'The Chemistry of Tears'

by Peter Carey

Knopf, 230 pp., $26

Time may not be enough to heal all wounds in Peter Carey's heartbreaking novel about what happens when "the other woman" must mourn the loss of her forbidden lover, "The Chemistry of Tears."

At the center of this profoundly detailed study of love and grief is the "oddly elegant" Catherine Gehrig, a 40-something conservator at London's Swinburne Museum (a fictional museum a bit like Seattle's Museum of History & Industry) who specializes in horology, the science of timekeeping. She works in a world of "clocks and watches, automata and other wind-up engines" among "scholars, priests, repairers, sand-paperers, scientists, plumbers, mechanics train-spotters really."

The first female horologist in the Swinburne's history, her sense of being set apart is only heightened by the fact that for 13 years, she's been having an affair with the museum's head curator of metals, Matthew Tindall, "one of those physically graceful disheveled beauties my country does produce so very well."

Matthew is 10 years Catherine's elder. He's also married with kids, so their romance has blossomed in the darkness of total secrecy. But now Matthew has died, and since no one seems to know how close he and Catherine were, she only finds out about it at work one day.

Like a stopped clock, her heart becomes stuck in the past, with memories of Matthew flooding her daydreams. But there is hope for consolation.

She discovers that one person may be aware of the connection between her and Matthew, Head Curator for Horology Eric Croft, "the master of all that ticked and tocked," a specialist in fanciful Oriental music boxes with movable buildings and beasts on them that the British exported to China in the 18th century. Eric was a close friend of Matthew's for years.

To help distract her, the sly Eric gives Catherine a special project to work on: A box of mysterious mechanical pieces that look to be parts from a 19th-century automaton, in this case a bird with moving parts. She must bring the bird back to life, while her own is at a standstill.

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'The Chemistry of Tears': the mournful mechanics of a broken heart