Parrot & Olivier in America is a delicious, sprockety contraption, a comic historical picaresque that takes as its creative origin Tocqueville and Beaumont’s 1831 journey … Carey’s story is in what eighteenth-century novelists called the ‘Cervantick’ tradition, which means that this Quixote and Panza must first be at loggerheads, then at ease, and finally in love with each other, and that the master must finally need the servant’s help. In the course of this transformation, the two men have many American adventures, some of them loyal to the narrative of Tocqueville and Beaumont’s journey...but Carey’s departures from the Tocqueville biography are as interesting as his loyalties. Olivier is prissier and more snobbish than Tocqueville was. Though he warms to the American experiment—he, too, is moved by the Fourth of July event—the warmth is intermittent, banked with superiority. Carey makes much of Olivier’s myopia, and it seems obvious enough that America, and thus the future, belongs to Parrot, not to Olivier.
Parrot and Olivier in America is still a Peter Carey novel, which means that it’s amusing and wise and graceful to a degree that we almost don’t deserve … The debate between Olivier and Parrot is insoluble, but then fiction isn’t in the business of offering solutions; its mission is to coax us into feeling the breadth and depth of the question as it’s asked by human beings every day of their lives. Can Olivier (absurd yet endearing) survive in America, and can Parrot (embittered yet softening) thrive anywhere else? The trick of a great novel like this one lies in convincing you that you can’t bear to part with either one.
That Parrot and Olivier in America doesn’t simply fall apart is the result of Carey’s having seen that the very incompatibility of the two stories was what was interesting about them. The challenge of the novel became to create an artistic whole out of such unlike materials, a challenge which Carey meets by making the disparity between John Larrit and Olivier de Garmont the subject of his book. At the simplest level, Parrot and Olivier in America is about two men of different background, social status, character, temperament and experience, who, finding themselves flung together by circumstance, at first dislike each other intensely, but come in time to find a measure of mutual respect, friendship, even love. But the novel’s interest in the immiscibility of Parrot and Olivier extends beyond character to structure and style. They take it in turns to tell the story and with quite distinct voices.
Peter Carey’s inventive, zigzagging novel Parrot and Olivier in America is chiefly set in...this America, a place of great physical beauty, eccentrically ambitious people, and social institutions that are both stolid and skimpy … Olivier is a jumpy, snobbish, sickly fellow whom his servant calls Lord Migraine, and his angle on the world makes up only half of Carey’s novel. Well, to be precise, although this precision is not confirmed for us until the very last page, his angle on the world is not the angle it seems. It turns out that Olivier’s English servant, John Larrit alias Parrot, has not only written his own half of the text, like Esther Summerson in Dickens’s Bleak House, but has conjured up Olivier as well. His farewell to us and his master, which he calls his ‘Dedication,’ is a tour de force of suggestion and complication.
He has written the novel in that wonderful form of the first person that includes the you — Olivier and Parrot both address their readers directly as they explain their histories … Carey braids his story carefully, lovingly. It has all his telltale favorite elements — lawlessness, revolution, hope for the future, men driven by passion. At its heart, Parrot & Olivier in America is a western; the simplest story in history, sculpted down to a twinkle in a philosopher's eye: Man's search for freedom.
Like most of Carey’s inventive, maximalist entertainments, Parrot and Olivier is replete with expressed feeling, if too wittily contrived for actual passion. The story is told in the alternating voices of its two main characters, and it’s hard to say where the emotional focus finally lies. Master and servant bump along through fits of contempt and pity and occasional affection, without ever really fusing or fully breaking apart … Sentence for sentence, Carey’s writing remains matchlessly robust. Sailors cling ‘to the rigging like soft fruit in a storm,’ while inside a dark parlor old ladies sit ‘wetting their hairy chins with stout.’ But as the book’s bravura paragraphs grow into chapters, the author seems unable to decide whether it’s Democracy in America or Martin Chuzzlewit or, once more, Great Expectations he’d like to inflate and transform.
Carey adapts his style to each [Parrot and Olivier]. Olivier relates his younger life with dream-like obliviousness; he is snug in his own cosseting, and his fears swim far beneath the surface. Parrot’s past is all harshness; and Carey writes it jagged and disjointed, sometimes to the point of incoherence. This can be irritating, yet it conveys a violence and pain so acute that it suggests traumatic amnesia, as well as a child’s patchy understanding of what is going on … There are a great many more permutations, twists, and characters in the novel; so many, indeed, as to display the occasional weakness of Carey’s strengths: a virtuosity overload and a piling-on of incident.
