deaf. (“I am proud to call myself an oralist,” says the father in one of his many opinionated speeches.) The patriarch is solipsistically working on electrical devices for deaf children even as his own children seem to be lost in their own subjective dreams. The mystifying bond of the family Carrefax seems to be a tinkering with machinery and an experiment with physical phenomena, including animals and plants.

In other ways, the family is chaotic. The father is slightly obtuse and autocratic, often leaving his children alone to the tutelage of servants. We have seen versions of eccentric well-to-do British families like the Carrefaxes in real life—the Sitwells and the Mitfords come to mind. In fiction one thinks of books such as Frances Hodgson Burnett’s “The Secret Garden” and Stella Gibbons’s “Cold Comfort Farm.”

C

By Tom McCarthy

(Knopf, 310 pages, $25.95)

Serge, we learn early on, is one of those rare babies (1 in 80,000 births) who are born, like David Copperfield, with a caul—a skin-like membrane covering the head for a brief time after birth. Mr. McCarthy does not make too much of this fact, though it does seem to mark out Serge for a special destiny. Like Dickens’s autobiographical novel, “C” is a Bildungsroman. It traces Serge’s psychological and moral growth from youth to early adulthood in four c-themed sections: “Caul,” adolescence and youth at the estate; “Chute,” a wartime spell where, at 19, Serge flies as an observer over enemy lines during World War I; “Crash,” a decadent postwar spell in London involving drugs and sexual mouse- hunting; and “Call,” a dramatic coda set in Cairo and Alexandria, where Serge, working for the Empire Wireless Chain, descends into the chamber of an archaeological dig and comes face to face with death.

The appeal of “C” depends in part on Serge as a character—a matter rather ambiguous as presented, since he carries the burden less of a moral force than of a groping anti-hero. He can appear uncannily sterile and robotic. We see him as a sort of cubist puzzle. He can only make love from the back, á le chien. He reads Hölderlin in the midst of dangerous aerial combat. He feels bound to lie about the way that his sweet sister died (a truly heart-breaking interval in the first section of the novel). During the wartime flights, he snorts cocaine and seems in a desperate and laughing way to welcome oblivion. (“He likes it when the bullets come close—really close, so that they’re almost grazing the machine’s side.”) His libido is often on the rise. He lewdly wears a tart’s stocking over his face. He attends séances and drinks to extreme. We often see him at crazy, desperate angles, a chap deeply wounded by visissitudes—an illness, a car crash, the danger of the enemy. His speech has a touch of the unreal and the incantatory. “His voice is strangely muffled,” writes Mr. McCarthy. “He can hear himself—but only silently, inside his head.”

Still, Serge is a seeker—of knowledge and experience— and in that guise a pilgrim we are willing to follow and even to care for. He is often pursuing the interests of his childhood, involving himself with codes and caprices in what can broadly be described as a need to make contact—with his sister, women of all sorts, himself. He uses the technological innovations that he sees all around him, even in the sanitarium, a spa to which at one point he has to repair for all sorts of treatments and tests.

And his emotional life? A woman appears in each section of the book, several in certain instances, and Serge’s relations with them are mostly perfunctory. He looks for love but finds little. His final rapprochement with a knowing archaeologist named Laura proves to be different in crucial ways. Their single fling in an Egyptian burial chamber has the drama of a sudden and surprising excavation. A weirder climax to a book could not be found.

Thus Serge poses a conundrum to the reader. He seems cold, but there is also a wild, romantic depth to him that keeps one interested. At one point we even read, believingly, that Serge feels “an almost sacred tingling, as though he himself had become godlike, elevated by machinery and signal code to a higher post within the overall structure of things.”

Mr. McCarthy, the author of two previous books—”Remainder” (2006), a comparatively straightforward novel, and “Tintin and the Secret of Literature” (2006), a work of nonfiction—seems to know everything. The curative powers of mineral water. Wireless transmission and airwave technology. Ciphers. Insect life. There are several splendid descriptions of flying: “The landscape falls away, it flattens, voids itself of depth. Hills lose their height; roads lose their camber, bounce, the texture of their paving, and turn into marks across a map. The greens and browns of field and wood seem artificial and provisional, as though they’d just now fallen from the sky.”

