An automaton, a man and a woman who can never meet, two stories of love—all are brought to incandescent life in this hauntingly moving novel from one of the finest writers of our time.
London 2010: Catherine Gehrig, conservator at the Swinburne museum, learns of the sudden death of her colleague and lover of thirteen years. As the mistress of a married man, she must struggle to keep the depth of her anguish to herself. The one other person who knows Catherine’s secret—her boss—arranges for her to be given a special project away from prying eyes in the museum’s Annexe. Usually controlled and rational, but now mad with grief, Catherine reluctantly unpacks an extraordinary, eerie automaton that she has been charged with bringing back to life.
As she begins to piece together the clockwork puzzle, she also uncovers a series of notebooks written by the mechanical creature’s original owner: a nineteenth-century Englishman, Henry Brandling, who traveled to Germany to commission it as a magical amusement for his consumptive son. But it is Catherine, nearly two hundred years later, who will find comfort and wonder in Henry’s story. And it is the automaton, in its beautiful, uncanny imitation of life, that will link two strangers confronted with the mysteries of creation, the miracle and catastrophe of human invention, and the body’s astonishing chemistry of love and feeling.
About Peter Carey
PETER CAREY is the author of eleven previous novels and has twice received the Booker Prize. His other honors include the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the Miles Franklin Literary Award. Born in Australia, he has lived in New York City for twenty years.
Editorial Review
The latest from the renowned and prolific Carey (Parrot and Olivier in America, 2010, etc.) is too fanciful to pass as realism yet too inscrutable for parable or fable. Though all of it (or at least half of it) concerns a grieving woman’s attempt to re-engage with life after the death of her married lover, the prevailing spirit is comedic, even whimsical, rather than tragic. And the prevailing metaphor is that of clockwork, the mechanical precision of the museum where she serves as a curator, with “a considerable horological department, a world-famous collection of clocks and watches, automata and other wind-up engines,” a place where “for years I thought clockmaking must still any turmoil in one’s breast. I was so confident of my opinion, so completely wrong.” To keep protagonist and occasional narrator Catherine from going haywire, her supervisor assigns her an archival task: to study the diaries of a man who had commissioned a mechanical duck for his ailing son more than a century earlier. Some chapters are all Catherine, some are from the diaries of Henry and his adventures with the mechanical duck, and some mix the two, though the reader must make leaps of conjecture to connect the writing of Henry and the response from Catherine. Then the plot thickens, as it appears that the circumstances surrounding her affair were more complicated than Catherine had realized, and she comes to suspect that the pages she reads were written specifically for her: “He anticipated someone would watch him through the wormhole, that was clear. He wrote for that person.” While reading about the attempts to construct a mechanical duck that would appear animated, practically alive, Catherine feels herself turning into a machine: “Ingest, I thought, digest, excrete, repeat.” – Kirkus Reviews
‘The Chemistry Of Tears’ And The Art Of Healing
NPR Book Review – May 16, 2012 (Excerpt)
Peter Carey’s dazzling new novel, The Chemistry of Tears, encompasses heartbreak, the comfort of absorbing work, the transformative power of beauty and the soul of an old machine. If you’ve never read the Australian-born, two-time Booker Prize–winning author of Oscar and Lucinda and True History of the Kelly Gang — or, most recently, Parrot and Olivier in America — his 12th novel is a terrific introduction to his work. Once again, Carey demonstrates an artful ability to capture a two-way interplay between past and present that is part historical, part fanciful and completely wonderful.
The day after BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in April 2010, Catherine Gehrig, a tall, elegant, 40-something London museum conservator specializing in horology — clocks and windup automatons — learns of the sudden death of her beloved, miserably married lover. Because their blissful 13-year affair was a secret, there is no one she can turn to in her grief. Her boss, a friend of her darling Matthew who condoned their relationship, sets her up with a new project in the museum’s isolated annex, away from prying eyes. He hopes the complex reassembly of a magnificent, mid-19th century automaton of a silver swan will distract and buoy her. He also provides a phenomenally able if unbalanced young assistant, whose spying presence Catherine resents from the get-go. Catherine and the pretty girl lock into exquisitely rendered terse, tense battles over the import and control of their project. [Read the full article...]
The Mechanics of Loving and Grieving
The New York Times Book Review – May 20, 2012 (Excerpt)
Peter Carey has said that he worked backward to create his latest novel, “The Chemistry of Tears.” He assembled an inventory of seemingly unrelated elements that intrigued him, then found ways of stitching them together. On top of it all, he added an eerie sensuality: “I would rather scrub your bones and place them in the open air, scrub your sternum, labor at your spine, scrub and scrub, with love, each vertebra, as particular as a nose, and lay you in the grass amongst the bluebells.” That heady blend of sex and death is almost enough to keep the seams from showing.
Mr. Carey’s wild hybrid novels are always intriguing, sometimes transporting, never ordinary. But concocting a narrative out of found objects can be forced and awkward. In the case of “The Chemistry of Tears,” the mixture winds up more mystifying than magical, and all too easy to resist.
Among this book’s ingredients: Engines. Automatons. The BP oil spill. Fairy tales. Charles Babbage, the 19th- century inventor and mathematician who conducted groundbreaking experiments with computing machines. Horology. Cuckoo clocks. A city with a layout shaped like a wheel. And a little German boy who was a child when much of this two-tiered book takes place, but whose name, Benz, still resonates in the auto industry today. [Read the full article...]
Peter Carey’s “The Chemistry of Tears”
The Washington Post Book Review – May 22, 2012 (Excerpt)
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. [Read the full article...]
THE LONDONDERRY AIR
Testament of an Ulster Gunman A Novel by Garrad Gawler
It all changed for Charles Cunningham, a Physics teacher at the local College of Technology in the County Derry town of Maddenstown, on a June afternoon in 1973 when a bomb exploded in his neighborhood. He answers an advertisement by the UDR, the Ulster Defence Regiment, but, in the time to come, he will experience the consequences of his decisions, and how his involvement complicates matters with family and friends, Protestants and Catholics alike, to an unexpected degree.
With “The Londonderry Air – Testament of an Ulster Gunman” Garrad Gawler describes in minute detail and with an astonishing level of authenticity not only the inner workings of the Ulster Defence Regiment, but also the activities of underground paramilitary groups of regular citizens who planned and carried out the assassination of suspected Republican terrorists in their neighborhood.
We are the only country that makes guns, including military-style assault weapons, available to anyone who wants to buy them. This is not freedom. It is a tyranny of death and destruction — a tyranny of which the National Rifle Association is proud. The Washington Post
