Man Booker Prize Finalist
National Book Award Finalist
Two-time Booker Prize-winner Peter Carey’s latest feat of imagination is an irrepressible, audacious, and trenchantly funny novel set mostly in nineteenth-century America.
Olivier—an improvisation on the life of Alexis de Tocqueville—is an aristocrat born just after the French Revolution. Parrot is the motherless son of an itinerant English engraver. Their lives are joined when Olivier sets sail for the New World to save his neck from one more revolution and Parrot is sent with him as spy, protector, foe, and foil. With the story of their unlikely friendship, Peter Carey explores the adventure of American democracy with the dazzling inventiveness and richness of characterization, story, and language that we have come to expect from this superlative writer.
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Amazon.com Review
The Democracy of Story-Telling: A Review of Parrot and Olivier in America by Colum McCann
Colum McCann is the author of Zoli, Dancer and, most recently, Let the Great World Spin, which won the National Book Award for Fiction and was the Amazon editors' pick as the Best Book of 2009. Read his review of Parrot and Olivier in America:
Faulkner famously wrote that the past is not dead, it's not even past. Every now and then a voice comes along to make the proper claim that nobody should forget and, even more radically, that nobody should be forgotten. These voices remind us that life is not yet written down: there is more to the story than meets the original word. Peter Carey has made an exquisite art of this sort of exploration into history and language: he smashes the atom of story-telling and comes up with quirks and quarks and quarries.
Carey is a rogue in the very best sense of the word: we are led by delight into a story that is bound to be profound, complex, tender, demanding, reckless, rigorous, charming, and, indeed, true. The value of good literature is that there's always another story to unfold. And in the unfolding, we are led by mystery towards discovery. Strap on the Carey boots, you’ll encounter new lands.
Carey's newest novel, Parrot and Olivier in America, is the story of two men who begin their lives on different ends of the human spectrum. Olivier is an aristocrat, born in France just after the Revolution, while Parrot is the son of an itinerant English printer. Part of Carey's provocative genius is that, even in the title, Parrot is named before Olivier: it’s the late 18th century and both men have swallowed the handcuffs of history. The servant and master. The dreamer and the dreamt. The men travel to America together, land in New York, embark on journeys that have both private and mythic overtones in the "you-knighted states." Ramshackle prisons. Convict ships. Broadway brawls. Land deals. Penal colonies. The small revolutions of human desire and failure.
The men develop an understanding and a friendship and a complexity that is a hallmark of a Carey novel: it is a wonder, as he points out, how many lives can be held within one single skin. The story is an examination of how landscape forms character, and the instinct towards that most democratic of things, story-telling. The task of fiction is to achieve is, by the power of the written word, a glimpse of truth that we didn't necessarily know was available to us. Part of Carey's genius is his ability to allow the reader to become the instigator of ideas. Parrot and Olivier in America is a fantastic riff on the servant/master relationship that can relate to Tocqueville, or to Hegel, or to Nietzsche’s "master morality," or indeed to the inanities of the Bush generation. Carey is well aware of the looking glass of history. Carey is here by being there. Whoever we are is whoever we have been. To label his work as "historical fiction" is to reduce the impact of what it means, and allows. He has his finger on the pulse. But not only that--he has shaped the vigorous graph of the beats.
I recall my first foray into the Carey world. It was back in the early 80's and I picked up a book called Bliss. Harry Joy's heart attack on his front lawn was my own in literature: it resuscitated me. From there I stepped into the lives of Oscar and Lucinda and then Jack Maggs. One of the greatest novels of the 20th century is The True History of the Kelly Gang which came in 2001 and is, without a doubt, an "adjectival" masterpiece. (I’m going to carry that book with me – along with DeLillo’s Underworld and Ondaatje’s Coming through Slaughter--to the gates of heaven or hell, whichever one will have me.) Recently Carey has written My Life as a Fake, Theft and His Illegal Self, all tours de force. What I love about his work is that it’s smart and funny at the same time. It’s always an adventure to read. I get transported out of myself, into a new world. The reader is allowed the dignity of exploration. It’s a form of travel, a manner of being away and remaining at home. I happen now to have the pleasure of teaching with Peter Carey at Hunter College in New York–-in fact, one of the reasons I’m at Hunter is that I wanted to teach alongside him, to shape my writing and reading, and to learn from him. I do so every time I read a book of his. He’s a master storyteller and a servant of language at the same time: he exists in that landscape with humility and grace. Parrot and Olivier in America is Peter Carey at his best: funny and tender and true.
