What Book to Read?

In the interests of fair disclosure, I have to say up front that I’m not a fan of Peter Carey. I didn’t even enjoy his (second) Booker Prize winning novel, True History of the Kelly Gang (2001), reviewed here. The Chemistry of Tears (2012) shares one of the same devices used in the earlier book: a story imagined around a real event or object. In this case it is an automaton, a swan that moves as if real. The story is partly about its creation, and partly about its restoration. Carey says that happening to see it being refurbished in a museum was the impetus behind the book.

Catherine Gerhig is a horologist who works at the Swinburne Museum (the V&A?) in London. One day her secret, married lover, who also works there, dies suddenly, leaving her bereft. Her boss, who may be in love with her too, gives her a new project to distract her: the reconstruction of a mechanical swan. The other half of the story, told in sections that alternate with Catherine’s, concerns Henry Brandling, a rich Victorian whose beloved son is ill with consumption. Henry hopes that the gift of a mechanical toy will improve his health, or even cure him. He initially thinks he has commissioned a mechanical duck, but the German watchmaker/inventor instead constructs the swan. Catherine reads Brandling’s story in the journal he kept of while the automaton was being constructed.

There are clearly meant to be parallels between the stories: whether ‘the huge peace of mechanical things’ can overcome grief is central to both of them. Both Catherine and Henry experience misery, rage almost amounting to madness, frustration and betrayal. It is a matter of opinion whether the two stories are fitted together like a well-oiled machine, or are mechanical in the pejorative sense. Catherine’s story has oddities enough, but Henry’s journal is positively opaque, and I got quite lost trying to work out what was going on. Much of it relates the story of the German watchmaker, Sumper, who has more or less kidnapped Henry; he tells Henry about the time he spent in London working with Sir Albert Cruickshank on something that sounds a bit like a computer, whose aim was to bring order out of chaos. Again there is a clear parallel with the reconstruction of the swan, but so what?

It doesn’t help that I found it hard to empathise with Catherine. She seems to have been made needlessly unpleasant, responding to grief with alcohol, drugs and rudeness. Nor could I understand her relationship with her assistant, who is apparently some sort of spy – but who for and why bother – with the Dickensian name of Amanda Snyde. She seems to have some kind of weird religious interest in the mechanism that makes the swan work, but again, I couldn’t see the point of it. I understand that not everything in a novel has to have some point, but in a novel about fitting together parts so they will move, you’d think her role would one of those moving parts. Perhaps it was and I failed to see it. But if so, I’m surprised that no one else in my book group could figure it out either.

Of course it’s not Catherine’s fault I couldn’t relate to her, or Amanda’s that she seems crazy; it’s Carey’s. I just don’t think he writes well about women. I didn’t find either of them convincing. It’s true I’ve been prejudiced against him ever since he wrote dismissively of his former wife – who had been his editor and muse – in his 2006 book Theft: a Love Story (though he shrugs this accusation off. You can read about it here). But the rest of the book club, who don’t share my prejudice, agreed neither character was realistic.

A review in the Guardian by the eminent writer and critic Andrew Motion didn’t suggest he had any of these problems with the book; rather the opposite. For him Carey exhibits ‘an easy-seeming mastery’ and is ‘too subtle a writer to spell out precise meanings …’ You can read his glowing assessment – ‘an impressive achievement’ –  here.

I have to admit that the swan itself is interesting, though I find it a bit bizarre. It was actually made in the eighteenth century, not the nineteenth as in this story. It is housed in the Bowes Museum, Barnard Castle, Teesdale, County Durham, England. You can read about it here, and watch a YouTube of it in action here.

You can read more about Peter Carey’s life and work on his website.