Peter Carey: Parrot and Olivier in America
Creating ‘a living breathing imaginary world’
MBP: Congratulations on being longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2010. You've won the Booker Prize twice, once for Oscar and Lucinda (1988) and again for True History of the Kelly Gang (2001). Are literary prizes as important to you now as they were earlier on in your career?
PC: First, this is a prize for a particular novel. Each novel is a long and lonely battle in what one hopes is the big game. In my secret heart I imagined this was the best work I had ever produced. The long list makes me believe, if only for a week or two, that I may not be completely deluded. Second, it makes me extremely happy, at my very advanced age, to share the list with so many vigorous, talented, original younger writers.
MBP: Parrot and Olivier in America is a re-telling of the story of Alexis de Tocqueville (Democracy in America). What was it about his life that inspired this novel?
PC: It was Democracy in America that set me on fire, seeing in its pages the very things that were scaring me to death in my American Life; the dumbing down of culture, the reign of a frightening uneducated and intellectually incurious president. I would have to use four letters to spell his name. So it was Tocquevilles ideas more than his life, although I thought it highly significant that he was a child of survivors of the terror. That was my entry point, not one that is made much of by the historians.
MBP: You must have heavily researched de Tocqueville's life for this book. As a novelist, how difficult is it to leave fact behind and make the story your own?
PC: Olivier's life cannot be Tocqueville's life. I produced so many narrative forces that made sure this was so. I dispensed with all his siblings. I changed his best friend and co-author (Beaumont) into Blacqueville and then I shot him. As if that was not enough, I made him share a cabin with a totally imaginary English servant who hated his guts. Even if I had not invented the Marquis de Talbot, there was no hope of Olivier being Tocqueville any more.
The bigger factual obstacles to a fluent narrative are the raging fires of history which have to be acknowledged but cannot be allowed to lay waste the living breathing imaginary world. It took me many drafts to get from 1814 to 1828 in three pages.
MBP: You explore the relationship between the French nobleman and his English servant. What are the traits that divide and bind these characters?
PC: That's a very good question, the question. After 400 pages I doubt I've properly answered it.
You were researching this novel in America during the presidential elections. Was Democracy in America often cited during the campaigning? How important is it to contemporary American politics?
PC: I don't recall Tocqueville being quoted during the campaign, although he is always being quoted, so I must be wrong. When I first learned that my American friends had all studied Democracy in America at school, I foolishly believed that this must have involved them reading the entire book. Of course I have met many people who have read every single word, but the majority seem to have read only those pages where Tocqueville speaks in support of the American idea. His doubts and fears have completely passed them by.
MBP: Many of your novels play out across two countries. Is this something to do with being an Australian living in New York?
MBP: I think it has a great deal to do with being born in a Commonwealth country in 1943, inheriting the notion that there was a real country somewhere else, not where I was born. That home was a green place we had never visited, where our own success and failure would ultimately be judged. Thinking of two countries is a colonial habit. To understand how Australian politicians live in two countries, look at our enthusiasm for British and (later) American military causes.
In any case, I have always inhabited two worlds simultaneously. One in my head and the other in the street outside. Jack Maggs. Cest moi.
