Gavin McLean reviews Parrot and Olivier in America.
Peter Carey
Hamish Hamilton, $55, hbk
In Parrot and Olivier in America, Peter Carey returns to form with a big, fast-moving historical novel, this time set mainly in the young revolutionary United States of America.
Although there's a large cast of characters, the main ones are an odd couple, the aristocratic Frenchman, Olivier, and Parrot (John Larrit), his often rebellious and sharp-tongued servant.
How do they wind up in each other's company? Parrot, the son of an English itinerant printer turned counterfeiter, flees his homeland to avoid hanging alongside his father.
Olivier, although richer, has also been through the mill, in this case the near-endless revolutions and upheavals of late-18th- and early-19th-century France.
Olivier is snobbish and undiplomatic, so his nervous supporters send him to America as a commissioner to report on penal reform.
This plot device is clearly inspired by Alexis de Tocqueville's famous book On Democracy in America.
Parrot and Olivier (dubbed "Migraine" by the Briton) find themselves sharing a cabin in an overcrowded and badly run sailing ship.
Neither knows that this is the first step in the emergence of an improbable friendship.
Carey has fun highlighting the gaps between the various social classes as this exchange between Olivier and an American banker, Peek, shows:
PEEK: To stand naked? Sir I would not stand naked with my wife.
MIGRAINE: We do not call it naked with a servant.
PEEK: What do you call it?
MIGRAINE: We call it getting dressed.
The voyage across the Atlantic and their escapades in America involve Rabelasian drinking, romantic intrigues and near-disasters.
Carey keeps everything moving at a cracking pace.
Through Olivier, and more particularly Parrot, Carey explores the social and political make-up of the new nation.
Olivier is liberal enough to see the need for penal reform: "behind every one of those numbered double doors - first oak, then steel - was a human soul, a mind in its bone cage, the centre of its solar system, burning with regret and rage, condemned to silent solitary labour, world without end", he observes.
He's also aware that his class is doomed to extinction: "We fiddled here. We fiddled there. And all the while the great lava flow of democracy came inexorably towards us."
But Parrot, the 50-year-old exile, is the truer voice of Carey's tribute to his new homeland.
Australian by birth, Carey, who has lived in New York for 20 years, also offers his antipodean readers a brief excursion to the island continent by Parrot which reinforces the message that the Old World is corrosive.
"Australia was invented by the British, the whole dry carcass, its withered dugs offered to our criminal lips."
Carey's love of America is not unqualified.
Olivier shudders at the Puritanism of the Americans - "we sat on chairs designed by a people who judged it a sin for a man to sit for long," he observes in one place.
And, although Americans still like to quote de Tocqueville, they sometimes skip over his warning that their form of democracy if carried to extremes could end up in tyranny.
George W. Bush is not mentioned, of course, but it's hard not to think of him in the few darker patches of this generally bubbly novel.
Gavin McLean is a Wellington historian and reviewer.
