Parrot and Olivier in America by Peter Carey
Faber and Faber; Hardback;
464 pages; 9780571253296;
Price £18.99

Annie McDermott

First of all, this is not a book about America. The book about America is what the French aristocrat Olivier, sent to investigate the prisons of the new democracy, is dictating to his secretary Parrot. Peter Carey’s book is about what happens in the meantime.

Parrot and Olivier in America tells the story of Olivier-Jean-Baptiste de Clarel de Garmont (Lord Migraine to his secretary), a short-sighted young nobleman living amidst the dangers of post-revolutionary Paris. His overbearing and staunchly royalist mother, who ‘has saved my life so often I have almost died of it’, sends him to the relative safety of America on the pretext of writing a report on the penal systems of the ‘new democracy’. Olivier’s companion and the novel’s second narrator is Parrot, an Englishman of many lives and many names (John Larrit, Perroquet, Monsieur Perroquet, and even Mr OK when Americans mishear the French) and the servant of a Garmont family friend.

Throughout the pair’s travels, these two opposing pairs of eyes remain firmly trained on each other. Any insights into America are as glimpses at the edge of their vision: the substance and shape of the narrative is drawn from the developing relationship between master and servant. This provides the fuel for the novel’s most touching moments and entertaining set-pieces. It is a pleasure to watch Olivier’s stiffly elaborate voice bend itself to the foreign subject of what might be going on in his servant’s mind, a question which, at one point, ‘became more pressing when, after a dinner of fatty goose, Master Larrit carried a bottle of brandy to my room and made it clear that he and I should shoot the breeze.’

As the reader follows their sentimental journey, however, it is difficult to escape a slight feeling of frustration. Carey has sketched out an ambitious plan that spans the globe and raises key political and philosophical issues – we are taken through England, France, Australia and America, and faced with such questions as the fate of art in a democracy along the way. And yet this formidable body of subject-matter feels more skeleton than flesh. Carey’s efforts to build his novel not from a single comprehensive account but from multiple perspectives, fragments, memories and speculations is an attempt to give it life – yet they feel too sparse and too shallow, and the promise of the novel is unfulfilled.

In Salem, Parrot encounters an engraver whose ambition is to produce a book of all the birds of America. He draws not from life but from death: his wife has become a skilled shot, and brings him back examples of each species which she then wires into lifelike poses and piles up in his studio to wait for their close-ups. The finished prints are posted in copper cases to England and France, where they sell for the highest of prices and furnish the libraries of noblemen who will never see such things in the flesh.

The book that is about America – Olivier’s On the Penitentiary System of the United States and Its Application in France – has, we are led to believe, much in common with these engravings. The reconstructed poses of the lifeless birds mirror the objects of his research – carefully controlled interviews with inmates of prisons that Parrot collects ‘as his lordship’s servants must once have collected moths and butterflies’, followed by ‘nightly dinners whose guests had been clearly selected to provide me with every statistic I could ever wish to know’. The book about what happens in the meantime – Carey’s book – aims to be closer to Mrs Watkins stumbling through marshes, shotgun in hand, splattered with American mud and blinded by the American sun.

At points, it succeeds. Olivier’s contempt for the rocking chair, ‘the inevitable machine, that awful monument to democratic restlessness’, is an individual encounter with America worth a thousand statistics. When presented with the offending seat in the deluxe cabin of a ship, he has it replaced with ‘a comfortable wing-backed reading chair’ and reflects that in a democracy you will ‘never find, as in aristocracy, one class that sits back in its own comfort and another that will not stir itself because it despairs of ever improving its status. In America, everyone is in a state of agitation: some to attain power, others to grab wealth, and when they cannot move, they rock.’ Such moments show the narrative at its best, but they are too few to flesh out such a formidable skeleton.

For a novel keen to withhold answers, it is perhaps too empty of questions as well. One of Olivier’s treatises that we never read attempts to answer the question of the role of the artist in a democracy. Carey’s novel does not attempt to provide any such answer, but the incidents, characters and views through which we are encouraged to explore the issue do not even surprise us with new insights into the problem or different ways of formulating the question. As postmodern readers, we have learnt to live without answers, but living without questions is more difficult. Peter Carey can, of course, live perfectly well without postmodern readers, but he nevertheless strays far enough into their territory with Parrot and Olivier that his Heart-Warming Tale of their trials, tribulations and unexpected friendship is not quite – almost, yes, but not quite – enough by itself.