By Paul Carrier
In Napoleonic France, two boys are born to surviving members of the aristocracy who emerged from the French Revolution with their heads still attached to their necks: Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville and Olivier Jean Baptiste de Clarel de Barfleur de Garmont.
De Tocqueville is a flesh-and-blood Frenchman best-known for a classic, two-volume study of 1830s America. But Olivier is something else entirely: a figment of the imagination of author Peter Carey, who brought Olivier to life in his magnificently imagined and vividly written novel, Parrot and Olivier in America.
What links the two men is that Olivier is loosely modeled after de Tocqueville. Parrot and Olivier in America takes its inspiration from the now-famous trip that Tocqueville and a companion made to the United States in the first half of the 19th century, by following Olivier and Parrot on a similar excursion.
In alternating chapters narrated by Olivier and Parrot, we first encounter both men during their childhoods, as the sickly and haughty Olivier tries to come to terms with a world transformed by the French Revolution and Parrot, an English printer’s son so named because of his uncanny mimicry, finds himself immersed in the underworld of British counterfeiters.
When the two finally meet in France as adults, the sarcastic, jaded Parrot and the conservative, snobbish Olivier embark on a journey to America to study prisons here, much as de Tocqueville did when he set sail for the United States in 1831.
In this, as in other things, the novel breaks with the historical record; while Olivier travels with a poor Englishman, Tocqueville was accompanied by his longtime friend and fellow French nobleman, Gustave de Beaumont. Although Parrot and Olivier in America was loosely inspired by de Tocqueville’s journey and Olivier is reminiscent of de Tocqueville, the novel charts its own course as it explores Parrot and Olivier’s conflicting attitudes toward the still-young American republic.
A two-time winner of Britain's prestigious Man Booker Prize for Fiction, Carey has been widely praised for his remarkable prose (the windows of a forger’s shop are all “dark and secret, declaring its business was not for you to know”) and his strong skills as a storyteller, but he also wins accolades for his detailed research, which allows him to work all sorts of arcane but compelling details into his books.
At the outset, Olivier and Parrot barely tolerate one another. Parrot refers to his traveling companion as Lord Migraine, because of Olivier’s seeming frailty. For his part, the aristocratic Oliver sees Parrot as a “common clown,” and treats him as such. Until, that is, their relationship matures after a series of American adventures, some shared between them, some not.
Once Parrot and Olivier make it to the United States, they expand their focus beyond prisons to include society at large, as de Tocqueville did, and Olivier concludes that democracy, American-style, is a flawed creation. It is "a truly lovely flower, a tiny tender fruit, but it will not ripen well,” says Olivier, who lost family to the guillotine during the French Revolution and fears the mob. “America,” Parrot replies, “is new.”
In an interview with the British newspaper The Telegraph, Carey disputes the popular American notion that de Tocqueville was smitten by all that he saw and heard while visiting the United States.
“Everyone talks about de Tocqueville as the posh French fella who really understood democracy and, as you start to listen, you start to think, ‘Hang on a second, he was not necessarily the greatest supporter of what was happening in this country,’” Carey told the newspaper. An Australian who has lived in the United States for many years, Carey noted that de Tocqueville saw and feared the power that misguided populists had, or could develop, in America.
Yet in Carey’s exquisite prose, Parrot, a low-born democrat who finds success and happiness in America, oozes optimism about his adopted country, and the reader is left to ponder two vastly different but equally valid sides of the same coin.
