Keepers of Truth, the - Softcover

Collins

3.47

823 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0743218035 ISBN 13: 9780743218030

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 2001

View all copies of this ISBN edition:

The last of a manufacturing dynasty in a dying industrial town, Bill lives alone in the family mansion and works for the "Truth," the moribund local paper. He yearns to write long philosophical pieces about the American dream gone sour, not the flaccid write-ups of bake-off contests demanded by the "Truth." Then, old man Lawton goes missing, and suspicion fixes on his son, Ronny. Paradoxically, the specter of violent death breathes new life into the town. For Bill, a deeper and more disturbing involvement with the Lawtons ensues. The Lawton murder and the obsessions it awakes in the town come to symbolize the mood of a nation on the edge. Compulsively readable, "The Keepers of Truth" startles both with its insights and with Collins's powerful, incisive writing.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

Review:

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

Review:

Jonathan Rabanauthor of "Bad Land" and "Passage to Juneau""The Keepers of Truth" is at once an expert and witty homage to the noir American thriller and a wonderfully observant and affecting portrait of America in its once -- and future -- decline. Michael Collins puts up an unflaggingly brilliant stylistic performance. I can think of no other writer who rises to such heights of lavish eloquence even as he remains so very cool and ironically self-aware.

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.