Amazon.ca
Combining the story of the last days of an elite and unusual Toronto private school with a very loose retelling of the story of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, and of Cassandra, Katherine Govier's
The Truth Teller is an ambitious attempt to bring an unashamedly idealistic approach to classicism to an accessible and entertaining novel.
The Truth Teller revolves around the Manor School, a tiny institution dedicated to providing a classical education for the wealthiest of Toronto's troubled and delinquent youth. The Manor is run by Dugald Laird and his wife, Francesca Morrow, an uncompromising pair who have dedicated their 50-year marriage to their school and their students, training them in everything from Greek to karate. Govier's heroine, Cassie, is the new girl at the school, a particularly awkward student who is blessed with a kind of clairvoyance. Cassie gradually learns to fit in with the "rat girls," a rebel set of tough, cruel star students, a kind of
Dead Poets Society for acid-dropping teenagers. As the rat girls embark on what they self-consciously dub "a life of crime," Dugald enters his own variety of senile clairvoyance, and the Manor's administration begins to crumble.
Govier's depictions of the teenage students' delicate mixtures of awkwardness, insecurity, cruelty, earnestness, and passion are the real highlights of The Truth Teller. But her dialogue often sounds cribbed from a government pamphlet on speaking to teenagers about drugs, and her handling of the complex plot tends to trip over its mythological ambitions. Fans of her earlier novels, especially the wildly successful Angel Walk, will likely find much to love here, but The Truth Teller is hardly an unqualified success. --Jack Illingworth
Review
"Grand and comic —
The Truth Teller possesses the intelligence and emotive power of a novel of ideas grounded in its characters' psychology and vivified by its language."
—
Maclean's
"
The Truth Teller is a pleasurable and stimulating read. Katherine Govier is at the top of her form — clever, subtle, observant....
The Truth Teller makes you reflect on the uneasy way that ideals and self-knowledge jostle in our personal and cultural psyches."
—
The Globe and Mail
"A well-written and inventive piece of fiction by a novelist at the height of her creative powers."
—
National Post
"A grand and comic, richly patterned novel. … [
The Truth Teller] possesses the intelligence and emotive power of a novel of ideas grounded in its characters’ psychology."
—Kerri Sakamoto
, Time magazine
"Katherine Govier is the kind of writer who, when you hear she has a new book coming out, makes you snap to attention. ... Govier will have secrets to reveal, things no one’s thought to tell you yet."
—
The Toronto Sun
"Intelligent, well-crafted and wryly entertaining… a comic and original collection worthy of the best of Ann Beattie, Alison Lurie and Bonnie Burnard."
—
The London Free Press on
The Immaculate Conception Photography Gallery