Mr. McCarthy often employs the historical present, a kind of “hot news” mode used by Hemingway both successfully (“The Killers”) and farcically (“Islands in the Stream”). There is a lot of wordplay, too. Nearly un-get-at-able sentences pop up. (“Abigail, insensible to these strands that Serge’s ear’s unpicking, coughs on the Melkonian he offers her and, waving smoke from her eyes, complains.”) The book is dense with allusions, extravagant and learned. Transitional gaps between the four sections give the narrative an enythmemic effect and force a frustrated reader to supply, or imagine, what is missing. But, one may ask, is that a bad thing?

The formal difficulty of “C” may go back to the postmodern idea that shifts interest from the “what” to the “how” of art, the game of problematizing. “C” is a novel of cognition. Throughout, Serge probes, explores, investigates, and the reader must likewise tease out the mysteries of both the narrative and its main character.

As to the novel’s title, there is a plethora of c-words: codes, calcium, catacomb, cyst, carbon (“the basic element of life”). And, Carrefax. What does it all add up to? It is hard to say, but there is an intrepid attitude to Mr. McCarthy’s literary sally that has little to do with pleasing publishers or even an audience. “C” is clever, confident, coy—and cryptic.

—Mr. Theroux’s latest novel is “Laura Warholic: Or, The Sexual Intellectual” (Fantagraphics).

It’s the great unknown for anyone on an international flight: How long will I have to wait at immigration when I arrive?

It turns out even airlines and airports don’t always know the exact answer, as a debate this week over waiting times at London’s Heathrow Airport showed. And even when they do, the answer can vary widely depending on the time of day or year.

Bloomberg News

A sign warns of delays at Heathrow last November. Long lines at immigration have dogged the airport as London prepares to host the Olympics.

Controversy over these delays extends beyond this summer’s Olympics host. U.S. airlines say waiting times are too long for international flights arriving at American airports, and delays of up to two hours this year at Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi Airport led Thailand’s government to urge some airlines to move to the older Don Muang Airport.

“The ease of the travelers’ experience is very important,” says Steve Lott, spokesman for Airlines for America, a Washington, D.C., trade group representing the nation’s airlines. “Frustrations with the travel process are enemies to travel.”

Queuing experts have many ideas about how to minimize waits—some of them formed while the experts themselves waited after international flights. However, the biggest cause of long delays is that arriving flights aren’t spaced out evenly, and that there aren’t always enough border agents to process long lines when arrivals are clumped together.

“It’s simply a matter of a saturated queue, and you solve that with either more servers or shorter processing time,” says Alfred Blumstein, a professor of operations research at Carnegie Mellon University who co-wrote a 2008 article on using technology in airline-passenger prescreening programs.

Since shorter processing times could mean less attention paid to security checks to keep illegal migrants or terrorists from crossing borders, experts say border agencies need to add more agents to minimize wait times. “It’s really a numbers game,” says Mr. Lott, who criticizes the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency for shifting agents from airports to land borders this year.

“CBP staffs ports of entry commensurate to incoming traveler volume,” a CBP spokeswoman says.

Part of the challenge with staffing is that demand for passport checks varies widely throughout the day. For instance, between 3 a.m. and 4 a.m. in John F. Kennedy International Airport’s Terminal 4, a major port of entry into the U.S., there were an average of 48 passengers arriving each day in the 12 months ending this April. The average wait from when a plane landed to when the last passenger cleared immigration, not counting walking time from the plane to the immigration hall, was 23 minutes, even with only 11 booths manned, according to CBP figures. Two hours later, nearly 14 times as many passengers arrived, and even with three times as many booths open, the average wait was 37 minutes.

In the Heathrow debate, there aren’t even agreed-upon figures.

