Customer Reviews

Parrot and Olivier in America

5 star:		(34)
4 star:		(21)
3 star:		(13)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

Olivier de Garmont, a 25 year-old French nobleman whose grandfather was guillotined during the 1789 revolution, is drugged by the Marquis de Tilbot, a close friend of Olivier's monarchist mother, and shanghaied to America. There, he is safe from the excesses of the 1830 July Revolution while he works as representative of the French government, investigating the American penal system. At the same time, Parrot, Tilbot's servant, agrees to accompany Olivier to America, where he is supposed to function as Olivier's protector and secretary, as well as a spy for his hovering mother. In PARROT AND OLIVIER IN AMERICA (PaOiA), Peter Carey examines how opportunity and democracy in Jacksonian America affect the cultured and charmingly observant Olivier and the capable Parrot, who is the equivalent of the modern-day personal assistant.

Peter Carey has based Olivier on Alexis de Tocqueville. In fact, Carey emphasizes on his website that he has threaded Olivier's commentary with excerpts from "Democracy in America," de Tocqueville's masterpiece. Olivier is a great character. He is a French aristocrat, fleeing democracy in his own country but fascinated by its operation in America; a highly cultured Frenchman, who is sometimes hilariously snobbish about American culture and cooking; and a young bachelor who falls in love with Amelia, a natural aristocrat and the daughter of a wealthy Connecticut farmer. Ultimately, Olivier must decide: Can a man with his background and values assimilate in democratic America?

Meanwhile, Parrot, whose real name is John Larritt, arrives in America without a good working relationship with Olivier, his boss. In his long association with Tilbot, Larritt has become skilled in art appraisal and the art business. But, he can serve no equivalent function for Olivier, who simply wants a servant and secretary. In America, Larritt is faced with the challenge of personal reinvention and must ultimately determine if and how America can suit his and his wife's talents.

In telling the story of Parrot and Olivier, Carey uses many narrative devices and issues that exist elsewhere in his oeuvre. This, for example, is my fourth Carey book that features a book within a book. (The others were Jack Maggs: A Novel, True History of the Kelly Gang: A Novel, and My Life as a Fake). Meanwhile, themes in PaOiA that are prominent in other Carey novels include fraternal tension and responsibility, absent fathers, fraudulent behavior by artists (Theft), and the mysterious power of love (His Illegal Self (Vintage International)). Similar to other Carey novels, PaOiA also has an abundance of sympathetic characters and writing that is brisk and sometimes amazingly lyrical.

Even so, I'd rate PaOiA a notch below Carey's other work. In part, I'd attribute this to the highly coincidental events featuring the character O'Hara, which serve to reunite Parrot and Olivier. I wonder: Are these events a direct reference to de Tocqueville's actual experiences in New York? And, even if they are, why are they necessary?

Also, I'd say that the critical relationships in this novel are men to women--that is, Parrot to Mathilde and Olivier to Amelia. In contrast, the relation between Parrot and Olivier, which gets lots of space, was primarily economic and functional. That's certainly okay. But I think Carey strived, but failed, to make that relationship mean more.

Marked up to four stars.

While Carey is a gifted writer, I think this book is ultimately and fundamentally flawed. It starts and ends with his plan to have the book told by the two main characters in alternating chapters. Carey changes the voices with ease, but each of them writes in the first person, so that the whole book tends to be confusing. Because the two narrators have similar writing styles, no doubt intended, that makes it even more confusing.

In addition, I didn't find either of the characters particularly sympathetic, so that I was not able to drum up much interest in their stories. Switching from one to the other constantly didn't help this either.

In the end, while I appreciated Carey's style, I was left feeling as if we never found out the end of Olivier's story (although Parrot's was resolved nicely) and that, to me, was unsatisfying.

Between the two voices, the unsympathetic characters, and the lack of resolution, I felt as if I was reading the middle of a larger book and not a complete novel.

