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Author Peter Carey starts every novel with the big argument what is wrong with the American approach to democracy in Parrot and Olivier in America; how do Australians live with the convict stain in The True History of the Kelly Gang.

In his most recent novel, The Chemistry of Tears, he's concerned with nothing less than the fate of the earth. The story of a contemporary museum curator who is restoring an automaton a clockwork silver swan takes place in 2010, the year the BP oil spill threatened environmental disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. A parallel story takes place in the 19th century as Henry Brandling struggles to get the swan made as a gift for his consumptive son.

If you ask why are you interested in the 19th century, I would say, because were living in it, Carey said in an interview with CBC News. Were living with the consequences of it. We argue with the 19th century capitalists, growth is good we still talk like that

At the same time we know that growth is killing us. At the same time, we know were living on the resources of a planet and a half. The system will break with all the destruction man can do. So in both those cases were living in the 19th century were living in 19th century with its mad, technological optimism. We have the idea that we get richer by making stuff and then throwing it away.

The prophet that Carey gets to carry his message in The Chemistry of Tears is Amanda Snyde a crazy young woman who is off her medication and who may also be a spy for the powerful manager of the fictional Swinburne Museum in London, where much of the story is set. Amanda is obsessed with the Gulf oil spill, transfixed by the webcam that shows the stain spreading across the ocean. She sees it as an end-of-days event, but then, she also believes that the internal combustion engine is the work of aliens, who bequeathed it to humankind to lead us toward self-destruction.

Shes nuts, but shes correct, Carey says, waggishly, adding that he had to make her unhinged because I wanted someone who could give a poetic expression of a bigger truth.

Carey is Australian born the youngest son of a man who ran a car dealership and admired Henry Fords invention. Carey himself has made his home in New York for the past 22 years, teaching creative writing. now at Hunter College. Hes won the Booker Prize twice, for Oscar and Lucinda and The True History of the Kelly Gang. The Chemistry of Tears is his 18th book.

The main contemporary character, the curator Catherine Gehrig, is the first Carey conceived and the woman who provided a narrative arc to the story he tells. Shes been in a secret affair with a married man and he dies, leaving her so paralyzed by grief she does not trust her own judgment. She cannot grieve openly, and her behaviour is so erratic she is moved to an annex of the Swinburne Museum and given a project meant to keep her out of harms way to reconstruct an automaton that arrives packed in pieces in numerous tea chests.

Im really very fond of her, Im fond of all my characters. I find her behaviour totally reasonable, Carey says of Catherine, who is more concerned about breaking into her lovers account and deleting all the e-mails theyve exchanged than with her odd assistant, Amanda, or with her job. Ive never experienced what Cat did, but I have loved someone. Its not hard to imagine.

The 19th century character Henry Brandling who seeks out a clockmaker in Karlsruhe, Germany to make an automaton is equally perturbed by grief, both for his failed marriage and over the illness of his child, Percy. Brandling has found a drawing of Vaucansons duck, an automaton that eats and excretes, by the real French inventor Jacques de Vaucanson. He wants a similar device for his consumptive son, thinking that it will make the boy laugh and encourage him to live.

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Peter Carey's The Chemistry of Tears

THE CHEMISTRY OF TEARS Peter Carey Knopf $26, 240 pages

Peter Carey's "The Chemistry of Tears" is a short novel that bristles with ideas. A meditation on grief, it also rambles freely through the history of technology, making reference to Charles Babbage (father of the computer), Karl Benz (father of the internal combustion engine), and an automaton that impressed Mark Twain and would make the title character in "Hugo" wet his pants.

The Deepwater Horizon oil spill provides an oppressive backdrop to one-half of the story, and bankruptcy through reckless stock trading shadows the other half. The two main characters, racked with pain over the death or illness of the person closest to them, are assisted in their obsessions by mechanically adroit zealots who use their grief against them. Horology and the construction of automata are described in precise detail, and the plot has a clockwork precision that's chillingly inventive and maybe wound a quarter-turn too tight.

The frame Carey chooses to contain his cabinet of wonders is a sturdy and familiar one: parallel chapters that tell an overlapping story. Catherine Gehrig is a buttoned-tight conservator at a London museum who finds out on the first page that her married lover, her colleague and "secret darling" is dead. Unhinged with grief, she's given a special project by her boss, the one man who knows her secret: reconstruct a 19th-century automaton, a silver swan that picks up fish and then cranes its neck before swallowing them.

Gehrig begins reading the notebooks of Henry Brandling, who commissioned the swan as a gift for his gravely ill son. Brandling's story is presented in counterpoint to Gehrig's, but of course she falls through the wormholes and identifies with a man who tries to use a mechanical marvel to assuage his grief. Their stories merge in places and jump the tracks when Brandling's project is hijacked by a mysterious German inventor and Gehrig's efforts at rebuilding the swan are complicated by an assistant who gets stuck in the oily current between obsessiveness and insanity.

Luckily for the unwary reader, Carey is a master novelist capable of pulling all this together with a casual brio. You don't win two Booker Prizes by being indecisive about where you're going with your narrative, and the open-ended conclusion can be read as a commentary on where these machines we've created are carrying us. It's a question as modern as artificial intelligence or oil pouring out of an uncapped well in the Gulf of Mexico. Creating a lifelike machine to do our bidding or to ease our pain as a counterweight to the dehumanization of industrialization is one thing. Making an automaton as a work of art is something else. Twain saw in the silver swan "a living grace about his movement and a living intelligence in his eyes." Gehrig's swan finally "bent its snakelike neck, then darted, and every single human held its breath."

