Author Peter Carey starts every novel with the big argument what is wrong with the American approach to democracy in Parrot and Olivier in America; how do Australians live with the convict stain in The True History of the Kelly Gang.

In his most recent novel, The Chemistry of Tears, he's concerned with nothing less than the fate of the earth. The story of a contemporary museum curator who is restoring an automaton a clockwork silver swan takes place in 2010, the year the BP oil spill threatened environmental disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. A parallel story takes place in the 19th century as Henry Brandling struggles to get the swan made as a gift for his consumptive son.

If you ask why are you interested in the 19th century, I would say, because were living in it, Carey said in an interview with CBC News. Were living with the consequences of it. We argue with the 19th century capitalists, growth is good we still talk like that

At the same time we know that growth is killing us. At the same time, we know were living on the resources of a planet and a half. The system will break with all the destruction man can do. So in both those cases were living in the 19th century were living in 19th century with its mad, technological optimism. We have the idea that we get richer by making stuff and then throwing it away.

The prophet that Carey gets to carry his message in The Chemistry of Tears is Amanda Snyde a crazy young woman who is off her medication and who may also be a spy for the powerful manager of the fictional Swinburne Museum in London, where much of the story is set. Amanda is obsessed with the Gulf oil spill, transfixed by the webcam that shows the stain spreading across the ocean. She sees it as an end-of-days event, but then, she also believes that the internal combustion engine is the work of aliens, who bequeathed it to humankind to lead us toward self-destruction.

Shes nuts, but shes correct, Carey says, waggishly, adding that he had to make her unhinged because I wanted someone who could give a poetic expression of a bigger truth.

Carey is Australian born the youngest son of a man who ran a car dealership and admired Henry Fords invention. Carey himself has made his home in New York for the past 22 years, teaching creative writing. now at Hunter College. Hes won the Booker Prize twice, for Oscar and Lucinda and The True History of the Kelly Gang. The Chemistry of Tears is his 18th book.

The main contemporary character, the curator Catherine Gehrig, is the first Carey conceived and the woman who provided a narrative arc to the story he tells. Shes been in a secret affair with a married man and he dies, leaving her so paralyzed by grief she does not trust her own judgment. She cannot grieve openly, and her behaviour is so erratic she is moved to an annex of the Swinburne Museum and given a project meant to keep her out of harms way to reconstruct an automaton that arrives packed in pieces in numerous tea chests.

Im really very fond of her, Im fond of all my characters. I find her behaviour totally reasonable, Carey says of Catherine, who is more concerned about breaking into her lovers account and deleting all the e-mails theyve exchanged than with her odd assistant, Amanda, or with her job. Ive never experienced what Cat did, but I have loved someone. Its not hard to imagine.

The 19th century character Henry Brandling who seeks out a clockmaker in Karlsruhe, Germany to make an automaton is equally perturbed by grief, both for his failed marriage and over the illness of his child, Percy. Brandling has found a drawing of Vaucansons duck, an automaton that eats and excretes, by the real French inventor Jacques de Vaucanson. He wants a similar device for his consumptive son, thinking that it will make the boy laugh and encourage him to live.

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Peter Carey's The Chemistry of Tears