Parrot and Olivier in America

The latest in my perusal of this year's Booker nominees, this novel by the prolific author Peter Carey left me a little disappointed.  Based more than loosely on Tocqueville's adventures in America, the book is told, in alternating chapters, in the voices of a young-ish French nobleman packed off to safety in America following the July Revolution and his older, English servant - who has also been sent along to spy on him.  It's possible this book just suffered by comparison, since I had just finished the phenomenal Room when I started Parrot and Olivier in America, but for whatever reason, the beginning was sloooooow going, particularly the chapters recounting Olivier's youth and his time in Paris prior to departing on a trumped-up tour of American penal institutions. 

The chapters told from Parrot's point of view were much more engaging, right from the beginning.  I'm sure part of this is because the former's voice was really rather annoying - indirect, inane, and self-absorbed.  This was clearly deliberate on Carey's part, and did a good job of establishing Olivier as a character, but I didn't like him, and I didn't find him funny or interesting enough to outweigh disliking his character.  Parrot has a more straightforward and broadly comic voice that I dealt with better, and the Dickensian adventures that shape his cynical adult personality are fun to watch unfold.

Olivier becomes funnier and more likeable towards the end (not coincidentally when his world starts cracking up a little), and downright useful in the closing passages, as Carey uses him to make the points we've been heading towards the whole way through.  The book requires quite a lot of willing suspension of disbelief, but it works (reminded me of Murder on the Orient Express - where can all these people come together but America?!), and I really enjoyed Carey's descriptive writing.

So, overall definitely positive, I guess (although it really took me 3/4 of the book to get there), but no Room, if we're ranking the nominees.