Forged, Forger, Forget
Nicholas Spice: Peter Carey, 5 August 2010
Parrot and Olivier in America
by Peter Carey.
Faber, 451 pp., £18.99, February 2010,978 0 571 25329 6 Show More
by Peter Carey.
Faber, 451 pp., £18.99, February 2010,
“... Parrot and Olivier in America is the singular and surprising offspring of an unlikely coupling between two different novels: one, a fantasia on Tocqueville’s travels in America in 1831, the other a picaresque romance about an Englishman called John Larrit (known as Parrot for his talent as a mimic) who is suddenly and brutally torn from an idyllic childhood as the son of an itinerant printer in late 18th-century Devon and transported to Australia, where he grows up to become a topographical artist and engraver ... ”