anyone see a Mason & Dixon resonance here?

[Mark Kohut]

I know two guys doing stuff in a novel, any fiction, must go further
back than I have ever read. (Iliad? NOT Genesis, but yes Gilgamesh, right?)

Up thru many we can name BUT, to set de Tocqueville off with another character as they travel America sure seems to suggest Carey has read M & D, I'd say. 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> OFF THEY GO
> Jan 28th 2010  
> 
> 
> PARROT AND OLIVIER IN AMERICA. By Peter Carey. KNOPF; 452
> PAGES;
> $26.95. FABER AND FABER; GBP18.99. Buy from Amazon.com[1],
> Amazon.co.uk[2]
> 
> 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.
> 
> -----
> [1] http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0307592626/theeconomists-20
> [2]
> http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0571253296/economistshop-21
>  
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