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.
Read more:
The Chemistry of Tears, by Peter Carey
Recommendation and review posted by G. Smith
