The Chemistry of Tears is a novel about two people with unquiet
minds, in very quiet places. It is 2010, and just as the oil from the Gulf of
Mexico environmental disaster is beginning to spread across the surface of the
water, Catherine Gehrig, horologist, is faced with a personal catastrophe of a
comparable scale. She has just learned that her lover of 13 years is dead.
Her supervisor at the
Swinburne Museum, a pretty self-satisfied and manipulative individual, sets her
the task of restoring an unusual object. (The nature of the object itself ought
to be discovered through a reading of the book, and there are no spoilers
here.) Among the items provided to her in a series of tea chests is a
collection of notebooks, giving Gehrig a jealously guarded entry into the life
of Henry Brandling.
In 1854, Brandling
left England in search of something so mesmerising that it would distract his
consumptive son from his illness. His travels took him to a small town in
Germany, and the workshop of the mysterious Herr Sumper. Brandling is forced to
submit to Sumper’s strange tales of his past adventures, and begins to doubt that
his work is even being done.
Peter Carey unspools these
two stories in tandem. We come slowly closer to the marvellous thing at the end
of both trajectories, from two different directions. As Brandling stumbles and
bumbles his way through life in his German village, impatiently awaiting the
completion of the project, Gehrig catalogues and pieces together this very work
of art, in all its extraordinary complexity. And as the novel progresses, it is
apparent that Catherine and Henry have more in common than it initially
appeared. Both are subject to the whim of others, and frustrated by this
intrusion. Both are hindered to varying degrees by those ostensibly sent to
assist them. Both are wracked with anguish and longing for a precious person
who they cannot be with.
‘There was no one I
dared turn to. I thought, I will work. It was what I had always done in crisis.
It is what clocks were good for, their intricacy, their peculiar puzzles.’
This is another
absorbing novel from Peter Carey. Of the two stories being told, it is
Catherine Gehrig’s which is the more compelling and believable. This is
achieved in part by her unusual position, in which she is both character and
critic: she can sit in judgement on the decisions made by Henry Brandling more
than 150 years earlier. Her particular professional knowledge also enables her
to interpret signals and clues missed by Brandling.
Carey examines with
utmost care the power of an object, especially one so elaborate and fantastic
as this, to distract, to calm, and to resolve. The Chemistry of Tears is a reminder of the great value of a thing
made with the hands, the heart and the mind, over a period of time.
