Ever since I read A.S. Byatt’s Possession, I’ve been sucked into a not-so-secret love of academic-cum-parallel-timeline romance fiction. Frequently, this has led to the consumption of vast quantities of ice-cream and perhaps some overcompensation as I reach for brutally masculine books about guns, warfare, zombie apocalypses, financial system meltdowns and the British public school system.

Strewn amongst these heaps of Coetzee, King and the occasional Mieville are utter gems by David Lodge and James Hynes. The most recent addition to these is the somewhat manic, and fairly trippy The Chemistry of Tears by Peter Carey, of Parrot & Olivier in America fame (amongst others), which to my mind competes with David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas for sheer dizzying reach. Mitchell’s novel made me wish I could scour my brain of all ancillary information so that I could process its contents with all the attention they deserved, rather than what I could muster; Carey may not require the same level of mental treatment, but it is no light read.

The Chemistry of Tears is similar to Cloud Atlas, in that it will probably require multiple re-reads before it really comes together. The opening frame for this tale is the year 2010; the scene, one in which Catherine Gehrig, a museum curator, has just found out about the sudden death of Matthew Tindall, her secret lover of 13 years. Traumatised by the sudden loss, and grief-stricken to an extent that goes well beyond “upset” and deep into the realms of “psychotic break”, she finds herself incapable of functioning without a descent into incipient alcoholism. “I do love my country’s relationship with alcohol,” she tells us. “How would I ever exist in the United States? I suppose I would have grief counselling instead.”

Instead of therapy though, Catherine receives a commission to restore a 19th-century automaton. Knowing that Catherine’s fascination with restoration work will likely be better for her soul (and liver) than the steady diet of vodka and Valium that she has adopted after Tindall’s demise, her supervisor, the well-meaning Eric Croft (who borders on Wodehouse-esque caricature) sends across to her eight rickety tea-chests that he promises she will be unable to resist.

He’s right, but not for the reasons that he imagines. As Catherine unpacks the boxes, secretly dreading the presence of a disassembled mechanical monkey (the worse possible reconstruction work she can imagine, it would seem), she finds an elaborate construct — a swan that can “swim” on glass and “eat” metal fish — and a heap of antique notebooks: the journal of the swan’s original owner, Henry Brandling. Intended as a panacea to Catherine’s grief in 2010, the swan’s construction in 1854 was meant to be a cure — of sorts — for Brandling’s only surviving son, the (terminally?) ill Percy. By continuously keeping Percy excited and interested in a variety of things, Henry had so far managed to keep his son alive, but each success is temporary, and each new measure needs to be even more dramatic and thrilling than the last.

To this end, Brandling — who is the heir to a railroad fortune and has already lost two children — travels deep into the German Schwarzwald (the original home of the cuckoo clock), where he hopes master artisans can build an extravagant toy — a duck that eats grain, digests it and then excretes the residue — for his child. In his notebooks are the stories of his travels and of his search for a technician skilled enough to build this defecating duck.

Swept away on a fantastic wave of general angst (“high on grief and rage” is how Carey describes it), Catherine finds herself swept into Brandling’s notebooks to such an extent that she sneaks them out of the Swinburne Museum and back home, where she reads them fervently (presumably while not throwing back the better part of a Russian distillery).

Brandling finally finds his master clockmaker, a large, intimidating — and possibly insane — man-monster known as Herr Sumper, who decides that what Henry and his son need isn’t a robotic duck: rather he has something far more wondrous in mind. As they argue and wrestle, both literally and metaphorically, over the issue of Percy’s gift, Sumper tells Henry of his own past as an apprentice to one Sir Albert Cruickshank, a brilliant and underfunded London scientist-cum-engineer.

In working with Cruickshank on the scientist’s greatest invention, his “Mysterium Tremendum”, Sumper gains an understanding of high science that is truly visionary, and it is this knowledge that pushes him into co-opting Brandling’s plans for his own ends. Sumper is obsessed with trying to translate the mechanics of technology, science and mathematics into a mystical, almost occult perception of the universe. In coming across Henry’s love for his son, Sumper sees an opportunity that we may see as exploitation, but that he considers portentous.

The Chemistry of Tears is all about obsessions: Catherine’s is to find some sort of closure; Henry’s, to somehow save his son; Sumper’s, to create something that will bring order out of chaos. Carey, the puppet-master, seems to be trying to put all these damaged people together to effect some sort of tremendous resolution. While he succeeds to some extent, his own characters cause the most difficulty with reconciliation.

Take Catherine, for example. For approximately 90 per cent of her time in the novel, she’s reeling about drunkenly and swallowing pills, like some literary hybrid of The Valley of the Dolls and Romeo & Juliet. She sobs. She flings things across rooms with abandon. She shuttles about London like a deranged butterfly. Carey does himself no favours by throwing us straight into the roil of Catherine’s grief. We have never met Matthew Tindall, we have no particular reason to care about either him or her. Demonstrating grief ad infinitum doesn’t actually make the grief more compelling; it transitions from actual feeling into a piece of performance art, all act and no real substance. It probably doesn’t help matters any that Catherine isn’t exactly the most likable protagonist: she’s not fragile, but brittle, spiky and all edges. The more she refers to her “secret darling”, the more one loses sympathy with her.

Henry Brandling is, despite being a slight send-up of the “bumptious tourist getting it all wrong” variety, far more likeable than Catherine, if only because he’s less self-indulgent. He may be a bit of an idiot, but he’s an idiot with a good cause, and you never get the sense that he’s doing anything for his own sake: his commitment to saving his son goes quite far as a redemptive characteristic.

Both Henry and Catherine share an obsession with their loved ones, with finding some way of preserving them, and of solving the mystery of the swan: Catherine in knowing how it got to her, and Henry in understanding what drove Herr Sumper to his state of mild hysteria. But as Croft, Catherine’s boss, says to her, in a moment that almost makes up for all of his barely-concealed drunken bumbling: “I find the notion that mysteries must be solved to be very problematic… mysteries are the point.”

Carey leverages Croft’s words into an ambiguity that covers The Chemistry of Tears like a wet fog, damn and clinging, incapable of being shaken off. Throughout the novel, we see the complexity of opposition: illusion versus reality, art imitating life, mechanical translations of the organic. All of this is very heady stuff, but what Carey seems to be getting at — what is most prevalent in those negative spaces where he restrains himself from excessive commentary and philosophising — is how we human beings parse the material and the illusory, without necessarily accounting for the animating spirit that differentiates life from its imitators. But it is neither one nor the other: if Carey’s gentle hints are to be believed, the alchemy of the spirit is just as important as the science of the body.

The Chemistry of Tears

(NOVEL)

By Peter Carey

Knopf

ISBN 0307592715

240pp. $26.00