Parrot and Olivier in America
Published Wednesday, July 28, 2010 by Kevin Breathnach | E-mail this post
“‘From where will they get their culture?” he cried. “the newspapers? God help you all.’”
The Booker Prize is an award oft-disparaged. A media and publishing event more than anything, even the ceremony’s acceptance speeches have been known to criticise it. On receiving the award in 2005 for The Sea, John Banville remarked that it was nice to see the award go to a work of art for once. In his 1972 acceptance speech, John Berger noted that, “the whole emphasis on winners and losers is false and out of place in the context of literature.” Martin Amis, whose father Kingsley won the prize in 1985, has written that the Booker Prize, which “demystifies and declasses the writer,” is only given to books that create consensus.
Nevertheless, given the influence it has on book sales, the prize deserves our divided attention at least. It's worth noting, therefore, that Peter Carey, author of the newly published Parrot and Olivier in America, is one of only two novelists to ave won the award twice.
Based partly on the American experiences of Alexis De Toqueville, Parrot and Olivier is an odd-couple novel jointly narrated by its eponymous heroes. John Larrit is a middle-aged English servant with artist ambitions, nicknamed Parrot for his skill as a mimic. Olivier de Garmont is a myopic young nobleman, sent by his parents to safety in America ostensibly to study its prison systems.
Before going any further, I should say that Parrot and Olivier stinks. Pages and pages pass by, and still Carey's prose stinks. “The smell was strong, even on the poop, a great stinking cloud of cheese.” “Beekman Street stank like a shit heap, worse than the faubourg Saint-Antoine.” “The air was thick with the smell of coffin wood.” Indeed, for a novel whose primary concern is often art and forgery, it is at least as stimulating to the olfactory as it is to the aural or ocular senses. “Today it is my sweetest memory of Henriette-Lucie, the jasmine escaping from its paper shell.” Perhaps there’s a greater truth in smell. Parrot can mimic any voice, and forge notes and works of art, but can smell be mimicked? When it recurs, as does the jasmine of Olivier’s mother and Parrot’s lover Mathilde, the connection is somehow stronger. “I smelled her,” Parrot sighs. “Her jasmine.” The richness of life is smelled, and it is no coincidence when Olivier discovers that, “each cell is aired by a ventilator, and contains a fosse d’aisance whose construction makes it perfectly odourless.”
Parrot’s is an involuntarily nomadic existence, and his character is a valuable study of displacement. Born in England, he is orphaned when, in the first great literary set-piece of the decade, Parrot loses his father when a pyrotechnic disaster befalls the illegal printworks where he and his father are employed. The link between the novel’s heroes, the part-noble, part-criminal Monsieur De Tilbot, becomes part-parent, part-master of Parrot. By way of Australia, he ends up in France, only to be uprooted once more, this time to America as both transcriber and spy of Olivier. It is no surprise that the chapters narrated by Parrot, invested with the wit and street-wisdom of someone who has lived, are the more enjoyable.
“In the morning,” he jokes, “we had what is called a tramp’s breakfast, that is a piss and look around.” What is surprising, and a true testament to Carey’s skill as a stylist, is that despite the abundant stale similes of an uneducated mimic – “as funny as a murder site”, “as bitter as a lemon tree” – Parrot’s prose still smells as sweet as his lover’s jasmine. “The eyes of children of old fathers,” Parrot reflects, “have a sad grey quality which I have observed on more than one continent. Perhaps it is not that they inherit an old man’s wisdom, but that they are born knowing they must soon say farewell to him who gave them life.”
Meanwhile, Olivier’s short-sightedness becomes far-sightedness. “I mean this, democracy. It is truly a lovely flower, a tiny tender fruit, but it will not ripen well.” The problem here is that a supposedly far-sighted Olivier De Garmont looks more like a hind-sighted Peter Carey. No matter the undoubted prescience of Alexis De Toqueville, much of what the fictional Olivier concludes – “that the only books on their shelves will be instruction manuals” – reads more like clairvoyance. Fact is often too incredible for fiction.
This expansive, back-and-forth novel is about many things: the budding and flowering of American democracy, the death of the ancien régime and the dynamics of class relations; but as the novel thunders on, it is the question of democratic discernment – immediately regarding art, with politics, finance, culture, criminality all implied – that Peter Carey seems most concerned by. “In a democracy,” says Olivier, “there is not that class with the leisure to acquire discernment and taste in all the arts.” But who needs a leisured-class, Peter, when we have the Booker Prize panel?
