Book notes No. 37 : Parrot & Olivier in America, Peter Carey

As yesterday, a bright and beautiful morning. A layer day - 'twill be hot in the sun later.

Australian author Peter Carey has twice won the Booker Prize - for Oscar and Lucinda in 1988 and True History of the Kelly Gangin 2001. Parrot & Olivier in America, his latest novel was shortlisted this year, but as we already know lost by a whisker to Howard Jacobson's The Finkler Question.Still, I have to say this book is definitely worth reading – it made the shortlist after all!

The story is based on the travels of the real-live French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville. The two main characters are Olivier, a French aristocrat and skin-of-his-teeth survivor of the Revolution of 1789, and his servant, Parrot, the son of an itinerant English printer whose hopes of becoming an artist are dashed, leaving him working as something of a ‘fixer’ to a wealthy patron. Olivier is sent to the colonies, ostensibly to research the American penal system, but in reality to escape further revolutionary danger. Parrot is sent along to act as minder, secretary, translator and banker and to keep him on the right track, especially in the matter of possible undesirable liaisons of the marrying kind.

                      

The book describes a moment in time in which the aristocracy are facing their own overthrow and possible extinction, and the new middle classes are busy imagining ways in which they might fill the vacuum. Everything seems to be on the change. Talented women artists, previously restricted to working behind the scenes with their master taking the credit, are now finding ways to work – and make money – in their own right. Among the very rich of the new colonial democracy, markets are starting to be made for fine art and other objects, once the provenance of only the aristocracy (the only people refined enough to appreciate them, according to Olivier). The new élite are grabbing the prestige of the old through marriage, and that new breed, the entrepreneur, is about to be born.

We see in both Olivier and Parrot an early incomprehension of the new post-Revolutionary world. As the book progresses, though, there is learning on both sides, and eventually each reaches an accommodation with the new world order. Does that sound too serious? Well, along the way there are some extraordinary, almost Dickens-like characters, some hilarious and nail-biting episodes, and some marvellous historical vignettes.


Actually, Edmund White put it better when he wrote for the jacket of the hardback edition: "I was sick with admiration on every page of this vigorous, lyrical masterpiece. The dramatic situations are struck off with hallucinatory force, the characters coddled with tenderness and humour - and the distant past is made as present as a slap in the face." Love it.

It’s a funny and fascinating read. Along with the Booker judges, I recommend it.