The U.K.’s immigration minister, Damian Green, said the government’s targets for Heathrow waiting times for passengers from the European Economic Area of 25 minutes or less for 95% of passengers had been met every day for the first 15 days of April. For non-EEA passengers, the target of clearing 95% within 45 minutes was met on 11 of those 15 days. In response, Chris Bryant, shadow immigration minister, cited figures showing that at least 107 times during those 15 days, the targets were breached.

But the two were comparing apples and oranges. Mr. Bryant was citing a different data set that had been leaked to him. Those data came from a Heathrow program to monitor waiting times. Airport monitors counted waiting time by identifying a different passenger each 15 minutes at the very back of the queue, which could be a line formed before passengers split off into separate lines for European passengers, non-European passengers and those prescreened for expedited-entry programs. The clock stopped when the passenger being tracked gets through immigration.

Mr. Green’s figures were based on checks every hour conducted by the U.K.’s Border Force. Its clock started once people had divided into separate queues and stopped when they reached immigration desks. So the U.K. government’s 25-minute and 45-minute waiting-time targets don’t include time to get from the gate to the back of the proper queue, or time spent being checked by an agent.

BAA Airports Ltd., which operates Heathrow, added to the confusion by not disclosing its full set of data initially. On Thursday, it reversed course, publishing the numbers on its website. The results weren’t pretty for Heathrow: Each of its four international terminals were found to breach the 45-minute target for non-European Economic Area passengers last month more than 5% of the time. One in four passengers arriving at Terminal 5 waited longer than 45 minutes.

“We know at times queues have been too long,” a Border Force spokesman said in response. He said the agency is adding 80 agents at peak times at Heathrow, and 480 during this summer’s Olympics.

With budgets tight, however, expanding the workforce can be difficult. Queuing experts have other suggestions.

Prof. Blumstein, for example, who waited for over an hour at Heathrow two weeks ago, suggested moving people sooner from the main queue into shorter lines before each desk to “shorten the dead time.” The risk, though, is that the person already at the desk takes longer than average to clear. That can lead to frustration if others who were further behind in the queue get served first.

Or as Richard C. Larson, director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for Engineering Systems Fundamentals who goes by “Dr. Queue” for his studies on waiting in line, puts it, “Welcome to the Olympics! We have for you an Olympic-sized queue delay, along with violation of fair play!”

—Learn more about this topic at WSJ.com/NumbersGuy. Email numbersguy@wsj.com

A version of this article appeared May 5, 2012, on page A4 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Border Delay Data Leave Fliers Up in the Air.

Por CHRISTOPHER JOHN FARLEY

¿Qué factores contribuyeron para que Los Vengadores rompiera el record histórico de taquilla para un estreno? El fin de semana, la película recaudó US$207,4 millones en Estados Unidos, superando el debut de Harry Potter y las Reliquias de la Muerte parte 2, el cual acumuló US$169,2 millones.

A continuación, siete razones por las cuales Los Vengadores, una película de Marvel, distribuida por Disney alcanzó este hito.

1) Una buena planeación y desarrollo: Las películas anteriores de Marvel como Iron Man y Thor, sirvieron como un adelanto de Los Vengadores. Cada uno de los filmes anteriores contaba con una pequeña escena que generó interés y anticipación para Los Vengadores.

2) Un reparto sólido: Al contar con actores como Robert Downey Jr., Mark Ruffalo, Samuel L. Jackson, Scarlett Johansson y Jeremy Renner, la película dejó en claro que no era solamente un filme para niños. El estrenar la película al cierre del festival de cine de Tribeca también envió la señal de que esta era una película “de verdad”, no una fórmula comercial al estilo de Transformers.

3) Un atractivo multigeneracional: El personaje de Capitán América fue creado en la década del 40, Thor, Hulk y Iron Man han existido desde los 60. Sin embargo, Los Vengadores da la impresión de novedad para los niños y a la vez tiene un aire de familiaridad para los adultos. Además, 40% de la audiencia en EE.UU. fue femenina, mostrando que la película no sólo tenía atractivo para los hombres.

