Peter Carey's Parrot and Olivier in America was marketed as a comic novel based on the adventures of Alexis de Tocqueville, but it is something of a deliberate fraud on both counts. Olivier de Garmont certainly bears some resemblance to Tocqueville, but it quickly becomes clear that comparing them too carefully is a red herring. Olivier's story must be considered as an entity by itself, inhabiting a sort of parallel universe to Tocqueville's rather than a direct retelling (which makes sense: otherwise, why not just name the character Tocqueville?). Similarly, I was a little disappointed to find that, while Carey's writing is shot through with his usual sense of irony, Parrot and Olivier in America is not really a comic novel. Sure, there are moments when it sets out to satirize the past, especially the development of American democracy, in various ways, but it lacks any sort of laugh-out-loud passages that characterize the comic genre. You'll smile, but you won't laugh.
It took me a long time to warm to this book. In fact, I read it twice, several months apart, before I could decide that I actually liked it. Part of the problem came from my expectations that it *would* be a humorous novel, and I felt let down by the fact that it wasn't funny the first time through. Carey, however, is a complex novelist, and it took that second reading for me to see the deeper intricacies of what he was trying to do. If you've read some of Carey's other recent books, such as
My Life as a Fake
or
His Illegal Self
, you'll notice a recurring interest in two overlapping themes: the constructed nature of the self, and the possibilities for inauthenticity that arise from this condition. As such, Parrot and Olivier in America repeatedly deploys the intertwining notions of copying and the counterfeit, from the fake money manufactured by Parrot's father to the carbon paper that Parrot uses to duplicate Olivier's letters. Underneath this repeated symbolism is a political critique grounded in the thesis that the origins of democracy have themselves been counterfeited, allowing the political apparatus to be delivered into the hands of a new ruling class that uses a rhetoric of freedom and equality to cover up its own inherent injustices.
Although Carey delivers this message with deft subtlety, it is not hard to see why, for most readers, such a conclusion is going to touch a sore spot. It is a view that implicitly challenges some of the most basic assumptions about not only who we are as a society, but also certain cherished enlightenment ideas, particularly the notion that human beings naturally and instinctively desire freedom, one of the key foundations of democracy. Still, Carey's assessment is not grounded in a blind anti-Americanism: like his characters, like Tocqueville, he has seen America for himself (Carey teaches creative writing at New York's Hunter College), and this meticulously researched novel challenges the reader to reject the evasions and deceptions of democracy's birth from an empirical position rather than from mere cultural prejudice.
Parrot and Olivier in America is perhaps not Carey's best book, but it is a fine political novel of ideas that rewards patience and close attention.
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