In New York, when Olivier tries not to crinkle his nose at “all this malodorous egalité”, he echoes a dirge that hums through so many of our air-conditioned drawing rooms. They had begun to treat their masters as the unjust usurpers of their rights”.
This seething domestic imbalance occupies much of their thoughts - and some of our elite may well find that Olivier’s lament on “the state of servants since the Revolution” strikes a nerve: “They consented to serve but were ashamed to obey. Reluctantly, they sail to America, ungraciously perform their roles of servant and master and their eventual friendship is as ungainly as the newfangled political order of the “you-knighted-states”. Parrot is tragically separated from his father and his country, flung into the service of the decaying French aristocracy armed with little except a talent for mimicry and art and Olivier de Garmont, scion of French nobility, is haunted by the horrors of a Revolution that spared his parents’ necks but grips his psyche as tightly as medicinal leeches do his flesh.
Facts first: Parrot and Olivier recounts the adventures and slow-cooked friendship of Jack Larrit alias Parrot, and Olivier de Garmont, loosely based on the political philosopher Alexis de Toqueville. But the most surprising achievement of Parrot and Olivier in America is that it captures so accurately, and unselfconsciously, the contortions of the democratic conundrum as it exists today right here, in India. And Peter Carey’s deliciously funny, sly and - best of all - beautifully composed portrait of that New World as seen through the eyes of an alarmed but often sympathetic European nobleman provides myriad perspectives from which to assess how truly revolutionary - and grotesque - the first blotchy blueprints of modern democracy must have been. Afictionalised, historical glimpse into the birth of American democracy cannot fail to intrigue, coming as it does at the end of a decade in which that many-headed beast has spurred violent debate from drawing-room to dhaba across the world.
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