It's a novel you might take a little time warming to. Right at the start, as Olivier narrates his childhood, he grabs the reader roughly by the collar: “You have agreed to be transported to my childhood, where it will be proven, or if not proven then strongly suggested, that the very shape of my head, my particular phrenology, the volume of my lungs, was determined by unknown pressures brought to bear in the years before my birth.”
There are pressures beyond your imagining. Olivier was born in 1805, into an aristocratic family. In post-revolution France, the young Olivier finds out about the Terror and the guillotine a little at a time. He gets an early taste of violence when he finds wrapped-up dead pigeons, all dried up. His teacher explains that the peasants tried the pigeons for stealing grain, found them guilty, and punished them.
Imaginary leaps
And right at the beginning of the novel, drawn in the middle of the text, is a figure, a cycle-like thing, that allowed Olivier to go “sailing, skidding, blind as a bat, through the open gates of the Chateau de Barfleur”, the home of the noble Olivier-Jean-Baptiste de Clarel de Barfleur. It takes a little while to make that imaginary leap from the two-room space you occupy in an Indian city into a French chateau, two centuries ago; especially if you haven't travelled much. With the narrative peppered with the unfamiliar French word, readers here may find the beginning of this novel something of an uphill climb.
But then, perseverance pays. The tale unfolds in two voices that alternate. The first chapter is told in Olivier's voice, the next in that of his servant, Parrot alias John Larrit. Friendship, love, the baggage of privilege, hard to shed and sometimes a burden — these are uncovered as you get swept into the whirlpool that is the life of these adventurers.
Perhaps it would help to know that the journey of the novel is woven around that historical journey undertaken by Alexis de Tocqueville in 1831. Tocqueville, then 25, and his fellow-magistrate friend, Beaumont, set sail for America on an ‘official' trip, to study prisons there. Their trip was also something of an escape — both aristocrats, they were ill-at-ease with the post-French Revolution dispensation. Wide-eyed and wondrous at all things unFrench, Tocqueville made elaborate notes. By the end of that decade, the two-volume Democracy in America was published. There is much in common between Tocqueville and Olivier.
The one ahistorical character is the English character, Parrot aka John Larrit, servant of Olivier and constant companion: bawdy, uneducated, intelligent. Parrot brings to the tale its raw passion and colourful expression. Deeply in love with his painter-lover Mathilde, he travels with her and her mother to America. With little to lose, and nothing to return to, he is able to find himself quite at home in America.
Aristocrat's dilemma
In many ways, Parrot is a foil to Olivier, who does find love, but cannot bring himself to shed notions of that ‘ideal' spouse to get home to France. As Parrot puts it, he's so stuck up, he “cannot see beyond the circle of his own arse.” Stuck between a world that's on its way out and one still to be born, the aristocrat cannot quite make decisions as easily as the older Parrot, who appears to flow with the tide and often has decisions made for him; he just eases himself into situations not quite of his own making.
It helps that Parrot comes with little expectation, little lofty thought or theory. He's better adapted to democracy: “Sarcasm does not become you, John Larrit. Listen to me well. In a democracy there is not that class with the leisure to acquire discernment and taste in all the arts. Without that class, art is produced to suit the tastes of the market, which is filled with its own doubt and self-importance and ignorance, its own ability to be tricked and titillated by every bauble…I mean nothing but kindness. Bring yourself away,” says Olivier to Parrot at the end of the book. By then, you know that Parrot is the one who could teach Olivier a few things. He has taken in his old master, given him a bed and hearth, and is the settled householder, with a future to look forward to. Olivier, in contrast, belongs to that other country, the past.
Peter Carey won the Booker twice already. Here is a novel that is an epic: not quite effortless reading, and very, very rewarding.
Parrot and Olivier in America;Peter Carey, Faber and Faber, £26.95.
