Carey is not a ‘difficult’writer. On the contrary, he is a consummate storyteller, vastly and raucously entertaining. What he does do is challenge readers with flights of fancy that are ideas-based and that, through satire, challenge our comfortable preconceptions about ourselves and our society. He creates entirely new worlds, and if this occasionally prompts a perception that his books make an overt pitch for greatness, we should cut him some slack. He also attracts his fair share of aggro for being a New Yorker who – or so the story goes – whines about Australia. But I am yet to hear a legitimate argument about why his zip code matters. And we should be thankful for his brand of whining.

Carey’s superb novel Parrot and Olivier in America (2010) may well be his finest. His new one, The Chemistry of Tears, is less weighty. Consequently, it does not possess that wonderful trait Carey achieves in his bigger works – perhaps most notably in Illywhacker (1985) – whereby the books totter about yet remain upright, like magnificent, odd-shaped monuments to the great messiness of life.

That’s not to suggest that The Chemistry of Tears fails because of its relative brevity. Indeed, Carey is in fine form, offering up a story that is audacious yet restrained, tender yet sardonic, and filled with moments of emotional complexity. Although Carey’s wit and his social observations remain penetrating, The Chemistry of Tears is subtler and more majestic than your average Carey.

‘Carey is in fine form, offering up a story that is audacious yet restrained, tender yet sardonic, and filled with moments of emotional complexity’

The story consists of two central strands, two key characters, separated by 150-odd years. In 2010 London, horologist Catherine Gehrig is grief-stricken after her secret lover, a work colleague named Matthew, dies suddenly. Her boss at the Swinburne Museum, Eric, tries to help by giving her the huge task of restoring a nineteenth-century automaton – a mechanical bird. Among the parts of the machine, Catherine finds the diaries of Henry Brandling, a well-to-do but unhinged Englishman who in 1854 travelled to Germany to have a mechanical duck made for his ailing son.

Catherine and Henry have grief in common. Carey’s descriptions of Catherine’s sorrow are visceral: she steals Matthew’s ‘silly soft tweed hat’; she attacks her own clothes; she breaks work protocols; she drinks heavily. Henry is burdened by his daughter’s death, his son’s chronic illness, and the breakdown of his marriage, which he dimly attributes to his glass-half-full attitude. His optimism, though uplifting, often seems an avoidance technique: ‘If we Brandlings have sometimes lost our wits or our fortunes on the horses we have also – this is the other side of the coin – known that the impossible was possible nine times out of ten.’

Catherine comes to depend on Henry’s notebooks – and vodka – to get her through the long nights. But what’s most intriguing are her relationships with those around her, including Eric and Catherine’s young and brilliant but troubled assistant, Amanda. Eric is especially memorable, juggling his concern for Catherine with museum responsibilities. He supports her despite her complaints and insults, but at times he resembles a puppeteer who imagines he can direct her emotional responses.

In one wonderfully awkward and touching scene, Matthew’s sons visit Catherine. When she asks them if they feel she stole their father, one of them replies ‘Let’s face it. ... You did.’ Nevertheless, the complications of infidelity remain somewhat muted here. Because Matthew’s wife is apparently so awful and deceitful, Catherine gains unambiguous hero status for, as Eric puts it, having saved Matthew’s life.

Henry, meanwhile, is obsessed with his duck, and finds himself beholden to its manufacturer, a man called Sumper. Full of bravado and tall tales, some of which may be true, Sumper has his own grand plans about what to build that go beyond a pretend duck with bowels that do not even connect to its anus. The combative bond that develops between the two men is intriguing, although Henry’s story doesn’t quite rise to the heights of Catherine’s.

A number of themes swirl through Catherine and Henry’s interlocked lives, including industrialisation, oil spills, mysticism, and the technical and artistic wonder of mechanisation. At times, it seems that a much bigger story might burst from the book’s pages. In this respect, The Chemistry of Tears is reminiscent of recent novels by Paul Auster. But whereas Auster’s Invisible (2009) and Sunset Park (2010) are multi-layered books that are absorbing but slightly too abbreviated, Carey draws disparate and sometimes fleeting ideas together with unforced purpose.

The ending is a beautifully elegiac hymn to lost love. If Peter Carey is an unpopular novelist, long may he remain so.