The Chemistry of Tears by Peter CareyAlfred A. Knopf, 2012 (Originally Faber and Faber)

Catherine Gehrig has lost her lover of thirteen years: he died suddenly, and because their affair was a secret (he was married), she’s unable to grieve publicly. Except their affair wasn’t entirely a secret: Catherine’s lover worked at the Swinburne Museum, as she also does, and was a close friend of her boss. Knowing she can’t cope, knowing she can’t keep her grief from being visible, Catherine’s boss moves her to the museum’s off-site annex and sets her up with a project: the restoration of an automaton from the mid-1800s. Catherine’s specialty is horology, and at first she’d prefer to be working on a plain old clock, rather than on a simulation of life: before the thing is even unpacked from its tea-chests and boxes, she’s dismayed, knowing there’s way too much stuff in those boxes for the thing to just be a clock. But despite the inherent creepiness of automata—as Catherine puts it,

But really, truly, anyone who has ever observed a successful automaton, seen its uncanny lifelike movements, confronted its mechanical eyes, any human animal remembers that particular fear, that confusion about what is alive and what cannot be born. Descartes said that animals were automata. I have always been certain that it was the threat of torture that stopped him saying the same held true for human beings. (16-17)

—and despite the somewhat cruel irony (which she’s fully aware of) that she must live with her grief while reconstructing a simulation of life, Catherine can’t help but be won over by the object inside the boxes. Or, not the object, exactly, but the story of the object, because the boxes contain a series of notebooks, too, which Catherine defies protocol to read (even bringing them home with her, even throwing one across the room in a fit of drunken rage).

The notebooks tell the story of the automaton’s commissioner, one Henry Brandling, and the book alternates between Catherine’s story and Henry’s, sometimes bringing the two together by actively focusing on Catherine’s reading of and thoughts about the notebooks. Through her reading and her work, Catherine feels a connection to Henry, feels convinced, even, that she’s somehow fated to be the reader of his words. Henry’s circumstances, like Catherine’s, are not the happiest: his first child died, his second child is ill, and his wife, heartbroken and stressed, can’t cope with Henry’s optimism that their son, Percy, will surely get better. Henry’s story starts with some diagrams of a still-earlier automaton, Vaucanson’s duck, in the newspaper: he shows the diagrams to Percy and Percy is all delight. Henry’s wife says that showing Percy the diagrams amounts to a promise to build the duck: Henry disagrees, but can’t really say no. But there’s no clockmaker in England who could build such a thing, so Henry sets off to Germany, to a town near the Black Forest famed for its clockmakers. There, Henry’s diagrams for Vaucanson’s duck are stolen, and he finds himself having to venture into the Black Forest itself, where the crazy-but-competent clockmaker/thief will build him the automaton. Sort of. With some changes.

So the duck becomes a swan, and while Henry despairs about it ever getting finished, Catherine works with a crazy-but-competent assistant on cleaning it and putting it back together again. Meanwhile, in the larger world, the BP oil disaster has just happened, and there’s a tension between Catherine’s life in the museum, how wrapped up she is in her grief and her work, and her assistant’s obsession with the disaster. There’s a tension, too, between technology-as-progress and technology-as-danger or technology-as-madness, which is partly explored in Henry’s story as well, in a tangent about the crazy clockmaker’s brush with an inventor modeled on Charles Babbage.

I like both Catherine and Henry as narrators: Henry’s optimism, expressed in sentences like this: “If we Brandlings have sometimes lost our wits or our fortunes on the horses we have also—this is the other side of the coin—known that the impossible was possible nine times out of ten” (25), and Catherine’s love for her dead lover and love for her work. There are great passages about the museum, which Catherine describes as

the great mechanical beast inside its Georgian cube on Lowndes Square, the wires, the trustees, the rules, the stairs, the secrets, Crowley’s Hole where someone hanged themselves, the entire jerry-built mandarin complex of rat runs which is a two-hundred-year-old building in twenty-first-century space. It was a very beautiful, quite astonishing, chaotic, awful thing. I fitted there as I would fit nowhere else on earth. (82)

But there is also sometimes a sense of too much going on, a feeling of too high a concentration of unhinged people in this book to make for contented reading, and also sometimes a distance, a stiltedness to the narration, which was jarring at first but which I got used to by the end. Lidija Haas, writing in The Times Literary Supplement, puts it this way:

Carey here frequently seems less interested in purveying a naturalism of his own than in musing on how such a thing is done, on the precision and detachment needed to evoke feeling, the vast complex systems, the thousands of moving parts, the countless hours of work required to make a spark of life – a bird’s neck turning, its beak darting, a creature or character with “no sense of touch” and “no brain”, but with its every motion “smooth as a living thing”.

I think that’s wonderfully put—not something I would have thought of or been able to express, but right on.