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
Recommendation and review posted by G. Smith
