[applause]
Geoff Pevere: Thank you.
Thank you very much.
This evening, it gives me great pleasure to
be here as part of Luminato and participating
in what I think is easily the coolest and
richest and best event in the entire week,
and that has nothing to do with my presence
and everything to do with our guest this evening,
Mr. Peter Carey.
I'm assuming that very, very many of you,
if not all of you, are familiar with Mr. Carey's
written work.
He is a phenomenally talented and provocative
novelist and through with such books as the
True History of The Kelly Gang, Oscar and
Lucinda, Parrot and Olivier in America.
He has consistently surprised us with his
prose and also surprised us with his investigation
of the relationship between history and the
imagination, the emotion, and the intellect,
machinery, and the organism and all of these
things in a very, very interesting and provocative
ways are also explored his new book, The Chemistry
of Tears.
I probably don't need to tell you that he
is the winner of not one but two Booker prizes.
And without further ado, I would like to introduce
reading from his new book, The Chemistry of
Tears, our guest this evening, Peter Carey.
[applause]
Peter Carey: Twice.
[laughter] Let me read from just the very
beginning of The Chemistry of Tears, and you
can set your watches, I think it will take
10 minutes.
The voice...
We do kill the thing we love when we read
out loud of course because it's much better
when you do it because in your imagination
you will know immediately that this is an
English woman and you will imagine her in
your mind.
My performance is really gonna to screw this
up, but there you go.
PC: Dead and no one told me.
I walked past his office, and his assistant
was bawling.
What is it Felicia?
Oh, haven't you heard?
Mr. Tindall's dead.
What I heard was, Mr. Tindall hurt his head.
I thought, for God's sake, pull yourself together.
Where is he, Felicia?
And that was a reckless thing to ask because
Matthew Tindall and I had been lovers for
13 years, but he was my secret and I was his.
Real life, I always avoided his assistant.
Now, her lipstick was smeared and her mouth
folded like an ugly sock.
Where is he?
She sobbed.
What an awful, awful question.
Not understanding yet, I asked again.
Catherine, he is dead, and thus set herself
off into a second fit of bawling.
I marched into his office, as if to prove
her wrong.
This was not the sort of thing one did.
My secret darling was a big deal, the head
curator of metals.
PC: There was the photo of his two sons on
the desk.
His silly, soft, tweed hat was lying on the
shelf.
I snatched it.
I don't know why.
And of course, she saw me steal it, but I
no longer cared.
I fled down the Philips stairs into the main
floor.
And on that April afternoon in the Georgian
halls of the Swinburne Museum, amongst a thousand
daily visitors, the eighty employees, there
was not one single soul who had any idea of
what had just happened.
Everything looked the same as usual.
It was impossible that Matthew was not there,
waiting to surprise me.
He was very distinctive, my lovely.
There was a vertical frown mark just to the
left of his big high nose.
His hair was thick.
His mouth was large, soft and always tender,
and of course, he was married.
Of course.
Of course.
He was 40 when I first noticed him and it
was seven years before we became lovers.
PC: I was by then just under 30 and still
something of a freak, that is, the first female
horologist the museum had ever seen.
Thirteen years, my whole life.
It was a beautiful world we lived in all that
time, SW1, the Swinburne Museum, one of London's
almost-secret treasure houses.
It had a considerable horological department,
a world-famous collection of clocks and watches,
automata and other wind-up engines.
If you had been there on the 21st of April
2010, you may have seen me, the oddly elegant
tall woman with the tweed hat scrunched up
in her hand.
I may have looked mad, but perhaps I was not
so different from my colleagues, the various
curators and conservators, pounding through
the public galleries on their way to a meeting
or a studio or a store room where they would
soon interrogate an ancient object, a sword,
a quilt, or perhaps an Islamic water clock.
We were museum people, scholars, priests,
repairers, sandpaperers, scientists, plumbers,
mechanics, train-spotters really, with narrow
specialities in metals and glass and textile
and ceramics.
We were of all sorts, we insisted, even while
we were secretly confident that the stereotypes
all held true.
A horologist, for instance, could never be
a young woman with good legs.
It must be a slightly nerdy man of less than
five foot six, cautious, a little strange,
with fine blond hair and some difficulty in
looking you in the eye.
PC: You might see him scurrying like a mouse
through the ground floor galleries, with his
ever present jangling keys, looking as if
he were the keeper of the mysteries.
In fact, no one in the Swinburne knew any
more than a part of the labyrinth.
We had reduced our territories to rat runs,
the routes we knew would always take us where
we wanted to go.
This made it an extraordinarily easy place
to live a secret life and to enjoy the perverse
pleasures that such a life can give.
