Parrot and Olivier in America

by Peter Carey

FICTION

FABER AND FABER

04/02/10

Peter Carey has always liked the idea of ill-matched travellers: one remembers the Oxford seminarian and the Sydney heiress brought together in the Booker-winning Oscar and Lucinda. Marginally shorter than that mammoth compendium, at 450 pages, Parrot and Olivier in America assembles an even less likely pair. ‘Parrot’ is the flame-haired son of a jobbing printer, first seen watching as his ‘da’ is employed by a shifty master-forger in late 18th-century Devon. Olivier Garmont, however, is the scion of a French aristocratic clan who are easing themselves back into society after the horrors of the Revolution.

Their destiny is the New World, to which free-thinking and endangered Olivier is packed off after the fall of the Bourbon monarchy, supposedly to compile a report on the US prison system, with Parrot engaged by the novel’s éminence grise, the scheming Marquis de Tilbot, as bagman, minder and spy. All this bowls along in the approved Carey fashion – rapt, whimsical and incurably digressive: a hundred pages before the pair are united; another hundred before they set foot in America and begin their tour of various state penitentiaries.

If the psychological core of this picaresque lies in the juxtaposition of its two central characters, then its sub-text can be found in the juxtaposition of its two political systems: American democracy versus the much shakier settlements of post-Enlightenment France. As ever, the sheer inventiveness of the writing is matched by its oddly provisional feel, the sense that the author, eternally beguiled by the multiple fictive paths stretching out before him, delightedly made it up as he went along.

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