But what of Parrot? He is an entirely improbable character with an improbable history. We first meet him as a boy working with his father for a printer engaged in the production of counterfeit currency. When this is discovered by the authorities and the print shop goes up in flames, he escapes with the sinister Marquis de Talbot and eventually reaches Australia. Years later, now married and an aspiring engraver, he is found again by the Marquis and returns to Paris. There he falls in love with the painter Mathilde Christian and it is with her and her mother that he departs to America acting as both Olivier's servant and the Marquis's spy. It is in Parrot's numerous exploits and scrapes that the humour in Carey's tale is to be found and it is Parrot who serves to expose the emotional and intellectual limitations of his master. But it is also Parrot, and not Olivier, who first comes to appreciate the possibilities of America. For it is there that Parrot again meets the disfigured Algernon Watkins, horribly burned in the print shop fire, and there that the two of them (like John James Audubon) embark upon producing a series of prints of American birds.

It is this endeavour to celebrate the natural beauty of America that allows Carey to address the issue of the possibility of art in a democratic society. Ultimately, a disillusioned Olivier concludes that in a classless and egalitarian society it is only money that is valued and that all matters of taste will be subject to an ignorant tyranny of the majority. Democracy, he concludes, is a tender fruit but it will not ripen well. In real life, of course, this was far from being Tocqueville's opinion. While he saw the dangers that could arise from the restless individualism and acquisitiveness of the Americans, he also saw that it was through her institutions and mores that America tempered any possible tyranny of the majority and that these same mechanisms generated the astonishing vitality of American society. It is therefore left to Parrot to celebrate America. His master's fears, he asserts, are phantoms. There is no tyranny in America nor could there ever be. The bleak certainty that there can be no art in a democracy is not true. And the proof of this lies in Parrot's own "jumbled life". The servant and employee has become a friend and progenitor. Parrot, the footman and rogue, has made Olivier what he now is.

Peter Carey has lived in America for the past 20 years and he is not the first to try to express the ambivalence of this experience in literary form. Many might judge Parrot and Olivier in America to be one of his least successful novels. The two love stories never entirely convince nor, for that matter, does the friendship between the two men. But the subject matter of Carey's story never fails to fascinate. Tocqueville said that he wrote his own account of the irresistible democratic revolution in a kind of religious terror. With Carey the mood is rather one of fascination and distaste but, for good or ill, he too has been marked by the prejudices, passions and personality of the New World.