‘The Chemistry of Tears’ by Peter Carey

Peter Carey’s novel, The Chemistry of Tears, engendered a litany of twitches, sighs, groans, smiles and ponderous head-shakes at my book club group. It’s that kind of opinion-dividing book. The one thing we did agree on was that it was intensely interesting.

New York-based Carey has written about glass chapels, Dickensian London, and the Kelly Gang. But a book about a grieving horological conservator, a mechanical bird, an eccentric Victorian-era businessman, industrialisation, obsession, love, and loss? Well, that’s an interesting and challenging melange – even for the dual Booker prize-winning author.

Does Peter Carey pull it off? In short, I think he does but at a cost. The two entwined storylines centre on a museum horology (clock) conservator, Catherine Gehrig. Catherine grieves for the death of her lover and co-conservator, Matthew Tindall, whose affair was known only to Catherine’s boss, Eric Croft. Denied public grief, Eric assigns Catherine a ‘special project’ to restore an old automaton. Along with the automaton Catherine finds the diaries of Henry Brandling, a wealthy but odd nineteenth century Englishman. Catherine discovers that Henry had commissioned an equally eccentric  German clockmaker, Herr Sumper, to construct a digesting, mechanical duck out of love for his ailing son, Percy, after the boy had discovered de Vaucanson’s original mechanical pooping duck. Sumper, however, decides to instead make his own art, building a silver swan that would be a legacy to his one-time master, English inventor Albert Cruickshank.

Carey’s narrative skilfully shows how Catherine copes with her very private grieving of Matthew and her obsession with Brandling’s diaries. This narrative is complemented by Brandling’s own obsessions, and of how the silver swan came to be built and wind up more than a century later in tea chests at Catherine’s museum. And while Catherine is as real and as vivid a character as any Carey has created, the problems of the book, in my view (and in the view of my Lit Nerds colleagues), lie in the characters of the diary – Brandling, Herr Sumper, Sumper’s wife, a fairytale collector, and others. These people, their locations, their stories and the author’s musings on Cruickshank’s adding machine, slowed the story and forced me to re-read passages trying to figure it all out.

The ending was frustrating and a little soggy, as the stories of Catherine and her conflict with her brilliant, beautiful assistant Amanda, and with Eric Croft, were not satisfactorily resolved. Also, the book’s highly interesting themes – of obsession, grief, loss, and industrial decay – could have been nailed better had the diary chapters been cleaner and clearer.

Throughout, Peter Carey’s trademark prose is bouncy, playful and given to poetic flights when required. While The Chemistry of Tears is not a rabid page-turner, I smiled much more often than I groaned. On balance, this is an interesting, curious and resonant work from one of Australia’s – and the world’s – most awarded and imaginative fiction writers.

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copyright James Williamson