165 of 168 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A FINE COMIC NOVEL THAT IS A RIFF ON TOCQUEVILLE IN AMERICA, March 30, 2010
This review is from: Parrot and Olivier in America (Hardcover)
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This exceptionally well written and consistently enjoyable novel succeeds both as a novel of manners and a novel of ideas. It's an extended riff on Tocqueville -not that Carey, an author of great discernment, has done anything so crude as to fictionalize Tocqueville's and his friend and associate Beaumont's epoch-making journey to America in 1831, a journey that resulted in the most insightful book about that young republic ever to appear, a book that is still a treasure hoard of insights into our country's mores and foibles even today. No! Rather Carey has created two comic but intensely, consistently human characters, and let them roam over our young country while he marks down their reactions to what they encounter.
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.
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51 of 55 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Reader in Limbo, November 13, 2010
This review is from: Parrot and Olivier in America (Hardcover)
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I haven't read many of Peter Carey's books, but have enjoyed tremendously those I have. "Jack Maggs" was a clever, pitch-perfect reworking of Dickens' "Great Expectations," and "True History of the Kelly Gang," for which he won his second Booker Prize, brilliantly chronicled the life of Australia's Billy the Kid. I was so looking forward to his take on post-Revolutionary France and America, confident that it would be a colorful, evocative ride. And while the novel certainly evoked the late 1700s in meticulous and rich detail, it was also a dense, overly written bore. I simply could not get into this book, no matter how hard I tried. Carey's inspiration, Alexis de Tocqueville's "Democracy in America," obviously means a great deal to him, but he didn't find a way to successfully share the "why" of that with this reader. In his acknowledgements he writes that the piece "may not suit everyone," and that his personal reading list -- which he used, in part, as research, and is available on his web site -- may be "interesting to literary mechanics and other specialists [but] absolutely no use to anyone else." And therein lies the problem, I think, with "Parrot and Olivier...": it's an exercise rather than a story, a literary hat trick rather than an engaging entertainment. But as this and "C," another book I couldn't fathom, were both short-listed for this year's Booker, perhaps I'm just a literary nitwit. Regardless, if today's "literature" is this impenetrable and dull, I want no part of it.
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50 of 54 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Unreliable narrators, February 14, 2010
Peter Carey has always been a master at the unreliable narrator and in Parrot and Olivier we are treated to two of the them, alternating chapters and versions of the truth. Olivier is a spoilt young French aristocrat who is sent abroad to save his skin at the time of the 1830 revolution. His unwilling servant is Parrot who has far more practical commonsense than his master but has been sorely abused by dubious French aristocrats before. Both of the damaged heroes are searching for love and respect and to varying degrees they find it, though in both cases their long term happiness is in doubt. At least one of our narrators has a genuine historical counterpart, and other characters we meet have a passing resemblance to real people. However, Carey, as usual, has his way of subverting history, while at the same time he raising issues about the relationship between the New and Old Worlds, and the ways that they are governed . Don't expect Henry James, do expect Peter Carey on top form.
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