4) Las buenas reseñas en el resto del mundo: Los Vengadores se estrenó en el resto del mundo antes de debutar en Norteamérica, su mayor mercado. Las audiencias internacionales ayudaron a incrementar la expectativa por la película a través de las redes sociales.

5) La película no fue mala: Algunos de los críticos más conocidos como Joe Morgenstern, el principal crítico de este diario y ganador de un premio Pulitzer, le dieron una reseña mixta a la película. No obstante, recibió la calificación A+ en CinemaScore y actualmente tiene una calificación de 93 en el sitio de reseñas Rotten Tomatoes. Aunque muchas de las películas más esperadas suelen decepcionar, esta recibió muy buenos comentarios.

6) El 3-D cuesta más: 52% de las entradas vendidas para Los Vengadores provinieron de proyecciones 3-D, las cuales usualmente cuestan un poco más, elevando así el total recaudado.

7) No hubo competencia: La segunda película más taquillera del fin de semana fue Think Like a Man, la cual recaudó apenas US$8 millones.

Por YELIZ CANDEMIR e
JOE PARKINSON
de Istambul

O governo da Turquia, diante de um déficit alto nas transações correntes que ameaça prejudicar a rápida expansão do país, está tentando convencer os turcos a transferirem suas vastas possessões em ouro para o sistema bancário.

O esforço para mexer nas reservas individuais de ouro — a forma tradicional de poupar dinheiro na Turquia — faz parte das tentativas de Ancara para reduzir o rombo financeiro que representa, atualmente, cerca de 10% do produto interno bruto.

As autoridades do governo dizem que o órgão regulador do sistema bancário anunciará, em breve, um plano para incentivar consumidores a guardar suas riquezas no sistema financeiro. Executivos dos bancos disseram estar considerando novos tipos de contas remuneradas para depósito de ouro que permitiriam aos clientes sacar barras de ouro em caixas automáticos customizados.

As medidas estão sendo tomadas depois de o banco central ter anunciado, em novembro, que os bancos poderiam reter 10% de suas reservas em ouro, um modo de incentivar os clientes a depositar suas jóias, moedas ou metais preciosos nos bancos.

Economistas afirmam que a reforma na política é feita para mudar a preferência histórica dos turcos por guardar uma grande porcentagem de sua riqueza pessoal fora do sistema bancário, como uma forma de se proteger contra a volatilidade econômica que periodicamente atingiu a Turquia nas últimas décadas.

A iniciativa é uma das frentes de uma batalha mais ampla para encorajar os turcos a pouparem mais enquanto se busca conter o crescente déficit nas transações correntes — um ponto crítico, o qual vários investidores temem ser capaz de derrubar uma economia em rápido crescimento, cuja expansão no ano passado foi estimada em mais de 8%. Nas últimas semanas, o desequilíbrio nas transações correntes do País aumentou mais rápido do que o esperado, em meio a uma escalada nos preços do petróleo e dados mostrando uma inesperada alta na demanda do consumidor.

“Historicamente, a Turquia tem sofrido com crises e inflação, então a tradição de manter ouro fora do sistema bancário pode ser difícil de mudar”, disse Murat Ucer, economista da Global Source Partners, uma consultoria de pesquisa localizada em Istambul.

É difícil quantificar o volume de ouro guardado fora dos bancos na Turquia; não há dados confiáveis sobre o tamanho da economia informal. A Refinaria de Ouro de Istambul estima o número em 5.000 toneladas, num valor de US$ 270 bilhões. Dados recentes mostram que muitos consumidores aumentaram a quantidade de ouro guardada em casa, ainda que o estritamente regulado sistema bancário tenha sido elogiado por ter atravessado confortavelmente a crise financeira.

Isso sugere que, apesar de a renda na Turquia ter triplicado e o desemprego caído drasticamente na última década, os turcos continuam temerosos de que deixar grande parte dos seus ativos no banco pode causar-lhes grandes perdas.

Alguns economistas alertam que a iniciativa é pura propaganda, dizendo que o governo deveria em vez disso se concentrar em reformar o burocrático sistema tributário do país, e em aumentar as suas reservas recolhendo impostos com mais eficiência.