In death, it was a total horror.
That is the same, but brighter, more in focus.
Everything was both crisper and further away.
How had he died, how could he die?
PC: I rushed back to my studio and Googled
"Matthew Tindall," but there was no news of
any accident.
However, my inbox had an email which lifted
my heart until I realized he had sent it at
4 PM the day before.
"I kiss your toes," it said.
I marked it unread.
There was no one I dared turn to.
I thought I will work.
It was what I had always done in crisis.
It is what clocks were good for, their intricacy,
their peculiar puzzles.
I sat at the bench in the workroom trying
to resolve an exceedingly whimsical 18th century
French clock.
My tools lay on soft grey chamois.
Twenty minutes previously, I had liked this
French clock, but now it seemed vain and preening.
PC: I buried my nose inside Matthew's hat.
"Snuffle," we would have said.
"I snuffle you."
"I snuffle your neck."
I could have gone to Sandra, the line manager.
She was always a very kind woman but I could
not bear anyone, not even Sandra, handling
my private business, putting it out on the
table and pushing it around like so many broken
necklace beads.
My German grandfather and my very English
father were clock-makers, nothing too spectacular.
First Clerkenwell, then the city, then Clerkenwell
again, mostly, good solid English five-wheel
clocks.
But it was an item of faith for me, even as
a little girl, that this was a very soothing,
satisfying occupation.
For years, I thought clock-making must still
any turmoil in one's breast.
PC: I was so confident of my opinion and so
completely wrong.
The tea lady provided her depressive offering.
I observed the anti-clockwise motion of the
slightly curdled milk, just waiting for him,
I suppose.
So when her hand did touch me, my whole body
came unstitched.
It felt like Matthew, but Matthew was dead.
And in his place was Eric Croft, the head
curator of horology.
I began to howl and could not stop.
He was the worst possible witness in the world.
Crafty Crofty was, to put it very crudely,
the master of all that ticked and tocked.
He was a scholar, a historian, a connoisseur.
I, in comparison, was a well-educated mechanic.
Crofty was famous for his scholarly work on
"Sing-songs" by which is meant those, sorry,
which is meant those perfect imperial misunderstandings
of oriental culture we so successfully exported
to China in the 18th century, highly elaborate
music boxes encased in the most fanciful compositions
of exotic beasts and buildings, often placed
on elaborate stands.
PC: This was what it was like for members
of our caste.
We built our teetering lives on this sort
of thing.
The beasts moved their eyes, ears and tails.
Pagodas rose and fell.
Jewelled stars spun and revolving glass rods
provided a very credible impression of water.
I bawled and bawled and now I was the one
whose mouth became a sock puppet.
Like a large chairman of a rugger club, who
has a Chihuahua as a pet, Eric did not, at
all, resemble his sing-songs, which one might
expect to be the passion of a slim fastidious
homosexual.
PC: He had a sort of hetero gung-ho quality
"metals" people are supposed to have.
"No, no," he cried.
"Hush."
Hush?
He was not rough with me, but he got his big
hard arm around my shoulder and compelled
me into a fume cupboard and then turned on
the extractor fan which roared like 20 hairdryers
all at once.
I thought, I've let the cat out of the bag.
"No," he said.
"Don't."
The cupboard was awfully small, built solely
so that one conservator might clean an object
with toxic solvent.
He was stroking my shoulder as if I were a
horse.
"We will look after you," he said.
In the midst of bawling, I finally understood
that Crofty knew my secret.
"Go home for now," he said quietly.
I thought, I've betrayed us.
I thought, Matthew will be pissed off.
"Meet me at the greasy spoon," he said.
"10 o'clock tomorrow, across the road from
the annex.
Do you think you can manage that?
Do you mind?"
PC: "Yes," I said, thinking, so that's it.
They are gonna kick me out of the main museum.
They are gonna lock me in the annex.
I had spilt the beans.
"Good," he beamed and the creases around his
mouth gave him a rather cat-like appearance.
He turned off the extractor fan, and suddenly,
I could smell his aftershave.
"First, we'll get you sick leave.
We'll get through this together.
I've got something for you to sort out," he
said.
"A really lovely object."
That's how people talk at the Swinburne, they
say object instead of clock.
I thought he's exiling me, burying me.
The annex was situated behind Olympia where
my grief might be as private as my love.
So he was being kind to me, strange, majeure
Crofty.
I kissed him on his rough sandalwood-smelling
cheek.
We both looked at each other with astonishment
and then I fled, out onto the humid street
pounding down toward the Albert Hall, with
Matthew's lovely, silly hat crushed inside
my hand.
