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A tale loosely inspired by the life of Alexis de Tocqueville is set in the early nineteenth century and follows an unlikely friendship between a survivor of the French Revolution and an itinerant English engraver's son.

Reading Parrot and Olivier in America is all the proof you need that Peter Carey is the best novelist in the English language today. He flips seamlessly between two fascinating characters, one written in a style worthy of Dickens, the other Moliere or Proust. But this is not dexterous writing for cleverness' sake, it's also a rich and riveting story about many of the themes that occupy Carey's books: love and friendship, the love or loss of parents, our connection to place, expatriation, democracy, and, just as Hitchcock managed a walk-on cameo in all of his movies, Australia also shows up here in a deft storyline twist. <br />Olivier and Parrot is one of the best books I've ever read and makes clear in my mind that Carey easily should be the next Nobel prize winner in literature. Bravo!

Writers of historical fiction have things "both" ways: on the one hand they want to give us a convincing, realistic portrait of actual historical figures and a time and place in the past, and on the other they're not bound to the facts as historians are. They can let their imaginations roam freely among the nooks and crannies of what actually happened and give us a free-form, entertaining evocation of whatever it is they're writing about. History is to historical fiction as classical music is to jazz: in the one form you follow the notes carefully and accurately, while in the other you're free to improvise. <br /> <br />Peter Carey's Parrot & Oliver in America is a jazz riff on the life and times of Alexis de Tocqueville, the 19th century French aristocrat who authored Democracy in America, which remains, 175 years after its initial publication, the definitive European view of what America and Americans are like. De Tocqueville was prescient about many aspects of American life. He noticed that unlike Europe where a landed aristocracy created centuries of class-conflict, disadvantaged Americans didn't hate the rich--they wanted to be like them. Americans believed, much more than their counterparts in Europe, that hard work and loyalty led to upward mobility and a rewarding life. In Europe the working classes had no possibility of becoming rich and the aristocracy found it beneath themselves to discuss financial matters. Although religion had long and deeper roots in European than American society, and he lauded the separation of church and state in America, he forsaw the strong and continuing role religion was to play in shaping American politics and life. <br /> <br />Historically, de Tocqueville travelled to America with another Frenchman, his friend Gustave de Beaumont, a French jurist and prison reformer. He and de Tocqueville were commissioned by King Louis-Phillipe to report on the "success" of American prison systems. In Carey's novel, Oliver, the character who represents Alexis, is sent to America for the same purpose, but by his mother, rather than the King, and is accompanied by an English working class servant nicknamed Parrot. Carey's book is very funny because of the striking contrast between de Tocqueville's aristocratic mannerisms and pretensions and Parrot's down-to-earth working class sensibility. <br /> <br />Carey takes his time wending his way through the events of the French Revolution and the class struggles that that entailed before finally putting Oliver and Parrot on a ship headed for the new world. That's when the fun in the novel really starts, but Carey's narrative style, moving back and forth from one character to the other and back and forth in time and place from one era and physical locale to another, as well as his tendency to call characters by different names depending on who is referring to them or the context of the reference, makes the book somewhat difficult reading. It's simply so densely imagined that it's hard to follow. I kept asking myself: where are we now? What time and place is this? <br /> <br />This said, it's very much worth your time and effort. Carey is an Englishman living in America writing about a Frenchman who visited America and wrote about it. You'll get a healthy sample of DeTocqueville's supercilious attitude toward American egalitarianism in passages such as these: <br /> <br />"I had not known America would look like this. In my innocence I had hoped to find here a model for the future of France, or at least some sign as to how, if democracy was unstoppable, we might at least safeguard our future with certain principles or institutions. <br /> Yet all I had learned was that when the mob was allowed to rule, a second mob sprung up beneath them, and the difference between the Americans and the French is that the Americans do not need to steal from their fellows; when they can roam the countryside in bands, cutting trees and taking wealth. Anyone can claim a site for his chateau, whether he be a night soil man or a portraitist." <br /> <br />"Oh Blacqueville, I wish you were here to see these Americans. They are the most turbulent, unpeaceful, least-contented people, far worse than the Italians and Greeks. Clearly there is nothing less suited to meditation than democracy. You will never find, as in aristocracies, 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. They dig canals, they tear along the rivers in a rage of machinery, the engines pumping like sawyers in a pit, the shores denuded of their ancient trees." <br /> <br />"It is strange, in New York, and Philadelphia, to see the feverish enthusiasm which accompanies Americans' pursuit of prosperity and way they are ceaselessly tormented by the vague fear that they have failed to choose the shortest route to achieve it." <br /> <br />These and many other similar "definitive" judgments set in concrete many Europeans views of American "crassness," and Carey has a jolly good time with them. Like many Brits he seems to have something of a love-hate relationship with America and things American. After all he lives here, but this novel gives him the opportunity to speak about contemporary America (that last quotation could certainly apply to the dot.com boom of the 90s or even more accurately, to the financial meltdown of 2008). Reading this book you certainly get the distinctly French sense of plus ca change, plus c'est la meme. <br />

