Clockwork is a fascinating concept to weave through a story in the digital age. I am old enough to remember winding my first watch but it is many years now since I have had anything other than a digital watch. If I put my mind to considering whether our household has any clockwork mechanisms at all, all I can come up with is a (somewhat twee) Christmas decoration featuring Santa on a music-box merry-go-round and our (rather unreliable) 1930s mantel clock. That’s probably typical of most households today. Clockwork has been relegated to the realm of museums, antiques, and nostalgia.

But in a splendid return to the dazzling form which produced Oscar and Lucinda, Peter Carey’s new novel, The Chemistry of Tears, is a deliciously eccentric tale of obsession, centring on clockwork, and grief.

Hidden grief is probably more common than we know. In Carey’s tale, Catherine Gehrig is The Other Woman, trying to grieve in secret for Matthew Tinsdale who, until his untimely death, is her colleague and lover at London’s ‘Swinburne Museum’. No one else knew about their affair, (or so she thought) so she tries to deal with her loss without any of the support that a grieving widow could take for granted. She can’t attend the funeral. She receives no consolatory sympathy cards. None of the stilted, awkward words of well-meaning friends ease her way through the raw passage of grief through the human heart.

But it is Carey writing this novel, so Catherine’s journey is anything but dignified. Naughty man, he makes his readers smile, chuckle, and laugh out loud at poor Catherine’s antics. An obsessive and controlling personality, she is well-suited to her job as the first female horologist at the museum, but try as she might, her efforts to behave as an unfeeling mechanical creature are sabotaged by the madness of her overwhelming grief.

To read the rest of my review please visit http://anzlitlovers.com/2012/01/26/th...