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New fiction 2

Illustration by Daniel Pudles

Parrot and Olivier in America. By Peter Carey. Knopf; 452 pages; $26.95. Faber and Faber; £18.99. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

UNIVERSALLY celebrated as a classic when it was first published in 1835, Alexis de Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America” nevertheless suffered from long years in the shadows. The centenary of the author’s birth in 1905 went uncelebrated. No new edition of the book appeared between 1913 and 1945. The best that Tocqueville got was the occasional reference in a learned footnote.

Today Tocqueville is revered as never before. The bicentennial of his birth was the occasion for academic bacchanalias on both sides of the Atlantic. No fewer than four new editions of “Democracy” have appeared in the past decade. Books on the great man pour from the printing presses, ranging in quality from ponderous academic tomes to Hugh Brogan’s delightful biography.

Now we have an unexpected addition to the Tocqueville renaissance: a fictional account of his visit to the United States by a much garlanded novelist. “Parrot and Olivier” has all the quirky qualities that we have come to expect from Peter Carey: a winding narrative, a mass of vivid historical detail, and some very lively writing.

The story of Tocqueville’s visit was an extraordinary one in its own right. He was only 25 when he crossed the Atlantic, dispatched by the French government to study America’s penal system. But as he travelled around the new country Tocqueville became obsessed with the idea that he was witnessing the future in the making, the rise of a new democratic world. A treatise on prisons became a meditation on the new world order.

This extraordinary tale is rendered even more extraordinary in Mr Carey’s retelling. The author tells his story through the eyes of two characters. Olivier is his version of Tocqueville—a French aristocrat haunted by the horrors of the revolution and the glories of the world it destroyed (“the fine powder on the men’s wigs, the lovely perfumes on the ladies breasts, the extraordinary palette of the ancient regime, such pinks and greens, gorgeous silks and satins whose colours rose and fell among the folds and melted into the candlelight”). Parrot is an itinerant English printer who—thanks to an over-complicated plot—ends up as Olivier’s servant-cum-minder. The narrative shifts constantly between the perspectives of the travelling duo.

The leading characters are beautifully drawn. Olivier is a fastidious prig and congenital hypochondriac. Parrot is an English radical—he reads Tom Paine and spits on the ancient regime—who is obsessed by art. Olivier is initially repulsed by America but falls in love with a saucy American woman, and hence with the country. Parrot finds a home and a business in America.

Mr Carey’s parallel storytelling provides him with more than just a way of exploring two idiosyncratic heroes. It allows him to offer shifting perspectives on the third character in this book—America itself. Olivier moves in what boorish Americans regard as civilised society. Parrot is at home in the artistic demimonde. The result is a gripping portrait of Jacksonian America in all its wild variety, from its model farms to its grungy boarding-houses, from its Fourth of July parades to its filthy streets full of copulating pigs.

“Parrot and Olivier” is a wonderful tribute to Tocqueville’s great book. But it is more than that: it is also a counterblast. One of Tocqueville’s greatest fears was that democracy would kill great art. Everything would be reduced to the dismal level of democratic man. Parrot dismisses this fear as a phantom. “There are no sans culottes, nor will there ever be again. There is no tyranny in America, nor ever could be,” he says to his master. “Your bleak certainty that there can be no art in a democracy is unsupported by truth.” Which points to a wonderful paradox: the very fact that we now revere Tocqueville to the point of writing novels about him is proof that one of his guiding ideas about the evils of democracy was bunkum, if magnificent bunkum.

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