The Chemistry of Tears is the 12th novel by two-time Booker Prize winner Peter Carey, and it’s a welcome addition to the substantial oeuvre of one of Australia’s finest prose stylists. After returning to the 19th century in his previous novel, Parrot and Olivier in America, he half stays there in this work, telling parallel stories that switch back and forth between the 19th and 21st centuries.

The first narrator we meet is Catherine Gehrig, a grieving conservator at the fictional Swinburne Museum in modern-day London, who is given the task of restoring a clockwork automaton that is apparently a replica of the mechanical duck designed by Jacques de Vaucanson in 1739. Included with the parts are the notebooks of the man who commissioned the replica, Henry Brandling, a wealthy member of a railroad dynasty who conceives of the automaton as a gift to cheer his beloved but ailing son. Catherine reads the notebooks and the chapters alternate...

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Carey’s book is a worthy one, but it suffers from the same lack of soul as the mechanistic world it laments over, all mind and machine, an abyss between our hearts, our souls, and the automata we have created to save us, but which are doing the opposite. Like the clockwork swan that Catherine, the main character, slowly brings to ‘life’, Carey’s story remains an intellectual expression of a passionate cause. Like the swan, it goes through the motions, clever but cold, its movements a simulacrum of feeling.

Throughout this story we are reminded of the ubiquitous machine, the automaton, and the rationalistic thinking that has given it an exalted place in our lives: the glorious, ominous, mechanical swan that Catherine painstakingly reassembles, her dead lover’s restored Mini, the noisy lawn mower outside her window, the clocks and tools of her trade, her assistant Amanda’s earpiece and the medication that keeps Amanda ‘normal’, the hole...

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