Thank you, thank you.
[applause]
GP: One of the things that I kind of always
believe to be sort of true in my life is a
bit of wisdom that my father often imparted
to me, which was if it...
It's all about common sense which is that
if it quacks like a duck, and it walks like
a duck then it's probably a duck.
And your book comes along and says no, it's
not really a duck at all among very many other
things as we'll get into in a moment.
The interesting thing about the reading from
the book is that it would in no way obviously
indicate where the book is about to go.
And the journey that is about to be taken
by Catherine.
The encounter that she is going to have with
someone undergoing a similarly intense emotional
experience in another century involving the
construction of an automaton of great intricacy
that is not a duck after all as it is and
first used to be.
So I'm very interested in finding out in particular
where this book begins for you in terms of
inspiration.
You wanna start...
Is it that emotional violence that you want
to begin with and see where it goes from there
or at what point, where do...
PC: The whole emotional life of the book is
true.
If this is the question, what's happening
here is totally discovered.
When I...
I normally tend to begin novels with ideas
that are a little bit like diagrams or cartoons
or something.
So that when I began Oscar and Lucinda, it
wasn't thinking about Oscar or Lucinda or
their strange love affair or the fact that
they would never do it.
But that I was imagining a box full of Christian
stories, in fact a church floating through
a landscape filled with indigenous stories.
And I was thinking how the Christian stories
killed the indigenous stories and how in that
particular circumstance that even the church
wasn't wanted anymore.
So that's sort of where I begin and so then
I begin to ask myself why this, why that,
who would do such a stupid thing?
Why would you put a church on barge.
I mean that is a ridiculous thing to do, but
I liked the ideas, and so I found reasons
for that to happen.
And in this particular case, it's not quite...
This book I think has got a lot more threads
in it, but one of the things that I started
with which in the end becomes the belief that...
In a book full of many unstable characters.
GP: Many.
PC: The least stable of them all has this
particular idea which is where I started,
and I was really thinking about, well I was
thinking about the internal combustion engine
particularly.
Which in my family, I come from a long line
of car salesmen and women, and my family loved
Henry Ford.
My father loved Henry Ford so much that I
had to give him this book when I was about
20 called, "Working For Ford," and he said,
"What a bastard he was."
So then I destroyed my father's belief in
Henry Ford, but that's something different.
[chuckle] So we all loved the internal combustion
engine and then I thought yeah well here we
are now, and if you wanted to think what was
destroying the planet, you'd have to put the
internal combustion engine pretty high on
the list.
I mean it's big list and there's a lot of
competition.
GP: Yes.
Television and [inaudible] temperature.
Yeah.
PC: And they want to look at this whole land
mass of thread with all these black lines
of bitumen, stone and how...
And I thought if you really wanted to destroy...
If you were say hostile space aliens wanting
to destroy the people on planet Earth and
make it suitable just for yourself then maybe
all you had to do was deliver the plans for
the internal combustion engine and come back
in 200 years' time, and it would have been
mostly done for you.
[laughter]
PC: And so I...
And of course it's a ludicrous idea but my
books often start with sort of ludicrous ideas.
I've learnt to trust them in a way and my
only safety lies in risk I suppose.
So I really tried all sorts of ways to make
that idea work.
And in the end that is an important thread
of the argument of the book, but that particular
thread of argument is carried by the least
stable character in the book whose clearly
nuts.
But the idea itself it seems to me to still
have an enormous poetic pattern.
So then I start to think about sort of a notion
that the internal combustion engine...
I should leave, shouldn't I...
Anyway the internal combustion engine might
have been...
Might be this other engine which might be
more interesting and that this might build
inside...
There is a planet inside this other engine
and I started to get really interested in
the incredible creativity and the inventiveness,
you know, 18th, 19th centuries particularly.
And although nothing is ever innocent, you
could sometimes look at the invention of that
time as being a little more innocent than...
Maybe a little less corporate for instance.
PC: And looking at this, I came across this
amazing cross-section of an automaton, which
was a duck invented by a man who did all sorts
of very serious work including inventing knitting
machines and so on which you can still see
in museums, but although the duck itself seems
to have lived no longer than a human being.
GP: Yes.
PC: And the duck was meant to eat and shit
and what a miracle that was.
GP: Mm-hmm.
PC: Because it's life, right?
And of course it was fraudulent but having...
I began to have the notion of somebody, somebody
going to Europe on a quest to have this thing
made by a clock-maker.
So I begin to invent Henry Brandling, and
at the other end of it, I begin to think about
somebody who might be assembling this same
automaton after many, many years, and I start
to think about Catherine.
