The Chemistry of Tears by Peter Carey

 

 

For some time in Peter Carey’s The Chemistry of Tears, it is quite difficult to identify the precise theme. Near the end, however, it is made clear in a key conversation between the main protagonists (held, significantly, over the telephone rather than face-to-face – the problem of communication is a secondary theme in the novel).

Catherine Gehrig, a conservator of horology at the Swinburne Museum in London and the narrator of half the story, calls her boss, the avuncular Eric Croft, for advice. It is specific advice she seeks, on a Latin translation, although it is clear that Catherine really needs an outlet for her emotions. Eric says to her: “I find the notion that mysteries must be solved to be very problematic.” He goes on: “Every curator finally learns that the mysteries are the point.” Aha! So we’re in the field of mysteries, then, we’re in metaphysics, we’re confronting the eternal questions. “Why do we always wish to remove ambiguitity?” Eric continues. “Without ambiguity you have Agatha Christie, a sort of aesthetic whodunnit. But look at any Rothko. You can look and look but you never get past the vacillations and ambiguities of colour and form and surface.” How very Careyian, you have to say, to distil the mysteries of the universe into a single Rothko canvas. On this occasion, however, it is a weak image. It is a typical of Carey to invoke high art to bestow gravitas on a concept and, in most instances, it works: when that concept is the nature of existence itself, however, the conceit comes close to bathos.

However, that is to quibble. The significant thing is that here, it seems, the novel is taking us into theological territory. This is somewhat surprising, as it is not traditional Carey material, and we shall return to this point later.

Catherine is grieving after the sudden death of the museum’s Head Curator, with whom she has had a thirteen year affair. Her boss, Eric Croft, the only person who knew of the affair, tries to help by assigning to her a new and prestigious project. Consequently, she begins conservation work on what appears to be a spectacular automaton duck. Packed alongside the automaton’s machinery are the notebooks of Henry Brandling, the Victorian patron for whom the automaton was built as a play-thing and health-aid for his consumptive son. Brandling’s notebooks form the second strand of the narrative. It is clear that the automaton – which Catherine discovers is actually a swan, rather than a duck – is of exceptionally high quality and technically it is remarkably advanced. It is designed to move around in a water-filled hull, eating fish and grain, digesting it and and finally defecating the excreta. What we have, then, is a mimetic representation of the natural life-cycle, inevitably suggesting notions of a creator and the created, what it is to be alive, ideas of free will and control, life and death and so on: the mystery of life recreated, in other words.

There is more. The novel explores surfaces, truths. Written on the automaton, in Latin, is the inscription “What you see cannot be seen.” Again, this takes us to the sense of mystery. Nothing we know in life is truly known to us, because we do not – cannot – know what comes after: there is never any clarity or truth, no matter how close we feel we may be to understanding something. Again, the automaton is a powerful image here: it is in poor repair, its parts disarticulated and stored in eight wooden tea chests. Many years later, conservators try to rebuild it, not understanding what it is for, not knowing the story behind its creation. That story is gradually revealed to us through Brandling’s notebooks but, once again, truth serves only to obscure: the final answer is, as it must always be, elusive. Mystery remains.

As a meditation on what it means to be human, then, for that is what the novel is, The Chemistry of Tears has all the necessary elements for a persuasive study. It almost comes off. In Brandling’s notebooks, he describes the work of Sir Albert Cruikshank, a pioneering inventor on whose work much of the technology behind his swan is based. Cruikshank, it transpires, is something of a visionary, residing somewhere in that debatable land between genius and lunacy.

We are presented with Cruickshank’s great invention, the Mysterium Tremendum. Clearly, since most critics agree Cruikshank is based on Charles Babbage, this wooden counting machine appears to be the precursor of the modern computer. The Mysterium Tremendum, therefore, is the key to the two principal strands of philosophical thought that the novel seeks to explore and it is these two strands or, more importantly, the interconnectedness of these two strands, that leads to the ultimate weakness of The Chemistry of Tears.

Mysterium tremendum is a phrase coined by Rudolph Otto to explore the mystery that must pertain in religion, through which rational thought must be submerged beneath a sense of awe at the numinous nature of the deity. By numinous, Otto means the religious experience itself, and the response it invokes in us. There are different ways the numinous can affect us, one of which is a sense of dread, or the Mysterium Tremendum, a sense of fear of a completely different order from any mortal fear. CS Lewis describes it thus:

Suppose you were told that there was a tiger in the next room: you would know that you were in danger and would probably feel fear. But if you were told "There is a ghost in the next room," and believed it, you would feel, indeed, what is often called fear, but of a different kind. It would not be based on the knowledge of danger, for no one is primarily afraid of what a ghost may do to him, but of the mere fact that it is a ghost. It is "uncanny" rather than dangerous, and the special kind of fear it excites may be called Dread. With the Uncanny one has reached the fringes of the Numinous. Now suppose that you were told simply "There is a mighty spirit in the room" and believed it. Your feelings would then be even less like the mere fear of danger: but the disturbance would be profound. You would feel wonder and a certain shrinking–described as awe, and the object which excites it is the Numinous.

