A review of Parrot and Olivier in America by Peter Carey

Some books embrace you, and you move within their heart and spirit, and you cry when you part. Some books take you on a ride; they are always slightly ahead of you but you finish together, with great satisfaction. Some books make you laugh, and you keep reading to escape from the real stuff going on around you.

Some books never embrace, or sweep you up, or entertain you, and you wonder why you wasted your time.

And so I entered the world of Peter Carey’s Parrot and Olivier in America. I confess, embarrassing as it is, that I have never read a Carey novel before. I did see Bliss, the movie, and found it bizarre but creative and moving.

I spent most of the time not really enjoying this novel. Carey was considering weighty topics of aesthetics and politics and relationships; but with a quirky style that I feared diminished the learning. Yet, I had to admire the breadth of the book, and the imagination and research that produced it. Maybe that was part of the problem, I never engaged so completely with the characters and the plot, that I forgot that I was a reader or a critic.

Carey uses the novel to examine the politics of class-torn France, telling the story of a French nobleman (Olivier) transplanted to America in the 1830s, a country in its infancy.

Accompanying him as secretary, is an older man (nicknamed ‘Parrot’), orphaned in England, who travelled via convict Australia to France, before being forced to join Olivier on his journey to America.

These two unlikely companions become metaphors for the great American experiment in democracy.

Olivier is challenged because his aristocratic rights count for nothing in the new world. His appetite for old art and fine wine cannot be sated. All that he measures his worth by, and the value of others, is now useless history. He is both excited and appalled by the prospects and possibilities.

While I found the ideas stimulating, most of the writing and characterisation felt simply too whimsical. However, as Jenny Byrne commented in The Age: “Once this novel grabs you, it holds you.”

I rushed to the end, caught up in the stories of these men, and marvelling at how much I take for granted in terms of the values and conveniences in Australia.

Olivier seems ridiculous in his posturing and presumption. Yet America and Australia were birthplaces of an egalitarian spirit which was original for its time, and which now has become the measure of democracy throughout the world.

Olivier and Parrot take it in turns to tell their own stories; and both are unreliable narrators, unable to see the world clearly. So Olivier is suspicious of the ‘common’ people after the deprivations his family suffered following two revolutions. Parrot is wary of law and the government having been orphaned at the hands of one, and seen the extent of corruption in the other.

Meanwhile, both of them are suspicious of religion. Olivier is a lapsed Catholic, and Parrot is an outspoken atheist, and neither of them see spiritual concerns as a necessary element of the ideal society

In some ways they both see art as replacing religion as the means of delivering a transcendent experience.

In this way their observations of early America fail to fully comprehend the significance of the faith of the pilgrims; and their deep belief in the sovereignty of God and his love for every person, which underlies the American concept of democracy and its constitution.

It was also the Protestant work ethic that was the driving force of the new economy so admired by Olivier.

Carey in his acknowledgments admits the influence on the novel of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. Tocqueville himself was a French nobleman who was greatly impressed with the experiment in personal freedom practised in America. However, Carey has not recorded in the novel the very perspective that Tocqueville captures brilliantly:

The Americans combine the notions of Christianity and of liberty so intimately in their minds, that it is impossible to make them conceive the one without the other; and with them this conviction does not spring from that barren traditionary faith which seems to vegetate in the soul rather than to live...

Upon my arrival in the United States, the religious aspect of the country was the first thing that struck my attention; and the longer I stayed there, the more did I perceive the great political consequences resulting from this state of things, to which I was unaccustomed. In France I had almost always seen the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom pursuing courses diametrically opposed to each other; but in America I found that they were intimately united, and that they reigned in common over the same country. (Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 1835)

In Carey’s defence, he was not writing an essay, but an (ultimately) engaging novel. The myopic vision of his characters about spiritual matters is more modern than the times he writes about.