And in all of this, there is not a drop of
the emotion.
I swear to God.
It's just to make, you know, just to...
But then I start to think about who Catherine
might be, and I've heard a story about a woman
working in a legal firm actually who's had
a long affair with a partner, and he died
suddenly and no one knows he's married like
this and therefore...
And the whole business of having to tell someone,
going through deleting the emails and all
the...
And I thought like that was an interesting
story, and I really wasn't thinking very carefully
about what the implications of this were,
which is typical of me.
I carelessly plunge ahead with something like
this.
PC: And because...
And so what comes together is the woman is
grieving and kind of expresses her grief who's
death has taken her lover from her.
She's dealing with life and death and pain
and suffering and life after death or not
and so on, and there that their dear crafty
Crofty, and his particular slightly self-obsessed
sort of why I'd been kind gives her a job
to do this thing, to work on this machine
which will simulate life and then of course
raises the question of life, what is life?
What is the human life?
And then just into or comes into all of these
things which always fascinate me, is in the
greater which the body is a machine and which
of course it is.
I felt not the tiniest distress in thinking
that their bodies are machines and that their
feelings are produced by the great factory
of their bodies, and it doesn't feel a tiny
bit less mysterious or amazing or wondrous
to me.
So it's not depressing.
But that's what...
PC: So she's sort of like that, but there
is another whole argument in the book which
comes from the Germans particularly which
is what suggested all that it is ridiculous
to have that sort of view of anything 'cause
how can you possibly know.
So there's a notion that we are like flies
buzzing against the glass of the cathedral
not knowing where we are.
So what I'm finding as I go into this is a
dialogue and an argument about these things
where I started and where I will stay is the
issue I've been concerned about the invention,
machines, the environment and the threat to
a planet and that will stay there, but this
other more emotional canvas will become more,
will be the discovery for me in the book.
GP: So you're saying that for a large part
though the process for you is a rather intuitive
and organic one.
It begins with the combustion engine and after
that you just kind of follow where it takes
you?
PC: Well, I don't know...
I mean I don't know whether intuitive is the
right word.
I think it's sort of more pursuing a sort
of abstract logic, you know, which says, "If
this is so therefore it follows that."
GP: Right.
PC: And that's what I would think what gets
called creativity.
For me, it is sort of figuring out what the
consequences are and if I want something to
happen to ask what sort of person would do
it really...
GP: Right.
PC: Not just 'cause you want to be the puppet
master.
GP Yes.
Yes.
Is it, is it a process that comes which you
describe it as a process that comes fairly
easily to you once you have settled on a notion
and how to pursue it?
PC: Writing is the easiest thing in the world.
[laughter]
GP: Two Bookers.
PC: That's right.
GP: Yeah.
PC: Well, you know, it's...
You know it's...
It comes easily.
Certain things do come easily.
GP: Yes.
PC: I mean I think the...
I've never...
Finding the voice of a character you know
is something I seem to do relatively intuitively
and quickly, but other things of course one
slaves over forever and gets halfway through
a book or three-quarters of the way through
a book and think it's all falling to bits
and it's crap and that it can never work,
and I found myself sitting there and like
I'm writing little notes to myself.
"What is this about" and then say, "This is
a book about...
" And then I write, "Yeah, so could somebody
write this book?"
"Yes.
Then why don't you do it?"
So...
[laughter]
PC: So like that.
But I think very...
If you knew you had to do it, it would be
very boring and if you...
If it wasn't full of...
If you weren't going where you've never been
before, it wouldn't be an interesting thing
to do.
I mean what's great about the novel for me
is so I start with an idea like that, a rather
slight sort of idea in a way and two years
later then there's this world, there are these
people I've never met whose pain I am aware
of and whose joys I am aware of and who are
not, I guess, like anybody I know, and there
they are.
And they have been born out of this process
with the ideas in their contradiction and
different layers, still being there.
GP: How do you imagine the book, for example,
might have turned out differently if you hadn't
come across the picture of the duck, of Will
Constance's duck?
PC: Well, something else would've happened.
I don't know.
[laughter]
GP: I'm wondering if the idea of the internal
combustion engine, the alien, the Trojan horse
might have found another vehicle.
PC: Oh!
Yes, I had been going at this for quite a
while in different ways, and I think a lot
of ways sort of I'm an unreliable witness
because I think I've occasionally said I had
the idea quite recently and then I realize
actually I had the idea years ago.
And I was certain, I spent a lot of time thinking
about...
Was thinking about Ford, Henry Ford and the
space aliens, which I am gonna do a book about
alien abduction one of these days, but I just
haven't got past the probes for the moment.
[laughter]