That Carey has chosen to call Cruikshank’s instrument the Mysterium Tremendum, something evoking a sense of awe in the deity, is clearly not accidental. Therefore, we must suppose that he is using his novel to explore the tension between our mortal lives and the awful uncertainty about what comes before and beyond. The spectre of death hangs over both narrative strands – Catherine’s dead lover and Brandling’s dying son. In each strand, neither protagonist is in control of their lives and, for neither, their final destination is what they would have wished. Linking them both is the swan, the beautiful and mysterious symbol of the numinous, that awe-inspiring representation of a created life.

But, having taken us on this journey towards (but never into) the unknown, the novel loses impetus. Why? Because of the second thematic strand in the narrative.

This is a jeremiad about the power and inherent dangers of technology and progress. We have Cruikshank’s machine, the Mysterium Tremendum, of course, and all that must follow from the digital revolution we are still living through. But, more than this, Carey dilutes the impact of his narrative with a very contemporary but wholly inappropriate environmental theme. Alarm bells ring early on when Amanda, a (none too convincing) secondary character, is fixated on the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill. At first, one wonders whether this was happening as Carey was writing the novel, and he slipped it in for verisimilitude but, it becomes increasingly obvious, this environmental disaster is a central element of the plot.

And as soon as this happens the novel loses its gravitas. The mysterium tremendum, the mystery of the before and the beyond, is relegated into a trite argument about environmental stewardship. Catherine concludes, near the end, that Brandling’s notebooks are “a critique of the Industrial Revolution”. And so the mysterium tremendum, the awe in the face of the unknown, is reduced to a hollow and secular complaint about the nature of modernity. This, to me, is absurd. If you are going to invoke the ultimate questions, don’t weaken the argument by shoehorning them into something less significant. Global warming may be a genuine concern, mankind may well be on the road to destroying the planet but, in metaphysical terms, these developments are inconsequential. Ultimately, they make no difference. They might to us, poor bloody humans, for sure, but if, in your novel, you are raising the question of there being something more significant than human beings, some motivating force, divine or otherwise, then to hook the novel’s conclusions on the fate of humanity is to completely fail to develop the point that you have elaborately tried to establish. This is bathos writ large. And this is exactly what happens to the narrative of The Chemistry of Tears.

It calls into question the whole environmental movement at present, the way it is being turned into a secular religion. Humanity has a habit of doing this, elevating whatever the principal concern of the day might be into a position of such import it becomes all-encompassing. It led, in Victorian times, to science and rationalism being bastardised into the ugliness of positivism. Now, the perfectly sensible desire to secure effective stewardship of natural resources is elevated into a whole new religion of nature. There is so much self-serving nonsense about this. The environmentalists are “saving the planet”, man is evil, the environment is everything, the environment is God. But this is essentially hypocricy: the planet existed for millennia before mankind first took its breath and it will survive for millennia after we’re gone: it needs no worship, it needs no saving. The only thing that needs saving is big, bad mankind, the very thing the environmental movement purports to oppose. There is something obscene about the way environmentalism is being turned into a religion. For that reason, I no longer like the term that William Golding coined for Jim Lovelock’s inspirational theories, Gaia. It invests a religious sensibility in something that should be secular.

The concept of a mysterium tremendum is, even for an atheist like me, a worthwhile area of study. Eric, in The Chemistry of Tears, is right: some mysteries do not require resolution, the mystery is all. The before and the beyond of our lives cannot be explicated: that is what religion is, whether or not one subscribes to the notion of a god. There must be some element of transcendence, whether that be a divine transcendence into the company of God, or a rationalist transcendence into nothingness. The environmental cause is by its nature, immanent, irrevocably rooted on this planet, this time, this realm of understanding. Why make it more mysterious? The Chemistry of Tears begins to explore fascinating territory but, somewhere along the line, it runs out of confidence and thematically it slides into disappointment. This is a great pity because, stylistically, as you would expect from any novel by the brilliant Peter Carey, it is a very fine piece of writing.

Bonjour Tristesse by Francoise Sagan

 

Françoise Sagan was eighteen when Bonjour Tristesse was published. The precocity is mind-boggling. How could she have written this? How could she have known?

