The Chemistry Of Tears is split between the story of Catherine Gehrig, a museum curator in present-day London, and the 19th-century man whose mechanical swan, modelled on the Vaucanson, sits on her desk, waiting to be reassembled. As a place where I might have started."Ĭarey's reluctance to summarise his new novel comes down, perhaps, to just how eccentric and unsummarisable it is. "And that led me off on a whole other way of dealing with things that were in my head." If a single image united all this, it was the long-range effect of industrialisation: "An overheated planet. Carey's mind has a pinball tendency to ricochet madly and so, eventually, he found himself thinking about a mechanical duck: the 18th-century automaton designed by Jacques de Vaucanson. That set him to thinking about oil, which triggered thoughts about Henry Ford. When Carey was growing up, his father sold cars to local farmers, engines customised "to get them up the steep bloody hill".
He had been reminiscing about his father's car business, in a town called Sale in Gippsland, Australia. Peter Carey's first thought was to write about engines.
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