Parrot and Olivier in America by Peter Carey

Peter Carey’s novel about America (or the idea of America) is told in the interleaved, alternating voices of Olivier de Garmont, a French commissioner sent to study the judicial and penal system of the new world (but also to escape a revival of revolutionary fervour at home), and his itinerant English journeyman artist-cum-servant, nicknamed Parrot.

Carey’s investigation into the nature of democracy in America is based heavily on the writings of Alexis de Tocqueville, and while these musings are fascinating, the real heart of the book is the frequently antagonistic but often strangely tender relationship between Parrot and Olivier.

Parrot’s voice is particularly strong, and while the narrative alternates between the two, the actual telling of the story is more complicated than it first appears. Parrot — a skilled engraver and calligraphist — takes dictation from the short-sighted Olivier (whose handwriting, we’re told, is quite awful), so that there are incidents told from Olivier’s point of view which appear in the sections belonging to Parrot, giving him the opportunity to provide his own commentary.

Carey in historical mode has a remarkable talent for making the reader feel what it’s like to be alive at a certain moment, with unusual but intensely imagined details — convicts being pressed together in a hulk like “wet poultry”, for instance, or an old woman’s “blood-filled hand”. And whenever Parrot opens his heart (which he does often, in rage, grief and joy), the words, and the effect, are magical. He is a complex, fully-realised character — and another of Carey’s orphans.

Many of Olivier’s observations about America are apparently paraphrasings and direct quotations of Tocqueville’s — for example, his ingenious recognition of the rocking chair (an invention of Benjamin Franklin, apparently) as being a symbol of America’s “democratic restlessness”, or when, upon being made to listen to a vocal performance by the young ladies of a Philadelphia family, he notes that “(what they) affect most are its difficult passages”, (which, I have to admit, put me in mind of the vocal gymnastics of the typical American Idol performance). Olivier’s prophecy that America will one day elect an idiot as president is a little obvious for my liking, though it suggests that Carey was coming from a pretty angry place when he conceived the book; this naked transplanting of the contemporary to the historical reminded me of the later sections of Antoni Jach’s Napoleon’s double.

Reading the book as an Australian, and knowing that Carey is ‘one of us’, Parrot and Olivier in America somehow also becomes a book about Australia (there is indeed a period of Parrot’s life set in the penal colony of New South Wales). It’s as though by making these points about America, Carey is making observations about Australia by comparison — though that may be less Carey’s intention and more my imagination. It would be fascinating, though, for America to send us a Carey, an Olivier, to describe our country to us with such penetration and such style.

(Oh, and the Australian edition is a wonder of a thing — frankly, it shits over the design of the UK and American editions.)