Cécile, the narrator of the story, is seventeen, on the cusp of adulthood. It is a difficult stage of growing up. Are you a child or an adult? For a period, around that age, you could be either, depending on circumstance. In moments of stress you revert to childishness; in moments of calm you stretch your emotional responses, experiment with differing perspectives. It can be a confusing time, disorientating, sometimes even upsetting. For Cécile, her difficulties are compounded by the fact that her mother is dead and her father is a philandering wastrel. During their long summer holiday on the French Riviera, her father has invited his 29 year old lover, Elsa Mackenbourg, to join them and the three live a bohemian existence which Cécile, knowing no better, takes for normality. This idyll is thrown into disarray when Raymond later invites another friend, the older and more mature Anne Larsen, to join them. Anne is a friend of Cécile’s late mother and she brings an element of sophistication to their ramshackle lifestyle. Raymond proposes to her, she accepts, and from here Cécile’s difficulties begin to grow.

After being treated as an adult and an equal by her father, Cécile is shocked by and resentful of the controlling way that Anne begins to deal with her. She is forced to study for her exams. She is treated as a child. She is forbidden to meet Cyril, the young man whom she has been seeing during the summer. She concocts a plan. Disaster ensues.

The novel focuses on Cecile’s intellectual growing pains. It is an irony that when she is at her most immature she is treated as an adult and as she matures she is increasingly treated as a child. This, of course, adds to her confusion and resentment. One feels for her: she is, unknowingly, at a massive disadvantage, with a feckless father who is intent solely on indulging his own selfish tendencies. She has no-one on whom to model herself until Anne appears and, not surprisingly, rather than learn from this intelligent and wise woman, instead she rebels against her imposed authority. Even now, all might not be lost if only her father could derive some sense of paternal competence but that is beyond Raymond. Cécile is let down. Everybody is let down.

The novel is beautifully written. The prose is uncluttered and simple, yet lyrical and evocative. It is very short, and it does not strain for great depth, but it explores the pain of youth, its confusions, its delusions, its sense of timelessness. It is an exploration of love, and we know what a difficult emotion that can be. In this novel there is only one true and honest love, that of Anne for Raymond. All the other permutations – Cécile and Cyril, Cyril and Cécile, Raymond and Elsa, Elsa and Raymond, Raymond and Anne – they are only varying forms of delusion. Only one true love, then, and in the end it is not sufficient to carry the day. Cécile describes her tristesse as “her realisation of the responsibility involved in exercising her freedom to make choices”. Human beings are, indeed, free to make choices, but we are seldom very good at it. In Sagan’s beautiful little novel, Cécile leads us to the enduring truth that, with the advent of adulthood, we are generally forced to say hello to sadness.

Home by Marilynne Robinson

 

Home provides an alternative point of view to much of the action in Marilynne Robinson’s previous novel, Gilead. It is told largely from the point of view of Glory, a woman approaching disappointed middle-age, a former teacher cheated by her lover who has returned to the stultifying family home in Gilead, Iowa in 1956. It is a story of death and dying, actions and consequences, guilt and forgiveness, communication and silence, redemption and doubt. It is an intensely serious, deeply thoughtful book and, on the level of writing craft, an astonishing example of the power of restraint in story-telling. It operates simultaneously as an analysis of spirituality, of modern American society and, most brilliantly of all, of the melancholy relationships of flawed families.

Home is told loosely from Glory’s point of view of, although it is not her story and we are not taken inside her mind. The use of third person in this novel – both Robinson’s previous novels are first person narratives – is perfect. It allows Robinson the distance that is required to explicate what the characters themselves can barely understand, and it allows that explication to be only partial but, ironically, through that partialness, it still permits us to see more than the poor characters ever could. This novel simply could not have been written in the first person; it wouldn’t work.

Glory is the daughter of the dying Presbyterian minister Robert Boughton, and the sister of John Ames Boughton, known as Jack. The novel begins with Glory returning to the family home after being abandoned by her fiance. There are intimations that Jack, too, after years of silence, now wishes to make a difficult return. Jack is a man with a past (fully explained in Gilead, but only partially revealed here), the family black sheep who disappeared twenty years before, after a childhood of dissipation ended in fathering a child to a local girl. All connection was subsequently lost – he even missed his mother’s funeral – although his father never ceased praying for his wellbeing and return. After some false starts, Jack finally arrives home hung-over, apparently an alcoholic, seemingly desperate but uncommunicative, and the novel revolves around the subsequent interplay between father, daughter and son.