Alexis de Tocqueville visited America in 1831-33, ostensibly to examine the prison system, but his observations of the young nations were more generally perceptive, as published in his DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA of 1835. Australian novelist Peter Carey, who has lived in America for twenty years, has reimagined Tocqueville under a thin disguise as Olivier de Garmont, the sickly offspring of an ancient Norman family, some guillotined in the Revolution, some spared, now finding himself an anachronism in his own country. Carey is excellent at portraying the political situation in a France where liberty steered a precarious path between tyrannies on either side. Olivier arrives in an America of paradox, on the one hand feted for his old-world position, and glad-handed on the other by people he could previously have dismissed as servants or tradesmen. He falls in love with the country (and with a beautiful American heiress), but his love alternates with bewilderment and even dislike.

Olivier is interesting in a sort of academic way, but Carey's masterstroke is to pair him with an English traveling companion several decades his senior, known as Parrot. The son of an itinerant printer in Devon, Parrot's life takes a new turn when he meets "Monsieur," a one-armed renegade French aristocrat who crops up throughout the novel as a diabolus ex machina, and is ultimately responsible for bringing Parrot and Olivier together. Transported to Australia (though not as a convict) the teenage lad learns to fend for himself, building some skill as an artist. Eventually, he is brought back to France by Monsieur, and used by him in a variety of shady dealings. He also falls for a fiery female painter named Mathilde, tossing like a towed dinghy in the wake of her genius. Whenever Parrot is the narrator, the language comes violently to life. Here is Mathilde's mother on her arrival in America "...wrestling with the rolled-up canvas, clanking and clattering with those beaten blackened pans she had carried like gold napoleons across the sea. With a nod and nudge she made it clear my only job was to hold her sobbing daughter and my heart was brimming, one part rage, one cockalorum, all sloshing and gurgling and spurting through my chambers." Those who have read TRUE HISTORY OF THE KELLY GANG know well what Carey can do in this vein.

Olivier has known only one life before coming to America; Parrot has lived through several lifetimes, and looks only to stop travelling, settle down, and discover what he really is. America provides that for him, as it so often does. As a European immigrant myself, I find it uncanny how well Carey has captured one's love/hate relationship with this country -- including the incredulity of most Americans that this could be anything other than total love. I am also struck by the way in which, by setting the genteel breeding of Olivier against the rough practicality of Parrot, he once more touches upon a central duality in Australian literature (it is the theme, for example, of Patrick White's VOSS), though translating it to America, where the problem of maintaining culture in a pioneer world found its own meaning and vibrant solutions.

Let's just say it up front: Peter Carey stands at the summit of stylists writing in English today. He has an astonishing ability to assume a voice - a Dickens character, an Australian outlaw, a runaway American boy, to name a few - and use it to assemble a world entire in itself. In this delightfully imagined jaunt through early nineteenth century America, he speaks through two alternating voices: the French aristocrat Olivier, highly educated but experientially cocooned; and John Larrit - Parrot - an Englishman much knocked about during his eventful life, now in the service of another French aristocrat. As a way of removing him from potential political harm, Olivier's domineering mother gets her son a commission to study the American penal system. Parrot is dispatched by his master to watch over Olivier in the New World.

Olivier struggles to fit the idea of America into his mental armoire, which contains sniffy upper class snobbery along with terror of the mob tyranny he witnessed during the French Revolution. Parrot, on the other hand, is much taken with the possibilities of re-invention he sees in the young country, and chafes under his servitude to Olivier.

Many interesting ideas are put into play, but lightly, gracefully. Much is made of artistic mimicry, from forgery of currency, to engravings of birds, to paintings that attempt to capture the evanescence of natural light. Or how one's emotional state rearranges one's rational conclusions - Olivier's feelings about America become inseparable from his reactions to the luscious Amelia Godefroy of the Connecticut Godefroys. There is subtle examination about the way our cultural assumptions (Blake's "mind-forged manacles") limit our perceptions of a new place.

Olivier experiences some undeserved acclaim and the promise of love, followed by a swift, steep fall from grace. Like his countryman Alexis De Tocqueville, he returns to France with reservations about our rude, energetic country, tempered by a grudging admiration. Parrot struggles to throw off the passivity and fatalism that have held him back since the untimely loss of his father when he was a boy. He wants to stay and become a new man in the New World. Olivier and Parrot are invigorated by their travels in America, as are we, led smoothly and safely to the end of the journey by Peter Carey, master ventriloquist.

