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As he has done before on several occasions, Peter Carey offers us two parallel stories in his intriguingly titled ''The Chemistry of Tears''. The two elements of the title reflect that this is a book about grief, but also about science. It's also a book about human's relationship with machines and dependence that we have grown to have on them, and the ugliness of life and the beauty of, at least some, machines. In one strand of the story, Catherine is a modern -day horologist working in a London museum whose world is shattered by the death of a married colleague with whom she was having an affair. Put to work on restoring a mysterious clockwork bird, she discovers the journals of Henry Brandling, the nineteenth -century wealthy man who commissioned the construction of the toy for his consumptive son.

Catherine's story line storyline is by far the most straightforward of the two and is set in a world that is simpler to understand than many of Carey's characters find themselves in. As often with his characters though, she is not particularly likable likeable and yet he manages to make us feel for her plight. She is completely unapologetic about her affair and has no thought for the widow or her two sons. Her behaviour to her well-meaning boss is vile, and her drunken antics including removing items from the museum for her own personal study at home is, at best, unprofessional. She has no real friends, and it's not hard to see why. However , her story is the more compelling of the two and Carey's prose is excellent particularly in observing the small details and it is this thread that provides what narrative propulsion there is here.