Unauthorised beginnings

VAST human enterprises mirror one another. Somewhere in the background of every new society lies the myth of our earliest foundations; over the slaughters and conquests and constitutional laws of the American continent hover the shades of Aeneas and his men destined to found Rome.

VAST human enterprises mirror one another. Somewhere in the background of every new society lies the myth of our earliest foundations; over the slaughters and conquests and constitutional laws of the American continent hover the shades of Aeneas and his men destined to found Rome.

  Parrot and Olivier in America
By Peter Carey
Hamish Hamilton, 452pp, $49.95 (HB)

How these societies live now raises the questions of how they planned to live then, how they imagined life together in the beginning of their common ventures, what identity they chose for themselves, including or rejecting those of the places they came from and those of the places they reached, what gods they chose to replace the endemic gods. Aeneas reduced society's founding adventure to that of one man with a mission; the European colonisation of America depended on thousands of Aeneases who believed in their right to invade, enslave and settle, and then to proclaim their independence from the parent state that had sent them forth.

Peter Carey has always been interested in beginnings. He explored the origins of family constellations in The Tax Inspector (1991), of identity and individuality in Illywhacker (1985), of the shadow side of society in Jack Maggs (1997), of Australia's outlaw legend in True History of the Kelly Gang (2000), of aesthetic desire in the nonfiction work Wrong about Japan (2005), of literary fiction in My Life as a Fake (2003). In Parrot and Olivier he has chosen to observe the creation myth of the US, not through the conventional chronology of history books (Carey seems suspicious of authorised beginnings) but through the eyes of early, albeit fictional, witnesses.

In this role he has cast two ungainly and opposing characters, disparate like Don Quixote and Sancho or Kim and his Lama, who together can lend bifocal vision to the experiment.

One is the son of a French aristocrat on the run from the revolutionary Terreur, Olivier-Jean-Baptiste de Clarel de Garmont, sailing to the New World with the pretext of researching the American penitentiary system, a character probably based on count Alexis de Tocqueville, whose account of democracy in America is the earliest important discussion of the subject. The other witness, Parrot, is much older, the son of an itinerant English printer, a gifted draftsman who is fleeing common law after a lifetime of dealings with forgers and anti-monarchists. Parrot is a clever, studious reader who (thanks to his father's trade) has known the works of Adam Smith since early childhood and understands the tangles of the mercantile world. Both Olivier and Parrot are "present at the Creation".

The founding of a society is a gradual process. The original definition of a nation is hardly ever original: it is the changing compound of an endless series of interventions that alter, dilute or intensify the initial purpose.

The independence of the US and the complexities of the French Revolution acted imaginatively on each other, but so did the alarms of the surviving kingdoms of Europe, Britain mainly, forcing the new American society to grow in the tension between two extremes: cutting off heads (in France) to do away with authority and cutting off heads (in England) to preserve it.

Thus, in the New World, escaped aristocrats became revolutionaries and populist revolutionaries became conservative. The new social context forced change and change in turn gave American society its identity.

Though there is no doubt something that can be defined as Caryesque in Carey's voluminous fiction (the uncoiling sentences that pretend to embrace one point of view but in fact shatter into a dozen others, the delight in coincidence that allows fundamental character traits to come to light, the contempt for the conventional telling of historical events, the pairing of characters who echo, contradict and explain each other), in the case of this new novel this style, though still recognisable, is embedded in a more obvious, thicker coat of literary humour: a contemporary version of the picaresque, that genre that hovers between broad social satire and bildungsroman.

Around the two heroes a large cast of secondary characters creates the impression of a complex, kaleidoscopic world in which people are carried away by the flow of events but manage to rise to the surface with some particular trait or hobbyhorse, with an almost Dickensian propensity to survive. Almost, because Carey's people appear not in their own right. In Dickens, the main characters seem at times to be nothing but foils for the existence of the minor ones. In Carey, the two protagonists observe the people they encounter strictly as specimens whose qualities depend on what Olivier and Parrot can or wish to see. The bumbling Monsieur l'abbe de La Londe (reduced to Bebe by Olivier), Olivier's fervent and sanctimonious mother, adoring the soon-to-be-beheaded king, the Micawberish Piggotts who deal in forgeries and pirated editions, Parrot's beloved and buxom Mathilde, portrait painter and seductress: all these and many more come into existence through their dealings with the adventurous pair and seem to have no life beyond them.

The viscount Rene de Chateaubriand, one of the many French visitors to the US at about the same time our heroes make the journey, described the wildness and vastness of the woods close to Niagara Falls as an empty, golden-age realm, and therefore full of possibilities. For Olivier, however, America is not a pioneer world of utopian promise but a world of curtailment, oppression and innumerable difficulties, impinging on what he believes himself to be (a nobleman) and on what he believes himself destined for (a nobleman's life.) Coming on the Kaaterskill Falls (from the Dutch kaater, meaning lynx) with his future father-in-law, Olivier sees sheets of water springing like a cat into the abyss. Led over the rocks behind the falls, his father-in-law shouts into his ear: "Now you are American." And this baptism is for Olivier not the beginning of a new identity but the loss of the old one, in his eyes the true one. "There was no air in America," Olivier says, recalling the experience,

only this great suffocating mass which would wash me clear away. I pressed my mouth against the rock behind me, and so could almost breathe. But still there reigned, in this dark heart, a terrifying and foreign obscurity. I cannot describe the awfulness of the murk or the horror of the sharp steely ray of light that then appeared, giving no comfort but rather an idea of the vast chaos that surrounded me.

Parrot, on the other hand, with Candide-like optimism, discovers in America the promise of equality. On the last page, the brand-new American citizen dedicates the book we have finished reading to Olivier, his master and companion, and declares that Olivier's fears have been proven unfounded. "There is no tyranny in America, nor ever could be," he writes with passion:

The great ignoramus will not be elected. The illiterate will never rule. Your bleak certainty that there can be no art in a democracy is unsupported by truth.

In the beginning of America's democracy, Carey seems to be saying, there was fear, overridden by hope, and faith in something wonderful about to come into being. Then history happened.