After –and really before- finishing Peter Carey’s Parrot & Oliver in America, I wondered what the book was about. It is inspired by Alexis de Tocqueville, the young French nobleman who wrote Democracy in America, the first great study of manners, morals and politics in the United States.
But beyond that knowledge, I’m at a loss to say I did not fully understand the plot of the novel, though some could say it had no real plot beyond poking fun at the French Aristocrats and early American schisms between Puritan and the changing times.
The character of Olivier de Garmont is an over-protected man/child with allergies and other afflictions who –after being apart of the Reign of Terror of the French Revolution, which he does not remember- is exiled to America, a place he no desire to come to in the first place.
Meanwhile, Parrot’s history involves a tramping childhood with his father, a strange apprenticeship to an engraver-forger, a voyage to Australia at age 12 with a shipload of convicts, marriage to an Irish girl in New South Wales, a gift for exact imitation of speech, a frustrated artistic vocation, and long service of various kinds to the enigmatic Tilbot.
In essences though, Carey paints a coarse America -based largely on De Tocqueville’s point of view it seems- is entertaining and the interaction between Parrot –a lowly English-man- and Oliver –an aristocrat buffoon- is somewhat predictable.
Still, Carey’s prose is vivid, poetic at times and very forceful. It’s enjoyable, and worth a read if only to prove the literary novel still exists in the 21st Century, but it bothers me that I could not grasp what fully Carey was trying to convey.
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