Peter Carey on Parrot and Olivier

Parrot and Olivier in America (available now in hardback) is the dazzling, complex and highly enjoyable eleventh novel from Peter Carey, twice-winner of the Booker Prize. Drawing on Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, the novel has wowed critics on both sides of the Atlantic, and beyond*.

The Australian author (soon to appear on a postage stamp) visits us this week from his home in New York so we couldn’t not ask him a few questions about the new book …

Peter Carey

What was your starting point for Parrot and Olivier in America?

Peter Carey: I might say, ‘Reading Tocqueville’s Democracy in America‘, but in fact it began before that, during those twenty years I listened to how Americans quote Tocqueville. If one were to rely on these snippets one would think that Tocqueville fell head over heels in love with this new Democracy.

Tocqueville was in his twenties and was only in America for a very short time. He was a child of traumatised survivors of the French Revolution. He had good reason to fear the mob and the rule of the majority. You might think he had no chance of understanding anything. But in reading Democracy in America this reader was astonished to see that did indeed ‘get’ America, although in a much more qualified way than common quotation suggests.

It is eerie, really, to see him fearing the dumbing-down of society and the devastating conjunction of capitalism and culture. He is looking at the USA in the 1830s, but he clearly sees the art collecting hedgefund managers, the phantoms of Palin and the Bushes. Outrageously, he thought it was impossible to create culture without a leisured and educated class, and he is obviously wrong and less obviously right. He creates an unexpected argument in the modern readers mind.

Indeed, I conceived the novel as a kind of argument. In creating Parrot, the son of an itinerant printer, I was inventing someone much closer to my own cultural history. Parrot is that exotic impossible thing, the working class artist.

I would hope that the book is never simplistic, that the argument is always in flux, and one’s notion of who has won and who has lost jumps back and forth and won’t stay still, even when the final page is turned. I would also hope that it was very funny along the way.

How closely did you go back to reading De Tocqueville work and specifically Democracy in America? And in taking on this figure as inspiration did you feel any difficulty in moving away from the historical, factual records?

Parrot and Olivier

I read a great deal around my subject. In the end this does not matter too much, but people who are interested in this sort of thing can find it on my website. As for Democracy in America I read it closely in my own magpie way. People who know Tocqueville far better than I do will find some of his lines woven into Olivier’s narration. Anytime you stumble across anything dismissive or snobbish about America, that bit came from Tocqueville. These are the lines that have been forgotten in Washington and elsewhere. That is not to say there is not a love affair with America and a particular American. Indeed there is, and it is cerebral and physical and always passionate.

As for the historical record, I wanted to be fastidious in one way and reckless in another. I wanted to signal to those who know the territory that my departures from known history were informed choices. For instance, Tocqueville travelled with Beaumont and wrote a report on prisons with him. My Beaumont figure is called Blacqueville and I had him killed off in Le Havre before the journey can begin. I think that this is a clear sign that we are dealing with fiction. I was much more interested in expressing and testing ideas through the conflict and odd friendship with his very independently minded completely fictional servant.

Did you already have the master and servant dynamic in mind to tell the story from the start? And did the two voices develop side by side as they run through the narrative?

Yes, from the very beginning. The voices were born as the book was born. For some reason they did not have to be hunted for, or adjusted. They were just there. When I had the voices I knew I could write the book.

As an adopted New Yorker, how much do the characters’ views on America relate to your own? And have your views on America changed significantly over the 20-odd years you’ve lived there?

Well I’m an Australian. I’ll always be an Australian. So no matter how familiar America (or at least New York) becomes to me, there is a huge part of it that appears to be alien and mad. Both these things increase side by side, a huge fondness and a kind of terror.

I have spent twenty years explaining to my American friends that the US is in no way like Australia, so I was rather astonished to realise, in studying Tocqueville’s visit and its consequences, just how much it paralleled a certain aspect of Australian historical experience, I mean the insecure and boastful nature of the New World when showing itself to the Old World. It’s sometimes hard to remember the extremely radical nature of American Democracy, this nation without kings, and it was startlingly familiar for this Australian to see these proud republicans seeking the approval of an aristocrat. I never felt so at home in all my life.

What parallels do you think can be drawn with more recent American administrations?

Tocqueville saw them coming.

Do you think that this is a novel that you could only write now, is it one that you have been waiting to write?

Oscar and Lucinda

Well, I’ve been thinking about Tocqueville for a long time now, but I held back. Why? Perhaps a sense that it was beyond me. In hindsight, it is clear that fearfulness has always been an extremely positive sign for me. It was true of Oscar and Lucinda and True History of the Kelly Gang – the terrifying big idea which must be tackled because it will not lie down or go away.

Finally, do you think that different countries will react to the book’s themes in different ways?

I’ve seen individual Americans despise the snobbish Olivier, and English readers feel very fond of him.  The English engage with the master servant relationship in a more powerful way than I had expected.  My early French readers seem to have been interested and amused, and have not yet questioned my right to mess with their history. And in Australia, where Tocqueville is not a figure of historical consequence, where one cannot expect anyone to give a damn about anything but the success or failure of what exists inside the covers, the reviews have been almost uniformly good. That is a category all of its own – too many readers for me to simplify their responses, and the very pleasant sound of turning pages.

*Here’s just some of what the critics have said:

‘I finished it with unabated enjoyment … a dazzling, entertaining novel.’ Ursula K. LeGuin, Guardian

‘What [Carey] does with words: the power and delicacy, the complex orchestration of colour and theme, seems impossible – more like music than language.’ Jane Shilling, Evening Standard

‘The chapters alternate between two voices, and the contrast creates one of those comic masterpieces that seems effortless while making you realize that Carey writes some of the best sentences in English.’ Tom Sleigh on www.newyorker.com

‘Carey is a canny yarnspinner, feeding backstory into the action with the skill of a fisherman. He possesses the singular voodoo that manages to fuse ornately descriptive prose with barrelling narratives that are stitched with human intrigue.’ Peter Murphy, Irish Times

‘Parrot and Olivier in America is a tour de force, a wonderfully dizzying succession of adventures and vivid, at times caricatured, characters with great panache … A rich and dazzling novel that shows [this] writer at his best.’ Sydney Morning Herald

‘Parrot and Olivier transports us to the rough-and-tumble America of 1830, and it’s possibly the most charming and engaging novel this demon of a storyteller has yet written. His prose has never been more buoyant, more vigorous, more musical. Open this book and listen to Peter Carey sing.’ Paul Auster

www.petercareybooks.com

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