Parrot & Olivier in America
A Novel
Parrot & Olivier in America
A Novel
Peter Carey
Alfred A. Knopf: 386 pp., $26.95
Come to think of it, America is one long picaresque novel. It takes an Australian-born novelist to remind us of this, mired as we are in the great project, democracy. Imagine a time when a French nobleman, Olivier-Jean-Baptiste de Clarel de Barfleur, and his not-so-trusty sidekick, John Larrit, known to loved ones as Parrot, might sail from Le Havre, fleeing the aftershocks of the French Revolution, and land in this bewildering caldron of possibility.
Seen through their eyes, we look strange, as we must have to Alexis de Tocqueville when he studied us and produced "Democracy in America." De Tocqueville traveled in the United States and Canada in the 1830s with his companion, Beaumont, ostensibly to study our prison system. It is the vigor of this inquiry that gives the book its shelf-life, not De Tocqueville's research on prisons. We never tire of looking in the mirror — constantly seeing our reflections in other cultures, approving and disapproving. How does our version of democracy stack up?
"Parrot & Olivier in America" is based on the travels of De Tocqueville and Beaumont — Carey has housed the footnotes at http://www.petercareybooks.com. He has written the novel in that wonderful form of the first person that includes the you — Olivier and Parrot both address their readers directly as they explain their histories. Olivier, born in 1805, in the shadow of the Revolution, first recounts his horror upon learning, early in his childhood, that castle life was not all flowers and Latin lessons. The source of his mother's sadness — her father was dragged to the guillotine by the sans-culottes. "I understood it then," he says, referring to his ancestral home, "not as a castle of pride and strength, but as a weak place, a soft thing in the coming night."
When Olivier's parents are called back to Paris to join the court of the returning King Louis XVIII, Olivier goes with them but is soon sent home to the country while the Bourbons and the Orleans argue over an increasingly useless throne. Olivier becomes a lawyer and, at 26, when all of their lives are in jeopardy, Olivier's mother, the Comtesse, devises a plan to send her son to America to study prisons; specifically the novel American idea of rehabilitating prisoners while they are incarcerated, a subject that does not interest the young marquis in the slightest.
