In a previous life Peter Carey was probably a forger. What else could explain the interest in falsification that pops up repeatedly in his novels? The titles of his most recent three – His Illegal Self, Theft: A Love Story and My Life as a Fake – announce a liking for duplicity and sidling past the law.

It may be hereditary: Carey is Australian, and although he has lived in New York for 20 years his books all deal in some way with the former penal colony that is his homeland. His latest, Parrot and Olivier in America, fictionalises the trip French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville (here called Olivier de Garmont) made to the fledgling republic in the early nineteenth century to examine and write about its prisons. The result, Democracy in America, dealt with much more than the penal system, and Carey insists it was the writer’s prescience, rather than the convict theme, that got him interested.

“I’ve always been thrilled by reading that lets you see that the present is burningly alive in the past,” he says. “So, when you read De Tocqueville worrying about what we would call the dumbing-down of culture, it’s pretty amazing. He worries that a moron would come to rule the United States. Well, we are living in the age of Sarah Palin… And then there’s President Andrew Jackson, battling with the banks. I’d finished writing the book by the time the crash came but all these things work.”

Yet Olivier’s low-born travelling companion, Parrot, is also a forger. What’s with the fixation?
“I don’t really want to know,” says Carey firmly. “One wants to feel one has done something original and exciting.” Which, of course, becomes fraught when you take history as your starting point – when I applaud a description of the rocking-chair as “that awful monument to democratic restlessness,” Carey is quick to point out that it is his, not De Tocqueville’s.

Clearly, the forgery obsessive doesn’t want to be mistaken for a forger himself: repetition worries him. Well, copying is the flipside of creativity: “According to Olivier’s [elitist] argument, Parrot should never be an artist, and I can’t exist as a writer [because Carey isn’t an aristocrat either] and Parrot can’t exist and this book can’t exist, if indeed Parrot wrote the book,” he says gleefully. “You could not produce art in this sort of democracy.”

The notion of democracy worried De Tocqueville; and 200 years later, it’s still worrying Carey: “You need to have an educated and well-informed populace. You do not feed them shit and misinformation day after day in the hope that you are going to have a functioning democracy in the end… particularly as it applies to the arts.

“Should you be raising the people up or should you sell them the sugar they want to eat?”, he continues. “Lots of people may think that Olivier and De Tocqueville are completely wrong about art and capitalist culture but I think they are right. We are swimming in a sea of cultural crap.” That’s probably true, but there are lifeboats, as he should know: he makes some of them, and they’re originals, every one.

Parrot and Olivier in America is published by Faber.