In this warm, captivating, and accessible new novel, Carey returns to the epic sweep found in his Booker Prize winning works, "Oscar and Lucinda", and "True History of the Kelly Gang". The two protagonists, a young French aristocrat and an older, artistic, lower-class British cynic, are also the twin narrators, telling a single tale through alternating first-person chapters. Loosely modeled on de Tocqueville's enthusiastic descriptions of his travels through early America, this story advances across turn of the (19th) Century England, France, Australia and the U.S. The insolent Parrot and self-assured Olivier insightfully describe historical events and settings with Carey's trademark attention to detail, revealing humorous subtleties that most historians tend to leave out. Their contrasting personalities react differently to the American experiment, but both are moved by its bold novelty and optimism.

Other readers may share my sense of regret in looking back, through these characters' nearly 200-year-old European eyes, at the promise of what the Founding Fathers created here, and how we've lately squandered it. The world no longer looks to the United States with the same kind of anticipatory excitement that Olivier and Parrot expressed about our country's early, unformed days; to recreate that feeling, one probably needs to travel to China or Brazil, where economics, technology, and culture are similarly racing into unexplored territory, with as yet unrealized promises of greatness.

The book will not be released in the U.S. until April 20, 2010 (I picked up a copy in the Sydney Airport).

If you are looking for a novel you can read quickly and enjoy, this might not be the book you want. If you want to know how people lived and looked at life around the time of the French revolution you might enjoy this book. It is basically history but with fictional characters living the events.

The beginning is especially slow and hard to get into. None of the characters were interesting enough that I really got involved in wishing them well. My main interest and reason for continuing reading was the insight into the way of life in France, the United States , England and Wales, and Australia during those years of change.

The reader who pushes past the initial tedious stage setting will find a novel that is at least more interesting than a straight history book. The use of characters set in the time, one rich and one poor for the additional contrast, allows the writer to set a stage for habits and ideas of the age in a way that makes them slightly more easily absorbed. I don't say it could not be done better, since I recently read Rebels & Traitors by Lindsey Davis which does a similar job on the English Civil War and does it in a much more readable manner. But if you are interested in this time period this might be a book you should try.

The novel opens in France where sickly, sensitive Olivier de Garmont and the remnants of his aristocratic family have survived the Revolution and the Terror of 1793, and are surviving the Bonaparte regime in their chateau in Normandy. The restoration of the monarchy brings no joy to Olivier's family, and his family decides to send him to America - ostensibly to study prison reform.

Parrot, considerably older than Olivier, is the son of an itinerant English printer. Olivier and Parrot are brought together by the mysterious one-armed Marquis de Tilbot whose presence looms large across the novel. When Olivier sets sail for America, Parrot accompanies him as both protector and spy.

The narrative shifts between the perspectives of Parrot and Olivier, covering both their adventures together and their separate lives. This enables the introduction and exploration of a number of different themes in the novel: including love, politics and ambition. I especially enjoyed the differing views of democracy:
`In a democracy, it seemed, one could not go against a servant's will.' (Olivier)
`I read Tom Paine by candlelight, but for 18 hours a day I was a vassal.' (Parrot)

Olivier is trapped by his past, caught between his aristocratic past and a brash new world where equality means dealing with people of different classes and station in life as though they are equals. Olivier is never really comfortable in America, although when he falls in love with an American heiress he sees some possibilities. Parrot, on the other hand, has already experienced much in his life and is more flexible in his approach to opportunities. It is Parrot's narrative that particularly enriches the story because it enlarges the world beyond that of the myopic Olivier.

The novel may have been inspired by Alexis de Tocqueville's travels through America, but there is more than one story in this novel. Parrot's life has been far more varied and he is, it seems, far better equipped to survive in the New World.

I am tempted to write more about this novel: it's vibrant, energetic and vastly entertaining. But for me, a lot of the pleasure was derived from reading the novel without knowing what was likely to happen next, and I don't wish to spoil this for others. Read it for pleasure, dissect it for significant themes if you so choose. But if you do choose to explore those themes then you may need to reread the novel - or read it at a far more leisurely pace than I did.

`Who would have imagined such an extraordinary world?'

Jennifer Cameron-Smith