Tocqueville, recast here in garish tones as Olivier-Jean-Baptiste de Clarel de Garmont, strolls out of his famous Democracy in America and into the pages of this kaleidoscopic story along with the whole grasping, bragging, bargaining cast of our ravenous nation. It's another feat of acrobatic ventriloquism, joining Carey's masterpieces … Parrot & Olivier starts poorly, particularly for a novel by Peter Carey, who usually sells his work hard in the opening chapters. We don't even reach America for well over 100 pages, and while the section on Parrot's childhood in England as a printer's devil contains the book's most inflammable scenes, Olivier's early, whiny section in France is tedious...There are engaging, funny scenes throughout this picaresque tale, but the travelogue grows rickety and stalls too often.
Though technically Olivier's servant, Parrot is almost twice his age and infinitely more wise about the world; his first impressions of ‘Lord Migraine’ are hardly flattering. Olivier, in turn, regards his uppity servant with appalled fascination, complaining to his mother in shipboard letters that Parrot himself takes on dictation. Their relationship develops into what Hollywood would call a ‘bromance,’ yet this agile and almost too facile novel aspires to be more than just the tale of an odd couple … Thematically, this is an aptly restless novel, touching on forgery, exile and loyalty before settling on the question of whether art can flourish in a democracy. Olivier, like Tocqueville, fears not. Parrot, who becomes the publisher of a folio of prints of American birds, disagrees … For all its madcap energy and playful accomplishments, the novel lacks the dark shadows that make the best comedies truly memorable.
Call it Parrot and Olivier’s Refined Journey. Except that Parrot isn’t really all that refined, as Olivier points out numerous times. Parrot, for his part, calls his employer ‘Lord Migraine.’ Needless to say, hijinks will ensue and these two crazy kids will end up the best of friends … John ‘Parrot’ Larrit is one of the book’s chief pleasures. The novel rouses from the aristocratic ennui of its first chapter as soon as Parrot begins recalling his childhood … The novel is crammed so full, it bristles like a hedgehog with all of Carey’s spiky ideas. Not all are carried to completion (the marquis’s motivations remain opaque, for example), but there’s enough to snag your imagination on, and to spare.
Parrot and Olivier detest each other from the start...Olivier finds Parrot's behavior appalling and sees him as a dangerous man who does not know his place. Parrot views Olivier as a pampered dandy. In short, the men represent for each other the worst of their respective classes … Carey...deftly uses this setting to shine a mirror of sorts on our current state, asking whether we have squandered both the country's enormous natural wealth and the nascent promise of its democracy. Near the end, Olivier says of America, ‘It is truly a lovely flower, a tiny tender fruit, but it will not ripen well.’
Parrot & Olivier unfolds in alternating first-person narratives, first from Olivier and then Parrot. Much of the narrative focuses on the men’s lives before they met, the experiences that formed the personalities that are struggling to find a suitable ground. Parrot often refers to Olivier as Lord Migraine; Olivier cannot seem to get his brain around why Parrot thinks he can act more like an equal than like a servant … The observations and experiences of the two men are as rewarding as they are thought- provoking. Olivier worries that the taste of the masses — without the guiding hand of a wise, educated upper class — will result in a form of government doomed to be run by idiots. Parrot is more optimistic, seeing that democracy’s flaws, however serious they might be, as far preferable to a society in which the restrictions of class define a man from birth.
I could say that it's about Alexis de Tocqueville...but only if ‘about’ means ‘more or less inspired by’. Olivier de Garmont's personality and career resemble Alexis de Tocqueville's in some respects, not at all in others … So, exactly as its title promises, the book is about Parrot and Olivier in America; but it's not about America. Its picture of the coarse, young United States of Andrew Jackson – based largely on De Tocqueville, of course, and I think also on later observers such as Frances Trollope and Charles Dickens – is entertaining, if predictable … The narrative proceeds in leaps and bounds, sometimes with a hop backwards, omitting connections, giving an impression above all, perhaps, of confusion – confusion of event and motive, incomprehension, a vast drama without structure.
The two take an instant dislike to each other — Parrot unaffectionately refers to Olivier as ‘Lord Migraine,’ and Olivier calls his new acquaintance ‘dreadful’ and a ‘retching varlet.’ But they soon bond, sort of, over the difficulties and adjustments that come with their new lives in America … Carey wisely uses the first quarter of the book to detail the respective backgrounds of the duo; by the time they meet each other, the reader knows them both well. And although a culture-clash story between a fussy aristocrat and a tough, working-class journeyman lends itself to some obvious humor, Carey finds comedy in unexpected places.
Instead of a novel of ideas, Parrot and Olivier in America is a big, trippy, often strangely beautiful novel of observations, with proper focus on the interplay between the two self-absorbed personalities doing the observing … It’s a fish-out-of-water and a buddy story, with un poco Quixote, a dash of Jeeves and Wooster, and a soupçon, naturally, of Tocqueville, some of whose biographical dates and details here are faithful. (Parrot, though, is entirely Carey’s invention.) … It’s in this fluidity that Carey’s novel reaches for something a bit deeper than mere entertainment. While Olivier and Parrot are both prisoners of their stations and their pasts, and agree about virtually nothing, they do manage to loosen into sympathy for each other.