Reading: Carey reads from "The Chemistry of Tears" at 7 p.m. Wednesday at Powell's Books at Cedar Hills Crossing, 3415 S.W. Cedar Hills Blvd., Beaverton.

-- Jeff Baker

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'Chemistry of Tears' review: Where the silver swan will carry us

REVIEWED BY ZSUZSI GARTNER From Saturday's Globe and Mail Published Friday, May. 11, 2012 4:00PM EDT

Annotated plans for the (de)construction of Peter Careys The Chemistry of Tears (including various figures, captions, gears, and essential diagrams):

Fig. 1. Canard Digrateur, 1738. Its fitting that Jacques de Vaucansons Digesting Duck, or the idea of it, squats at the centre of Peter Careys latest novel.

The famous mechanical duck, one of the early roboticists automatons, had 400 moving parts and could purportedly eat grain and then defecate. Its miraculous anatomy was fraudulent the feces was pre-stored in a compartment and pushed out by a mechanism as the duck swallowed and digested the grain but the lifelike automaton still compelled.

Carey has explored creation and authenticity before, most recently in Theft: A Love Story and My Life as a Fake, as well as constructed identities in His Illegal Self. In The Chemistry of Tears, the twice-laurelled Booker Prize winner again takes on complex fraudulence and subterfuge, in both the past and present of his story.

Fig. 2.a. Catherine Gehrig, 2010. A rational sensualist and British museum horologist, Gehrig is charged with reassembling an 18th-century automaton. Its an exquisitely demanding task her avuncular and crafty boss thinks will soothe as Catherine grieves the sudden death of her secret lover and fellow conservator. (All of this unfolds in the first brisk dozen pages Carey is one of the dabber hands with plot among literary writers.)

Fig. 2.b. Henry Brandling, 1854. The Englishmans Grimm Brothers-like adventure in the Black Forest illuminates the Victorians fondness for quack cures (pun only noted in hindsight, honestly!).

Brandlings young son is ill (consumptive?) and is subjected to the fashionable treatment of freezing hydrotherapy when all else fails. Henry is convinced, after showing Percy reproduced plans for Vaucansons century-old duck in a London newspaper and witnessing his sons surge of energy, that he has found a cure, a clockwork Grail.

The German clockmaker he commissions to recreate the mechanical canard is a mad, bullying neo-genius who claims to have worked with Dr. Albert Cruikshank an avatar of Charles Babbage, the 19th-century inventor of the Analytical Engine, godfather of the computer, and an icon of the Steampunk genre (viz. William Gibson and Bruce Sterlings seminal The Difference Engine.)

Caption 1. Always remember that almost any treatment is safer than the condition you are treating. Percys physician.

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The Chemistry of Tears, by Peter Carey

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 Prizewinning 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.

Boxed up with the swan's hundreds of screws, rods and rings are 11 notebooks densely filled with "handwriting as regular as a factory's sawtooth roof." These are the journals of Henry Brandling, a British railroad heir who, desperate for a divertissement for his sickly young son, traveled deep into the land of expert clock makers in the German Schwarzwald in 1854 to commission a mechanical toy duck. "High on grief and rage," Catherine becomes increasingly caught up in Henry's fantastical tale about his dealings with Herr Sumper, a mechanical genius and probable con man, and his strange household a story that alternates and ultimately intertwines with her own. "Eviscerated by love," she wonders if Henry is "building some mad monument to grief, a kind of clockwork Taj Mahal? Or was that me?" Her unhinged anguish evokes the state of mind Joan Didion describes in The Year of Magical Thinking.

Peter Carey has won the Booker Prize twice, for the novels Oscar and Lucinda and True History of the Kelly Gang.

Peter Carey has won the Booker Prize twice, for the novels Oscar and Lucinda and True History of the Kelly Gang.

Automatons (also central to Martin Scorcese's recent film Hugo) are fascinating in their eerie, lifelike realness. Carey raises questions about "what is alive and what cannot be born," intense identification with machines, and the damage caused by industrialization including the Gulf oil spill. Catherine rails at her well-meaning boss that "it was highly 'inappropriate' to give a grieving woman the task of simulating life." As for souls, she and Matthew, "conceited about [their] ecstatic pragmatism," had no truck with them. Carey's narrator adds beautifully, "That we were intricate chemical machines never diminished our sense of wonder, our reverence for Vermeer and for Monet, our floating bodies in the salty water, our evanescent joy before the dying of the light."

Liberally adorned with descriptions such as a sky "black and bleeding like a Rothko," Carey's gorgeously written, intricately assembled book runs as smoothly as a well-oiled machine. It considers what it means to search for "deep order" in a random universe and "attempt to give meaning to a mess." Yet as tightly engineered as it is, The Chemistry of Tears also leaves room for "fuzziness and ambiguity," mystery and wonder, especially in the realm of our bodies and feelings.

Watch a video of the mechanical Silver Swan housed in the Bowes Museum in Northern England, which inspired by Peter Carey.

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'The Chemistry Of Tears' And The Art Of Healing