Trying so hard to put the pieces back together again

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Catherine Gehrig, the heroine of Peter Carey’s new novel, The Chemistry of Tears, is a museum conservator and a horologist, which is to say that her life is dedicated to precision, and good order, and the restoration of the chaotic damage inflicted by time and human carelessness. One day she arrives for work at the Swinburne Museum, one of those jewel-like, hidden treasure houses with which London is so fortunately endowed, to learn that her colleague, Matthew Tindall, is dead. He suffered a catastrophic heart attack on the Tube. Matthew was Catherine’s lover for 13 years, a fact unknown to any of her colleagues except Eric Croft, the head curator of horology, who loved them both.

Unable to attend the funeral at which Matthew’s wife, Margaret, will preside, unhinged by grief, Catherine is swiftly moved by Eric to an office in a grim annexe of the Swinburne, where she is to undertake a complicated consolatory project, housed in eight tea-chests. “Was I the first conservator on earth who did not wish to open up a box?” wonders Catherine, who fears the chests may contain “some awful tribe of clockwork monkeys blowing smoke” — her first conservator’s assignment having been just such a distressing simian.

But when she opens the tea chests what she finds is less eerie: a tin of brass screws, a large number of twisted glass rods and 11 school exercise books, written in a peculiar style of handwriting that immediately engages her sympathy, “for I decided that the writer had been driven mad. I did not yet know his name was Henry Brandling but … I pitied him before I read a word”.

The notebooks prove to contain Henry Brandling’s account of a strange journey he made to Germany in 1854. Henry comes from a wealthy family whose hold on sanity is not entirely secure. He is married, unhappily, to Hermione, a handsome, unpleasant woman who takes a keen interest in the artist Brandling commissioned to paint her portrait. Their only surviving child, Percy, is sickly, and adored by his father who, trying to distract him, shows him the plans for a marvellous French automaton — a mechanical duck that appears to eat, drink and — to Percy’s great amusement — defecate. According to Hermione, Henry has promised Percy that he will have the duck constructed, and so he departs on a search for a craftsman who can make the automaton. “I was not suited to adventures,” he reflects.

Henry’s quest, fantastical to begin with, steadily assumes the nightmarish lineaments of a particularly nasty fairy story as he meets an ogre who once pole-vaulted into Prince Albert’s bedroom at Buckingham Palace, an angelic crippled child and a man who claims his mother was a cat.

Meanwhile, the tragic mystery of Henry’s automaton (which is not a duck at all) leaks into Catherine’s personal tragedy: the chaos of her love’s dissolution (and with it her sense of who she is) counterpointed by the precise engineering and anarchic narrative of the creature she is painstakingly restoring. Eric hopes the automaton will, in its turn, restore the fortunes of the museum.

The health of a sick child, the broken heart of a bereaved woman, a museum’s budget cuts: it is a heavy freight of expectation for one beautifully engineered mechanical bird to bear. Yet Peter Carey’s intricately constructed narrative, with its tender, astringent reflections on the nature of love and mortality, human ingenuity and human destructiveness, convinces the reader that such a thing is entirely possible.

Carey, who is now 68, has been the recipient of numerous literary awards, including the Man Booker Prize twice — in 1988 and 2001. It is remarkable, and rather cheering, to find that the fine bloom on his writing, the sharp, green bite of emotion and the pellucid observation seem entirely unaffected by success and a

(well-deserved) place in the modern canon.

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