{"id":263,"date":"2013-03-07T10:02:21","date_gmt":"2013-03-07T10:02:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/demo.bookoxygen.com\/?p=263"},"modified":"2013-03-08T09:07:13","modified_gmt":"2013-03-08T09:07:13","slug":"the-chemistry-of-tears-by-peter-carey-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/?p=263","title":{"rendered":"The Chemistry of Tears by Peter Carey"},"content":{"rendered":"

Published by Faber & Faber\u00a0\u00a07 March 2013<\/strong><\/p>\n

288pp,\u00a0\u00a0paperback, \u00a37.99<\/strong><\/p>\n

Reviewed by Rachel Hore<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\u00a0Like the wondrous machine whereof it speaks, this novel is a triumph of craftsmanship\u00a0and as one reads it\u2019s easy to imagine Carey fitting it all together, balancing the pieces and turning the screws with the finest of his literary tools. Only sometimes does the structure creak. Catherine herself is being played upon, but she doesn\u2019t see why at first or who her deus ex machina<\/em> might be, but one is troubled by a sense that the author occasionally over-manipulates his characters.\u00a0 An exquisite young female assistant appears, who spies on her, but who pursues her own sinister agenda: she\u2019s obsessed by strange theories about the oil spill in theGulf of Mexico (it\u2019s 2010) and the warming world.\u00a0 What is the link between Sumpter, a strange cube found hidden inside his creation, and the invention of the combustion engine?\u00a0 This humble reader has still not got it completely straight.<\/p>\n

The pleasures of this novel\u00a0 – and there are many \u2013 are ones of language and intellect. The metaphor of the automaton throws up myriad themes about the relationships between science and sensibility,\u00a0 the mechanical and the organic, the material and the supernatural.\u00a0 Carey\u2019s prose is always light and lean, evocative of place and character and feeling.\u00a0 Catherine sums herself up vividly when she observes: \u2018There was surely something incensed <\/em>\u00a0about my walk, the ink blue of my swirling skirt; and me, as always, too heavy on the heels.\u2019\u00a0 Sometimes her sensibility is taken too far, as when she revisits her dead lover\u2019s office: \u2018All around me were Matthew\u2019s molecules, oxygen that had caressed the clean pink lining of his lungs.\u2019\u00a0 There\u2019s a lot of this.\u00a0 What gives the book its heart and \u2013 dare one say soul \u2013 is when it mines the depths of what makes us human.\u00a0 Catherine\u2019s love for Matthew, Brandling\u2019s concern for his child, these are what forge the differently chemicalled tears.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Now available in paperback<\/p>\n

The pleasures of this novel – and there are many \u2013 are ones of language and intellect. The metaphor of the automaton throws up myriad themes about the relationships between science and sensibility, the mechanical and the organic, the material and the supernatural. Carey\u2019s prose is always light and lean, evocative of place and character and feeling. […] in Reviews<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-263","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-new-fiction-and-non-fiction","category-notable-books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/263","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=263"}],"version-history":[{"count":40,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/263\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":268,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/263\/revisions\/268"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=263"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=263"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=263"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}