Peter Carey’s new novel is about robots. I think. And grief. Yes, I’m positive it’s got something to do with grief. And art restoration, computers and global warming. And possibly space aliens, but don’t quote me on that. The Australian two-time Booker winner, who lives in New York, is one of my all-time favorite novelists. For more than 30 years, he’s published dazzlingly smart stories about con artists and fanatics with deceptions nested inside confusion tied up with madness. But his latest novel pulls those strings of madness a little too tight to unpack. It took me back to A.S. Byatt’s “The Biographer’s Tale,” which tried to re-create for us the bafflement of confronting jumbled notes, and succeeded.
“The Chemistry of Tears” starts in 2010, but, like the best of Carey’s fiction, it slips into the 19th century. Catherine Gehrig is a conservator at an “almost-secret” museum in London who’s just learned that her lover of 13 years — a married colleague — has died of a heart attack. As her cloistered grief threatens to overwhelm her, her boss offers an unusual salve: a box of rusted parts from some kind of automaton circa 1854. In need of painstaking restoration, it’s a complex project that might distract Catherine from mourning and garner some flashy publicity for the museum when she’s done.
(Knopf) - ”The Chemistry of Tears: A Novel” by Peter Carey.
This is the third of Carey’s cerebral short novels about the provenance of curious objects. In “My Life as a Fake” (2003), he scanned the slippery lines of a fraudulent poem; in “Theft” (2006), he swirled through the palette of art forgery. In “The Chemistry of Tears,” his heroine picks through hundreds of corroded springs, tarnished silver rings and glass rods gunked up with old glue. Descended from a line of clockmakers, she’s a horologist who could recognize the angle of Whitworth screw threads since she was 10. She quickly realizes that the pieces she’s charged with reassembling compose something like the mechanical digesting duck that Jacques de Vaucanson constructed in the mid-18th century. Or they may hold the evidence to humanity’s impending destruction. Or I may have been snacking on too many paint chips from an old windowsill.
In any case, the key to this historical, mechanical and possibly metaphysical mystery is 11 faded notebooks found among the decrepit machine parts. The peculiar style of the handwriting convinces Catherine “that the writer had been driven mad,” which sounds a little crazy itself, but hang on. Violating the museum’s rules (and common sense), she takes these notebooks home and begins reading the remarkable tale of a wealthy young man named Henry Brandling. In 1854, Henry got it into his head that only a replica of Vaucanson’s duck could cheer up his sickly little boy, so he traveled to Germany in search of a clockmaker capable of re-creating such a machine. (The logic of that motivation may be the rustiest spring in this novel.)
As Catherine slowly reconstructs the automaton in her modern-day workshop, alternating chapters take us back into the Black Forest, where Henry has employed a manic, and possibly murderous, genius. The mysterious manuscript, the increasingly bizarre picaresque voyage, and the grotesque characters Henry meets along the way are all classic Carey tropes, and very quickly several fascinating themes start to shoot and snort out of this Rube Goldberg plot.
These books offer keen insights into leadership and management challenges, which on a day-to-day basis can bring their own dramas, twisting plot lines and, in this city, political intrigue.
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