- Paperback: 304 pages
- Publisher: Phoenix; New edition edition (May 3 2001)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0753811022
- ISBN-13: 978-0753811023
- Product Dimensions: 12.9 x 2.2 x 19.8 cm
- Shipping Weight: 299 g
- Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (30 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #584,529 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Amazon
Michael Collins' third novel The Keepers of Truth, shortlisted for the 2000 Booker Prize, is set in the American mid-west in the 1980s, as industrial decline eats away at the heart of a small town and July heat delivers a punishing drought. Once thriving with metal manufacturers, the town, "hemmed in by crops that it doesn't pay to grow any more", now boasts trainee managers. Eating is the new pastime. Bill works as a reporter for the Daily Truth, a local newspaper built in a disused foundry. Suffering from an inflated sense of his talent as a philosopher, Bill makes a verbose and often funny narrator, an inept news journalist and, as the novel progresses, a sloppy Private Eye: "I apply philosophy like one applies dressing to a wound."
When Ronny Lawton's father goes missing, Bill has to adjust to the shock of producing copy people will actually read. After a small piece of finger is found, the town rushes to vilify Ronny and trial by media ensues. Before e-mail, at the cusp of the widespread use of answer machines, news travels more slowly and the newspaper men fight a losing battle for ascendancy over television. "I lived in the slipstream of TV's immediacy," says Bill. He ironically designates the paper's editor and photographer the "keepers of truth" and wonders at their apparent ability to ride the edge between banality and scavenging. It later emerges that the women of the town keep truth of a different order.
Being from Ireland with its capacity for nostalgia, Collins handles the town's decay and loss with great pathos and fiercely energetic satire. As an outsider, he is well placed to inhabit a narrator set apart by cynicism, boredom and an intellectual view as moribund as the town's labour history. But in Bill's search for deeper meaning, he stumbles into an understanding of the Lawton murder that the media en masse fail to grasp. Collins has produced a compelling and often profound detective story that takes an athletic swipe at the confused mores of contemporary America--a society consumed. --Cherry Smyth --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
From Publishers Weekly
This curiously landscaped crime drama, Collins's U.S. debut and a Booker Prize nominee, showcases the author's cool, playful competence. Captivatingly set in a small, nameless rust belt town left far behind in the economic dust, the story loosely hangs on the disappearance of Old Man Lawton. Locals believe he was killed by his no-good son, Ronny, but police don't have enough evidence to make an arrest. Though the official investigation soon comes to a dead end, the search becomes the obsession of the story's narrator, a man referred to only as Bill, who works as a reporter for the town's newspaper, The Truth. Bill pursues the case along with two of his colleagues, Sam and Ed, bumping along in a bizarre, dreamlike hunt that yields few clues, but succeeds at illuminating life in a small town mired in steep decline. Big industrial employers are long gone, replaced by fast food chains and strip malls. Alcoholism runs high. Everybody knows everyone else and, more chillingly, knows each other's secrets and shortcomings. It is no surprise that the search for Old Man Lawton becomes a bloodthirsty affair that brings out the town's true nature. Collins, an American citizen published primarily in his native Ireland (Emerald Underground; The Man Who Dreamt of Lobsters), displays a craftsman's touch throughout this arresting, frequently creepy tale of an America not often viewed.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.
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Most helpful customer reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
gripping mystery,
By don mitchell (Chicago, IL) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Keepers of Truth (Paperback)
This sleeper that never quite caught the public eye has been shortlisted for all major literary awards, Booker and IMPAC. It's a tour de force, a retrospective look at our America, or indeed Western Civilization, in the latter part of the 20th Century. Filled with brilliant philosphical insights, and a true murder mystery, Collins has created one of the most interesting hybrid fictions I have ever read. He focuses on the monumental dismantling and reconstruction of our world from a manufacturing base, to a service sector economy. The sense of displacement, anger, but ultimate sense of hope in the book is a realistic portrait of the social and psychological pangs we all went through as America changed in the late seventies.This book was our unanamious choice as book of the year in our book club.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Unsettling Genius,
By A Customer
This review is from: The Keepers of Truth (Paperback)
NPR does a great service in bringing us voices that we may otherwise never hear. Michael Collins is one such voice. Hailed in Europe and lauded with prizes, I'd never heard of him. In his interview he gave such a personal account of his struggle and survival in America as a young immigrant, that I decided to read his book. He seemed to suggest that we as a nation had lost our ability to think politically, to react to world affairs. Needless to say, I bristled at this contention. I wanted to ask him why he stayed?I can't say I agree with everything in this book, but it is an uncanny vision of America, a re-vision of past events overlayed with some heavy, but insightful analysis of us as a country. His contention that over 20,000 people were murdered and this constituted an undeclared revolution within America in the early eighties now seemed more insightful than when I first heard the figure. Collins contended in the interview that Americans were apt to dismiss this figure as gang related, to mitigate the level of violence to a subgroup of our nation. However, in The Keepers of Truth he has created the emotional and political landscape of America, peopled it with all the hopes and fears we share. He shows the rise and fall of characters, not always their own fault, but victims of society, and we are asked to have humanity and understanding for those who fail, and indeed, in this book, failure seems inevitable, or at least decline. (It is hard to decide what I feel about this contention.) Collins raises serious societal issues in of all genres to adopt, a crime, or mystery novel, and he pulls it off with such verve of language, suspense and pace, that one had to give him his moments on the soapbox. As a denizen of the midwest I can vouch for at least the atmosphere and tension Collins creates. It is a startling achievement for a foreigner to understand, or maybe, not understand, but question us with such probing questions.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Wasting Your Life in a Small, Redneck Town? Here's the salve,
By somebody (the Midwest) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Keepers of Truth (Paperback)
I picked up Keepers of the Truth after going to amazon.com and adding some books to my reading list. All the reviewers were saying things to the effect that the guy's very underrated, and one even went as far as to say that KotT is better than Franzen's book.Now that I'm 85 pages into it, I wish that I had read it before his lecture tour. He does make some interesting analogies, particularly his juxtaposition of a bathroom stall and a confessional. Also, I now have this desire to ask him what he thinks of Bruce Springsteen's role in the working world: an emotional salve or a revolutionary much in the vein of Collins as a writer. I think that as age advances on him, he will at least gain contentment that this book will be added to required reading lists through the Midwest (or maybe just along the Coasts). The book seemed like it was just going to be some surrealistic ... when he started talking about workers in stained yellow shirts with buckets of beer. His characters have since demonstrated the worth of the book. I think my brother might enjoy the text as well, since Collins seems to have Hunter's flare for the gauche.
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