Book by Peter Carey
The Chemistry of Tears is a 2012 novel by Australian author Peter Carey.
Plot summary
Catherine Gehrig is a middle-aged horologist working in "the Georgian halls" of the Swinburne Museum, London SW1. For the last 13 years she has been in love with her married colleague, Matthew Tindall, and when he dies suddenly she is distraught. Her boss Eric Croft moves her to the museum annexe in Olympia and gives her a recent acquisition to assemble: a complex mechanical toy that she first thinks might be a monkey, then decides is a duck. Croft's hope is that Catherine will be led towards recovery by "the huge peace of mechanical things". She slowly becomes entranced by a story that has some peculiar parallels with her own.
This story, which is told in sections that alternate with Catherine's own, involves Henry Brandling, scion of a wealthy 19th-century railway family, husband of sourpuss Hermione and father of sickly Percy. When Percy falls ill, and all the usual Victorian therapies have failed, Henry becomes convinced that a foreign and mechanical entertainment might heal him. Henry's search for the mechanism and Catherine's restoration of it provide the novel's counterpoints.
The novel carried the following dedication:
"For Frances Coady"