The novel opens in France where sickly, sensitive Olivier de Garmont and the remnants of his aristocratic family have survived the Revolution and the Terror of 1793, and are surviving the Bonaparte regime in their chateau in Normandy. The restoration of the monarchy brings no joy to Olivier's family, and his family decides to send him to America - ostensibly to study prison reform. <br /> <br />Parrot, considerably older than Olivier, is the son of an itinerant English printer. Olivier and Parrot are brought together by the mysterious one-armed Marquis de Tilbot whose presence looms large across the novel. When Olivier sets sail for America, Parrot accompanies him as both protector and spy. <br /> <br />The narrative shifts between the perspectives of Parrot and Olivier, covering both their adventures together and their separate lives. This enables the introduction and exploration of a number of different themes in the novel: including love, politics and ambition. I especially enjoyed the differing views of democracy: <br />`In a democracy, it seemed, one could not go against a servant's will.' (Olivier) <br />`I read Tom Paine by candlelight, but for 18 hours a day I was a vassal.' (Parrot) <br /> <br />Olivier is trapped by his past, caught between his aristocratic past and a brash new world where equality means dealing with people of different classes and station in life as though they are equals. Olivier is never really comfortable in America, although when he falls in love with an American heiress he sees some possibilities. Parrot, on the other hand, has already experienced much in his life and is more flexible in his approach to opportunities. It is Parrot's narrative that particularly enriches the story because it enlarges the world beyond that of the myopic Olivier. <br /> <br />The novel may have been inspired by Alexis de Tocqueville's travels through America, but there is more than one story in this novel. Parrot's life has been far more varied and he is, it seems, far better equipped to survive in the New World. <br /> <br />I am tempted to write more about this novel: it's vibrant, energetic and vastly entertaining. But for me, a lot of the pleasure was derived from reading the novel without knowing what was likely to happen next, and I don't wish to spoil this for others. Read it for pleasure, dissect it for significant themes if you so choose. But if you do choose to explore those themes then you may need to reread the novel - or read it at a far more leisurely pace than I did. <br /> <br />`Who would have imagined such an extraordinary world?' <br /> <br />Jennifer Cameron-Smith <br />

<br />Let's just say it up front: Peter Carey stands at the summit of stylists writing in English today. He has an astonishing ability to assume a voice - a Dickens character, an Australian outlaw, a runaway American boy, to name a few - and use it to assemble a world entire in itself. In this delightfully imagined jaunt through early nineteenth century America, he speaks through two alternating voices: the French aristocrat Olivier, highly educated but experientially cocooned; and John Larrit - Parrot - an Englishman much knocked about during his eventful life, now in the service of another French aristocrat. As a way of removing him from potential political harm, Olivier's domineering mother gets her son a commission to study the American penal system. Parrot is dispatched by his master to watch over Olivier in the New World. <br /> <br />Olivier struggles to fit the idea of America into his mental armoire, which contains sniffy upper class snobbery along with terror of the mob tyranny he witnessed during the French Revolution. Parrot, on the other hand, is much taken with the possibilities of re-invention he sees in the young country, and chafes under his servitude to Olivier. <br /> <br />Many interesting ideas are put into play, but lightly, gracefully. Much is made of artistic mimicry, from forgery of currency, to engravings of birds, to paintings that attempt to capture the evanescence of natural light. Or how one's emotional state rearranges one's rational conclusions - Olivier's feelings about America become inseparable from his reactions to the luscious Amelia Godefroy of the Connecticut Godefroys. There is subtle examination about the way our cultural assumptions (Blake's "mind-forged manacles") limit our perceptions of a new place. <br /> <br />Olivier experiences some undeserved acclaim and the promise of love, followed by a swift, steep fall from grace. Like his countryman Alexis De Tocqueville, he returns to France with reservations about our rude, energetic country, tempered by a grudging admiration. Parrot struggles to throw off the passivity and fatalism that have held him back since the untimely loss of his father when he was a boy. He wants to stay and become a new man in the New World. Olivier and Parrot are invigorated by their travels in America, as are we, led smoothly and safely to the end of the journey by Peter Carey, master ventriloquist. <br />

The qualities that define a good book for me are 1)rich and complex language 2)a story so engaging that I no longer am aware that I am even reading 3)a story that transports me to an unfamiliar time and/or place and 4) a story in which the characters become so real that I can understand their motivations and yet also find them fascinating. <br /> <br />Parrot & Olivier in America is just such a book! Peter Carey is an amazing author who can recreate the life of an outlaw in Australia in one book and portray the life of a French aristocrat in the early 19th century in a different novel. Each book is unique but they have in common the touch of a master writer. <br /> <br />I highly recommend investing some time in this wonderful story. You will be glad that you did.