The Chemistry of Tears by Peter Carey

Previously published in The Herald Magazine.

The one thing to always remember about two time Booker winner Peter Carey is that he’s a bit of a wily genius. Regardless of how well informed his readers may be, it is close to impossible to understand every reference and every nuance of any of his novels. Each is a feat of research and high brow intelligence, but also often a subtle marvel that traps you entirely, whether you understand it perfectly or not - whether it is perfect or not. 

Carey has written twelve very unique and much loved novels. His latest is The Chemistry of Tears, the story of Catherine, a conservator of clocks and clockwork automatons - a horologist - at a museum in London. It is also the story of Henry Brandling, a 19th century man of means who imagines that the creation of a clockwork duck that eats and defecates will perhaps lift his tubercular son’s spirits. The two narratives are joined when the automaton Henry had made by German clockmakers is given to Catherine to repair and assemble, along with his diaries that reveal the process of making the mechanical swan. 

We are thrust headfirst into Catherine’s world and her immense grief on finding out that Mathew, her lover of 13 years is dead. He was a married man with children, a colleague and as Catherine tells us repeatedly, her ‘darling’. Their relationship is so secret that no one even thinks to tell her how he has died and instead we see her plummet deep into grief as she imagines how, ‘each vision … a shock, a rip, a cry’. This of course means she can not share her grief with anyone at all - oddly, Catherine seems to have no friends, no family to turn to; other than a few cursory work related acquaintances, her only meaningful human contact seems to have been with Mathew. Our only understanding of a happy, stable Catherine comes from her own recollections of how her relationship with Mathew had been blissful - currently, Catherine is incredibly unhinged: a ‘whirring mad machine’, entirely unappealing in her overwhelming, almost tedious self-pity and grief. Fueled by vodka and valium she is completely, absurdly erratic. Yet is it Catherine who is the more interesting of Carey’s two narrators. Henry is woefully predictable - a sad, desperate man who is bullied by the clockmaker he hires in the Black Forest. 

Of course, Carey does not stop with Catherine when it comes to bewildering insanity and immense emotional outpouring. Henry finds himself with an unhinged German inventor and a mad little ‘angel’ child both of whom befuddle Henry constantly. Catherine’s new assistant is bipolar and one day claws Catherine’s face like a wounded animal would. Characters have sudden, huge gusts of powerful emotion, constantly impending breakdowns, overwhelming waves of love, loss, grief - its almost too much too take in, if Carey wasn’t so oddly equally precise in the pacing of the narrative.

It is not possible to truly understand every single nuance placed within the text (and subtext) of The Chemistry of Tears. Even though many of the references Carey has wound together in this story are based on historical reality (including Jacques de Vaucanson’s 1739 Digesting Duck automaton and a child prodigy called Carl who may be Karl Benz, the inventor of the gasoline driven car), there is simply too much to tightly wound together in this book to completely understand. Its all wonderfully post-modern: the book, like the automaton is a complicated, intense clockwork puzzle. 

For all its precisions, for all its perfectly balanced cogs and wheels, The Chemistry of Tears does not wind itself up neatly closed. Carrey is relentless in his constant introduction of new ideas and new speculations till the very end. As Catherine’s is once asked, ‘why do we wish to remove ambiguity?’