- Paperback: 304 pages
- Publisher: Phoenix; New Ed edition (3 May 2001)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0753811022
- ISBN-13: 978-0753811023
- Product Dimensions: 12.9 x 2.2 x 19.8 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 532,259 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
The Keepers of Truth
and over one million other books are available for Amazon Kindle .
Learn more
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Did you know you can trade in your old books for an Amazon.co.uk Gift Card to spend on the things you want? Plus, get an extra £5 Gift Certificate when you trade in books worth £10 or more before June 30, 2012. Visit the Books Trade-In Store for more details. |
Product details |
More About the Author
Product Description
Amazon.co.uk 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 --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Review
Jonathan Raban
author 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.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Inside This Book
(Learn More)
First Sentence
I call this one 'Ode to a Trainee Manager'. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
I call this one 'Ode to a Trainee Manager'. Read the first page
Explore More
Concordance
Browse Sample PagesConcordance
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
Suggested Tags from Similar Products(What's this?)Be the first one to add a relevant tag (keyword that's strongly related to this product)
|
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
Wow.....
This is a detective story alright...where the quest for evidence is for the evidence of America's dying soul. And Collins captures it, in the way that only a brilliantly gifted outsider can.
Having grown up in the dying industrial town/heartland mileu, I found this book to be deadly accurate as well as profoundly insightful.
The story itself, if read on the surface, is wildly, luridly entertaining the way any great thriller or mystery would be. Where it separates from even that success is the artistry with which Collins indicts our culture and the banalities and inanity which we take for granted.
Yet, the way this satire is revealed, in the classic framework of a thriller, a true American story, makes his insights, profound as they are, deceptively subtle and as the reader, you become complicit.
Bill's voice as a narrator is a dangerously seductive one. It's easy to get caught up in his withering yet hilarious indictments of the people who make up his town. Yet as the story moves on, you can see his voice in a different light and the insights Collins really has to share with his readers are ones you've been tricked into putting together on your own.
Then you put the book down as I did, exhilarated for the thrilling story yet ennervated from all the deeper contemplation of the underbelly of the American dream, tkae a deep breath and say, "brilliant."
I'd give it more than five starts if I could.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
On one level 'The Keepers of Truth' is a well-crafted murder mystery set in a small town in America's midwest, in which Old Man Lawton has disappeared and everybody in the town is quick to point the blame at his trouble-making son, Ronny. Everybody that is except Bill, the local reporter for the town rag, 'The Truth', who seeks to discover just that. Bill is the unlikely hero and inspired narrator of this tale: he is a local, down on his luck after failing to get into law school and struggling to get over his father's suicide, who is able to rise above the gossip and jealousies of those around him. On a broader level, 'The Keepers of Truth' provides a perceptive portrayal of the social malaise in a late-70s industrial town, with factories closing and the local economy in terminal crisis. This portrayal includes memorable descriptions of late-night activity at Denny's: read this novel as a combo-meal with Eric Schlosser's non-fictional 'Fast Food Nation' and you'll never eat junk food again! Fairly obviously, the novel's setting makes for fairly bleak reading, punctuated occasionally by some humourous touches such as material concerning Darlene, the local beautician, and a number of guffaw-inducing headlines that Bill wishes he could write!! The only other Michael Collins novel that I have read to date is 'The Resurrectionists': both novels are particularly well-written with compelling storylines, whilst also confronting social issues head-on and leaving the reader with plenty to think about.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Written with passion and fury, this novel is as unrelenting as a nightmare. On the surface, it is a murder mystery and investigation, but at its heart, it's a bleak case study of a community which has died since its manufacturing industries shut down and the supports for its local economy collapsed. Everything which gave dignity, meaning, and focus to the hardscrabble lives of the inhabitants is gone. In the middle of a hot, dry summer in this community in the Dust Bowl, Ronny Lawton's no 'count father disappears, and Ronny, no Boy Scout himself, is generally assumed to be his killer.
Collins sets up the framework for his themes from the outset. The main character, Bill, is the grandson of a man who made his fortune selling ice, and later manufacturing refrigerators. Bill is working haphazardly for the local newspaper and living in the basement of the family mansion because it's the coolest area of the house during these brutally hot days. He is recovering from a breakdown and hospitalization following his father's suicide. Ronny Lawton, to whom he is drawn, at first, as a newsman, is in many ways his opposite, though they share the bond of having lost their mothers and having had cruel fathers.
Except for Bill, who believes Ronny may be innocent, everyone--the local police, the FBI, the newpaper owner, and the claque of women at the local hairdressing salon--needs to find Ronny guilty to regain control of their lives. The pace of the novel is unrelenting, and the small-town dialogue is realistic, filled with petty resentments and jealousies. The prose is vivid, full of heavy, occasionally "purple," descriptions. The pathetic setting of a community which has lost every reason for being, and the hopelessness of the lives of its inhabitants, made obsolescent by the decline of manufacturing, make this a bleak reading experience. Collins's humor, however, saves it from bathos, and the psychological credibility of the characters and the excitement of the plot make this a book difficult to put down. Mary Whipple
Would you like to see more reviews about this item?
Were these reviews helpful?
Let us know
Most Recent Customer Reviews
Booker Shortlistee Disappoints
Written by an Irishman living in America, this Booker shortlistee is a strange beast set in a Midwestern town during the long hot summer of 1979. Read more
Published on 20 Mar 2008 by A. Ross
crime story wrecked by overwriting
Stripped to the bone, this is an above-average tale of small town America. The author, however, attempts to bring 'literary heft' to the proceedings with weighty images that are... Read more
Published on 17 Dec 2006 by donald darkness
As intense and emotionally draining as your worst nightmare.
Written with passion and fury, this novel is as unrelenting as a nightmare--you can't break out of it once you are in it, and you are compelled to see it through to the end. Read more
Published on 4 Jan 2006 by Mary Whipple
Well-crafted murder mystery in small-town Midwest
On one level 'The Keepers of Truth' is a well-crafted murder mystery set in a small town in America's midwest, in which Old Man Lawton has disappeared and everybody in the town is... Read more
Published on 27 May 2005 by "gavinrob2001"
An outsider looking in...
A voice both within and outside America narrates this surreal elegy to the death of American Industrialism and the passing of a certain blue collar security and life. Read more
Published on 28 Mar 2002
The Best Of the Pack
This stunning book keeps cropping up for all the major awards, and with good reason. Probably one of the most important books of the last few years, a blend of suspense, murder,... Read more
Published on 23 Mar 2002
A commentary on industrial decline - and a cracking yarn
The Keepers of Truth is quite simply one of the finest books I have read in some time. When my girlfriend gave it to me for holiday reading I thought it was going to be a bit heavy... Read more
Published on 8 Sep 2001 by Jon Meakin
Fascinating and engaging exploration of social consciousness
Mr. Collins' latest book is a fascinating and engaging exploration of the social consciousness of small-town, middle-class, Midwestern United States. Read more
Published on 5 Sep 2001
Another Booker disappointment
I do wonder about the books that make the Booker Prize shortlist, I really do. I had high hopes for this one: a whodunnit set in the decaying trailer-trash urban landscape of the... Read more
Published on 5 Sep 2001
The best book I've read in ages!!!
I can see why this book was nominated for the Booker Prize. Part thriller, and part sociological study of America, this book blazes a new genre, providing a new lease on life for... Read more
Published on 29 Aug 2001 by fworsley2000@yahoo.com
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
|
|
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
