Chemistry comes together
By Andrew Miller |
May 25, 2012, Friday
|
Print Edition
Print Edition
IN Peter Carey's 12th novel, much depends on two voices. The first belongs to Catherine Gehrig, an horologist working at the (fictional) Swinburne Museum in London. We join her at the very moment she learns of the sudden death of her lover, Matthew Tindall, head curator of metals at the same institution. For 13 years, Catherine has been Tindall's mistress. He was older, married, a father, but the pair of them lived a blissful, secret life together. Now Tindall is gone - felled by a heart attack - and gone with him, in Catherine's mind, is all good, all possibility of happiness.
She is in her early 40s, an "oddly elegant tall woman" who is also perhaps "something of a freak," at least in relation to her specialty, her high-level fiddling with antique clocks and automatons.
Her surname derives from an immigrant German grandfather, a clockmaker. Her father, "very English," was also a clockmaker but had the misfortune to be working at a time when fine mechanical watches were being replaced by mass-produced ones powered by little batteries. Professionally disappointed, he took to drink.
Having a drink is not Catherine's first reaction on learning of Matthew's death, but she spends much of the rest of the book downing vodka and swallowing pills. She is miserable and angry and tells us so, insistently. She is grief-stricken, half-crazed by her unhappiness. But how much do we care? We were not witnesses to her idyll with the head curator of metals. Grief stated, even stated repeatedly, is no more than that. It has little hold over our emotions. It might be easier if Catherine were easier to like, but for much of the book she's not.
Carey's depiction of Catherine as a technician, a professional piecer-together of old and elaborate things, is more effective.
In the midst of her troubles, she remains in thrall to her trade, to the beauty of mechanical things, to the detective work required to make whole the dismembered artifacts of the past. Knowing this, her boss, the refined and kindly Eric Croft, arranges for her to take on a project he says she will not be able to resist. He will not tell her exactly what it is, but eight rackety tea chests are delivered to her work room, and inside the chests, together with the jumbled parts of some elaborate device, she finds a pile of antique notebooks tied with raffia. She is tasked with putting the device back together.
The closing scenes, in which Catherine and her young assistant finally recreate what it is, are among the best in the book, and the moment when it is set in motion is thrilling.
In an interview a few years ago, Carey spoke of admiring the quality of "risk" in works of fiction. This, I think, is right, risk being an index of a book's and a writer's ambition. "The Chemistry of Tears" takes risks, is quietly ambitious and is, in its last pages, both touching and thought-provoking.
She is in her early 40s, an "oddly elegant tall woman" who is also perhaps "something of a freak," at least in relation to her specialty, her high-level fiddling with antique clocks and automatons.
Her surname derives from an immigrant German grandfather, a clockmaker. Her father, "very English," was also a clockmaker but had the misfortune to be working at a time when fine mechanical watches were being replaced by mass-produced ones powered by little batteries. Professionally disappointed, he took to drink.
Having a drink is not Catherine's first reaction on learning of Matthew's death, but she spends much of the rest of the book downing vodka and swallowing pills. She is miserable and angry and tells us so, insistently. She is grief-stricken, half-crazed by her unhappiness. But how much do we care? We were not witnesses to her idyll with the head curator of metals. Grief stated, even stated repeatedly, is no more than that. It has little hold over our emotions. It might be easier if Catherine were easier to like, but for much of the book she's not.
Carey's depiction of Catherine as a technician, a professional piecer-together of old and elaborate things, is more effective.
In the midst of her troubles, she remains in thrall to her trade, to the beauty of mechanical things, to the detective work required to make whole the dismembered artifacts of the past. Knowing this, her boss, the refined and kindly Eric Croft, arranges for her to take on a project he says she will not be able to resist. He will not tell her exactly what it is, but eight rackety tea chests are delivered to her work room, and inside the chests, together with the jumbled parts of some elaborate device, she finds a pile of antique notebooks tied with raffia. She is tasked with putting the device back together.
The closing scenes, in which Catherine and her young assistant finally recreate what it is, are among the best in the book, and the moment when it is set in motion is thrilling.
In an interview a few years ago, Carey spoke of admiring the quality of "risk" in works of fiction. This, I think, is right, risk being an index of a book's and a writer's ambition. "The Chemistry of Tears" takes risks, is quietly ambitious and is, in its last pages, both touching and thought-provoking.
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