(Photo © Matt Valentine)--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
From Publishers Weekly
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
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Olivier is Olivier Jean-Baptiste de Clarel de Barfleur, born to a centuries-old family of the high nobility in France. Unfortunately, it is a France that no longer exists, and Olivier's loyalty to the new state is suspect. It is safer, more circumspect, for O. to disappear for a while. A fact-finding expedition to the United States, to examine New World prison systems, offers the perfect excuse. O.'s mama' is worried, though. She doesn't want her darling little boy to fall prey to some New World harpy. Parrot -Perroquet -is dragooned into going along as Olivier's secretary and servant, and as O's mother's spy on her son. Parrot is English, and no aristocrat -no, far from it! He knows his birth name -John Larrit--but isn't certain when or where he was born. His father, an itinerant printer who is eventually transported for forgery, quoted Rousseau to his son very early and Parrot starts the journey with nothing but disdain for his noble master.
Over time they become more than friends, in a friendship between two men who could not be more different -in their looks, dress, sensibilities and affections, and prejudices. Although Olivier tries to admire America -at one point, he even proposes marriage to an American beauty--he cannot shake his disdain of men's commonness in this raw country and he is fearful of what America will become in little time. For Parrot, America offers a new beginning: his dreadful past counts for nothing in this grand open land. And that is one of the many excellences of this truly exceptional popular novel: Carey uses his two narrators, O. and P., to voice disparate and sometimes conflicting views of the New World, and he doesn't load the case for one view or the other. Because what both men say about the new country they are observing is true: Andrew Jackson's America is raw; money rules all; only the thinnest veneer of culture exists even in the highest ranks of society; and on and on the observations go. Americans then, as now, were a problematic people, hard to encapsulate in one simple truism.
Carey, who has won two Booker Prizes in the past, is a consummate word worker. The descriptions in this book are apt and powerful. The captain of the ship that carries O. and P. to the States "was as hard and scrawny as a piece of rope. He had rheumy squinting eyes, a tobacco-stained mustache, a rum drinker's nose, and absolutely no arse at all. But his fingers were large and white and soft, made for the dark and secret places of a sailor's life." Olivier reminiscences about an Normandy "when the air was rich with summer hay and the orchard fruit lay amongst the grass, rich rotten peaches, bees crawling the blossoms, wax melting, honey dripping from the beehive frames."
O.'s final judgment on this strange new country he has tried to adjust to but failed is "this democracy. It is a truly lovely flower, a tiny tender fruit, but it will not ripen well. ... I tried to love it. I could not." "Poor devil," thinks Parrot. "Is it not obvious to him that the people are making their own future very well? . . . America is new." Earlier P. reflects that America is a country "whose people have more stages in their lives than caterpillars."
One final comment: Parrot sees himself as a failed artist: he is good with line as an engraver's son might be expected to be but sees no subtlety in what he limns. His `wife" Mathilde, on the other hand, is an exceptional artist, whose paintings glow with a light of their own, beneath the surface of skin and woods and object. There is a great deal of talking about art in this book, mostly but not solely when Parrot is the narrator. There is also a succinct judgment of the paintings of Thomas Cole that is as to the point as anything I have come across. Carey writes with a painter's eye, and that is one of many reasons that this fine book deserves the widest possible reading audience.