The secrets within families, the stories that dare not be told, the emotions that must remain checked, the opinions unaired, these are the remarkable moments which inform Home. This is a small-scale drama which reveals large-scale truths. Its damaged protagonists, each silenced by memories of their own and each other’s scarred pasts, circle around one another, seeing in each other a desperate need. But they are barely able to help themselves, far less offer anything concrete, any genuine support to their family. Time and again, they rebuff one another; given the options of release or pain, forgiveness or judgement, they choose to extend their private pain even although that pain must, inevitably, spill over and harm those they love and care about but cannot find a way to care for. At the heart of it is misunderstanding, and an inability – or refusal? – to attempt to understand from another’s perspective. For anyone brought up within such a stark Calvinist milieu it is excruciatingly difficult to read. For anyone else it must be completely alien. Near the end, the dying father says to his son, apologising for his behaviour towards him, ‘I promised myself a thousand times, if you came home you would never hear a word of rebuke from me. No matter what.’ Such confessions do not come easily to men like Boughton, they speak of a deep truth; but even now, when this confession of weakness – failure – is finally made, this promise of connection between kin, the opportunity is lost. ‘I don’t mind,’ Jack tells his father. ‘I deserve rebuke.’ And so father and son remain mysteries to one another. Boughton queries why his son always greets him with an impersonal ‘sir’ but, late in the novel, when Jack does call him “dad”, he reacts:

“Don’t call me that.”

“Sorry.”

“I don’t like it at all. Dad. It sounds ridiculous. It’s not even a word.”

“I’ll never use it again.”

Glory and Jack are two of eight children. The other six have all, in their ways, become successes. Glory and Jack, in their ways, are failures. For Glory, there is something inevitable about this:

[they] were the unexceptional children, she thought – slighted, overlooked. There was no truth in this notion. Jack was exceptional in every way he could be, including, of course, truancy and misfeasance, and yet he managed to get by on the cleverness teachers always praised by saying “if only he would put it to some use.” As for herself, she was so conscientious that none of her A’s and A-pluses had to be accounted for otherwise than as the reward of diligence. She was good in the fullest and narrowest sense of the word as it applied to female children. And she had blossomed into exactly the sort of adult her childhood predicted. Ah well. 

This is the first of two uses of “Ah well” in the novel, and it is clear that, in their almost bashful informality, they represent key moments. For Glory, this is the acceptance that the accumulation of disappointment she has known in her thirty-eight years has been, is and will continue to be inevitable. This is her, and this is her lot. Had she been a boy she might have entered the ministry. As a girl, bright, conscientious, caring, naïve, irresolute, she is resigned to being the one charged with maintaining the family house after her father has died, the core to which the family – the others – may return should or when they choose. She has no future, other than as a means of preserving the family’s history, the curator of the ghosts of the past. It is a desperate submission of a woman’s vitality, heartbreaking.

The second “Ah well” comes late in the novel, and also comes from the perspective of Glory, but this time referring to her father:

He loved to reflect on the fact that grace was never singular in its effects, as now, when he could please his son by forgiving his friend [Ames]. “That is why it is called a Spirit,” he said. “The word in Hebrew also means wind. ‘The Spirit of God brooded on the face of the deep.’ It is a sort of enveloping atmosphere.” Her father was always so struck by his insights that it was impossible for him to tell those specific to the moment from those on which he had preached any number of times. It had made him a little less sensitive than he ought to have been to the risk of repeating himself. Ah well.

The significance of this throwaway remark, this shrug of a sentence, should not be underestimated. This is not a novel, and these are not characters, where failings are easily forgiven or even understood. If forgiveness and judgement are twin prongs on which the Christian faith is built, in Calvinist Christianity the latter has the greatest weight. Boughton’s promise not to rebuke his son is lost. When money disappears in Gilead he immediately believes his son to be the thief and seeks to make reparation: this, a well-intentioned but thoughtless response, a failure to observe the man in front of him other than through the prism of the boy he had been twenty years before, seals the divisions which have always existed, creating a vacuum across which father and son have no means of communicating. Glory, with her simple “Ah well”, discerns another such flaw in her father and dismisses it. Ah well.