The Booker Prize is an award oft-disparaged. A media and publishing event more than anything, even the ceremony’s acceptance speeches have been known to criticise it. On receiving the award in 2005 for The Sea, John Banville remarked that it was nice to see the award go to a work of art for once. In his 1972 acceptance speech, John Berger noted that, “the whole emphasis on winners and losers is false and out of place in the context of literature.” Martin Amis, whose father Kingsley won the prize in 1985, has written that the Booker Prize, which “demystifies and declasses the writer,” is only given to books that create consensus.
Nevertheless, given the influence it has on book sales, the prize deserves our divided attention at least. It's worth noting, therefore, that Peter Carey, author of the newly published Parrot and Olivier in America, is one of only two novelists to ave won the award twice.
Based partly on the American experiences of Alexis De Toqueville, Parrot and Olivier is an odd-couple novel jointly narrated by its eponymous heroes. John Larrit is a middle-aged English servant with artist ambitions, nicknamed Parrot for his skill as a mimic. Olivier de Garmont is a myopic young nobleman, sent by his parents to safety in America ostensibly to study its prison systems.
Before going any further, I should say that Parrot and Olivier stinks. Pages and pages pass by, and still Carey's prose stinks. “The smell was strong, even on the poop, a great stinking cloud of cheese.” “Beekman Street stank like a shit heap, worse than the faubourg Saint-Antoine.” “The air was thick with the smell of coffin wood.” Indeed, for a novel whose primary concern is often art and forgery, it is at least as stimulating to the olfactory as it is to the aural or ocular senses. “Today it is my sweetest memory of Henriette-Lucie, the jasmine escaping from its paper shell.” Perhaps there’s a greater truth in smell. Parrot can mimic any voice, and forge notes and works of art, but can smell be mimicked? When it recurs, as does the jasmine of Olivier’s mother and Parrot’s lover Mathilde, the connection is somehow stronger. “I smelled her,” Parrot sighs. “Her jasmine.” The richness of life is smelled, and it is no coincidence when Olivier discovers that, “each cell is aired by a ventilator, and contains a fosse d’aisance whose construction makes it perfectly odourless.”
Parrot’s is an involuntarily nomadic existence, and his character is a valuable study of displacement. Born in England, he is orphaned when, in the first great literary set-piece of the decade, Parrot loses his father when a pyrotechnic disaster befalls the illegal printworks where he and his father are employed. The link between the novel’s heroes, the part-noble, part-criminal Monsieur De Tilbot, becomes part-parent, part-master of Parrot. By way of Australia, he ends up in France, only to be uprooted once more, this time to America as both transcriber and spy of Olivier. It is no surprise that the chapters narrated by Parrot, invested with the wit and street-wisdom of someone who has lived, are the more enjoyable.
“In the morning,” he jokes, “we had what is called a tramp’s breakfast, that is a piss and look around.” What is surprising, and a true testament to Carey’s skill as a stylist, is that despite the abundant stale similes of an uneducated mimic – “as funny as a murder site”, “as bitter as a lemon tree” – Parrot’s prose still smells as sweet as his lover’s jasmine. “The eyes of children of old fathers,” Parrot reflects, “have a sad grey quality which I have observed on more than one continent. Perhaps it is not that they inherit an old man’s wisdom, but that they are born knowing they must soon say farewell to him who gave them life.”
Meanwhile, Olivier’s short-sightedness becomes far-sightedness. “I mean this, democracy. It is truly a lovely flower, a tiny tender fruit, but it will not ripen well.” The problem here is that a supposedly far-sighted Olivier De Garmont looks more like a hind-sighted Peter Carey. No matter the undoubted prescience of Alexis De Toqueville, much of what the fictional Olivier concludes – “that the only books on their shelves will be instruction manuals” – reads more like clairvoyance. Fact is often too incredible for fiction.
This expansive, back-and-forth novel is about many things: the budding and flowering of American democracy, the death of the ancien régime and the dynamics of class relations; but as the novel thunders on, it is the question of democratic discernment – immediately regarding art, with politics, finance, culture, criminality all implied – that Peter Carey seems most concerned by. “In a democracy,” says Olivier, “there is not that class with the leisure to acquire discernment and taste in all the arts.” But who needs a leisured-class, Peter, when we have the Booker Prize panel?
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