A look at great reads from the editor of the Times Literary Supplement. This week: Peter Carey’s American picaresque take on Tocqueville, a celebration of 200th anniversary of Tennyson’s birth, and a new collection from pop chronicler Gordon Burns.
Peter Carey’s American Picaresque
Peter Carey's Parrot and Olivier in America is a “puzzling novel” and the multi-prize-winning Australian author will doubtless not be troubled by that conclusion from Tom Shippey in the TLS this week. Olivier is based loosely on Alexis de Tocqueville and Parrot has affinities with Audubon. But neither match is wholly what it seems. The novel combines the European picaresque with its successor the American “road book” and the whole book has “the feel of a roman à clef where the keys don’t quite fit.”
We are offered one writer of political philosophical tomes and another of bird books but nothing is so simple for long. Birds are major players and mostly victims, especially pigeons. The reviewer's final queries about “a number of loose ends” give as much flavor of the whole as the critique that precedes it. "Why did de Tilbot murder the clergyman on board ship? Bringing Watkins the engraver back makes a kind of sense, but why Mrs. Piggott as well? Who is the “lawyer and comic novelist of some local renown” who gets Parrot out of jail in New York? He sounds as if he should be identifiable, and perhaps he is, but not by this reviewer.”
Parrot and Olivier in America is such a literary work that there is always more to find: "the more you bring to it, the more rewarding its insinuations, its unpredictable switches between satire, serious reflection, and plain fun. Like Oscar and Lucinda (not to mention Carey’s other works), it demands and repays repeated reading." Expect more prizes.
Tennyson’s Financial Speculations
If the proprietor of a lunatic asylum invites you to invest your entire worldly wealth in a speculative business set up to revolutionize the decorative woodcarving industry, what do you say? Probably not “Yes,” unless you happen to be Alfred Tennyson, who comprehensively ruined himself by embracing this proposal from his acquaintance Matthew Allen in 1840. That is the starting point of Nicholas Shrimpton's TLS review of new essays on Tennyson, edited for the 200th anniversary of the poet's birth last year by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst and Seamus Perry. Not surprisingly, the revival of woodcarving had failed by the autumn of 1842, and Tennyson, in his early 30s, was on track to be “a glamorous outsider: impoverished, marginal and dissident.” But by 1845, he had a state pension and in November 1850, he was a surprise pick for Poet Laureate. The rest is literary history.
Encounters with Pop
Gordon Burn, who died last year, was a British novelist concerned with cultural icons and other media-dissecting forms. He won a Whitbread Award for Alma Cogan, a novel based on the life of a mostly forgotten pop singer and his posthumous Sex & Violence, Death & Silence collects Burn’s “encounters” with the Pop Artists who rose to stardom in the 1960s, and the Young British Artists of the '90s. “Encounters” is the publisher's cool coinage for occasional pieces, complains Nancy Campbell in the TLS. “It seems to imply that all these writings were composed on cigarette paper as the author abandoned parties at dawn. Yet Burn is always erudite, and his prose has a beauty that many of the YBAs deliberately eschew in their work.”
Burn believed the media presentation of public figures to be a kind of fiction. So he had no qualms about using fiction himself. An essay on David Hockney begins as a story set in the artist’s living room with the curator Henry Geldzahler “sleeping, slumped into the coffee-cream leather settee, his mouth open and his belly rising and falling inside a tasseled and faded extra-large size, grey and green old-time cowboy shirt.” Hockney is introduced like a flustered Mrs. Dalloway, “pushing a way through the press of people in the market, two awkward brown boxes strung together under his arm, weaving and dodging” a path to his flat, at which point he meets Burn and the fiction becomes an interview.
Peter Stothard is the author of Thirty Days, a Downing Street diary of his time with British Prime Minister Tony Blair during the Iraq war and On the Spartacus Road: A Spectacular Journey Through Ancient Italy which will be published in January.