The fourth character in the novel is Reverend John Ames, a Congregationalist minister and long-time friend and theological sparring partner of Boughton, after whom Jack is named. Ames is the central character of Gilead, which relates the same basic story as Home but does so on a more theological level. And it is largely through Ames that the telescoped nature of Home’s analysis of familial crisis is broadened into a wider study of spirituality, an analysis of faith and trust, hope, redemption. Ames, also dying, is mistrustful of Jack, fearful that he will once again bring pain upon his father and suspicious of his motivations. A manifestly good man, but afflicted by a tendency to judge in absolutes, he is responsible for the novel’s most damaging event, when Jack, seeking absolution and aiming to proclaim publicly his belief in God, attends Ames’s Sunday service, only for the old man to extemporise a sermon on guilt which is clearly, shamefully aimed directly at Jack. Jack, one feels, would inevitably have broken before the novel’s conclusion, but this rebuff entirely ensures his failure. The balance of forgiveness and judgement tilts again towards judgement. The capacity to change, to shift long-established beliefs, is rendered impossibly hard for men in whom rigid sense of duty and propriety is all. Boughton, similarly, is unshakeable in his faith, blind to its failings. He tells Jack:

“I hate to think that any trouble might have come to you because your father was a tight-fisted old Scotsman!”

“I can reassure you on that point, sir.”

“Good. That’s fine. But there is that other vice of the Scots, you know. Drink.”

Jack smiled. “So I understand.”

“It is a plague amnong them, my grandmother said. They have no defense against it. She said she had seen many a good man wholly destroyed but it.”

This is a remarkable passage. Drink is, indeed a curse of the Scots, and it is, specifically, the curse of the alcoholic Jack. And yet, in this one-dimensional caricature of their shared Scots heritage, Boughton misses the one, overwhelming inherited characteristic that has brought their family to this pass: their Calvinist need to judge, to weigh the measure of forgiveness on the unforgiving and intolerant scale of religious rightness. Robinson, a committed Congregationalist herself, is impressive in the way she allows the faults of the Congregationalist Ames and Presbyterian Boughton to stand in such stark relief.

Late in the drafting of Moby-Dick, Herman Melville, upset and bemused by the lack of success of his career, wrote into the beginning of the novel a key passage in which Father Mapple speaks to the men before they embark on their whaling voyage, in a church surrounded by memorials to their dead predecessors, men killed or lost in action. It is a lengthy oration, brilliant and unifying, drawing together a room of individuals into a single congregation. In it, Melville released some of his frustrations at the lack of response his novels were eliciting from his own congregation of readers. Father Mapple succeeded where Melville, despite his best efforts, was failing. He was using words as a tool to draw people into a greater consciousness. Ames and Boughton, fine ministers both, have a similar ability to use the power of words to shape an audience, draw it into their world view. And Robinson, too, another genius with words, allows herself her pulpit moments but this is no blinkered, didactic sermonising. Her characters’ flaws are all too evident.

Robinson understands human failings and foibles. None of her characters are irredeemably bad, none saintly in their goodness. The ostensible rotten apple is clearly in search of understanding, both his understanding of others and others of him; while the pair of dying ministers struggle to forgive or forget or to ascribe to Jack anything other than ill-intent or recidivism.

Meanwhile, the true sin occurs outside the family, in the community of Gilead itself. The novel is set in 1956, the year of the Montgomery bus boycott, the start of the Civil Rights movement in America. Civil rights is not a subject old Boughton considers to be of any import: whenever Jack raises the subject it is rebuffed. The ‘colored’ people are creating the trouble by themselves, his father says. ‘It will soon be forgotten.’ There is no problem in Gilead, he insists. Perhaps not, but the only black church in town was burned to the ground, in what Ames describes as a ‘little nuisance fire’, many years before, since when no black families have lived there. Racism can just as easily be discerned by absence. This is the third great theme of Robinson’s novel, the structure of American society, and it is deftly handled. It is through Jack, the flawed individual, that it is presented, time and again. A plot development brings it to the fore as the novel reaches its conclusion, and we are left with the message that secular matters, as well as spiritual, are not as clearly beneficent in the sleepy town of Gilead as its aged and paternalistic ministers may care to believe.

Home is undoubtedly a melancholy novel. It’s characters are damaged people. It offers no major hope of transformation, only small glimmers. Glory, for example, despite her crushing emotional reticence, does achieve a breakthrough, a glimmer of understanding. She and Jack finally come closer – not close, but closer. It is a small triumph in a book where small triumphs are not to be overlooked. Near the end, there is one paragraph which is haunting in its perfection. Boughton is rapidly approaching death, his mind wandering; Jack is preparing to leave; Glory is preparing to fulfil her role as custodian:

Glory was aware suddenly that the weariness of the night and day had overwhelmed her, and her hope of comforting had not had anything to do with the way things really happen in the world. Her father was crouched in his chair, with this chin almost in his plate, drowsing and speaking from what she could only hope was a dream, and her brother was withdrawing into utter resignation, as if the old incandenscence had consumed him before it flickered out. But he brought her a tea towel for her tears, and then he helped his father to his room.

Everything is contained within that brief paragraph. It is a beautiful study of loss and connection. It leaves nothing else to be said.