Customer Reviews

Keepers of Truth

5 star:		(32)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Written by an Irishman, The Keepers of Truth ostensibly refers to the motley trio, Sam, Ed, and Bill, who run the towns newspaper, The Truth. This book was a Booker Prize nomination and deserved to be. The depiction of an unidentified rust belt town in the throes of its own cultural death is handled brilliantly.

Our story is narrated by Bill, the newspapers writer  a modern day philosopher who is relegated by necessity to write the dribble of small town papers (obits, lions club meetings, local ball team reports). Himself a somewhat tragic figure, he is suddenly given new life when an old man people hated goes missing and his son is suspected of the crime. The police cant find enough to pin the murder on Ronny (the son) but the pursuit of clues engages the whole town. Bill finds himself in the confidences of Ronnys ex-fiancée, and finds he begins to learn more about what might have really happened.

What makes this novel such a powerful one is not the story itself, but the setting in which the story occurs. The town, once a center of industry is now half-dead, full of white trash, strip malls, and too many alcoholics. In the degeneration of this culture, violence, anger, and desperation have reared their ugly heads and the negative small town culture reigns (everyone knows or pretends to know everyone elses private business).

I found this not just an interesting murder mystery but also a sociological perspective on the cultural death of America. A country that is becoming more desperate, more shallow, less feeling, and less kind with every gun license, every hate crime, and every desperate act by a people who have lost themselves

I got this book from my wife who said she wanted to broaden my horizons. Our styles differ greatly. I read mostly hardboiled murder mysteries for the sheer entertainment value. When I want to learn something, I read non-fiction. I have a problem with preachy books.
But I have to say despite my reservations, this book blew me away. It was like the best blend of both non-fiction and fiction I've ever read. I lived through the late seventies in the midwest, and my father lost his job due to the economic downturn. I like to put that period of my family life out of my mind, but this book brought that time and feeling back to me. Maybe it was personal impact that made this book have its effect on me, but I found myself re-reading parts of it to my wife. I even called my father just to talk, just to ask him about what he felt back then. I didn't tell him why I was calling, though I've sent him the book.
I know this isn't probably a review, but it's what I felt, it's how this book affected me.

This is a sad, dark novel with sad, dark characters. Beautifully written with very real people and scenes of harrowing behavior by otherwise ordinary people. The elevation of suspected murderer Ronny Lawton to local folk hero at Denny's, where he becomes employee of the month as a result of his sudden popularity among the high school crowd is frightening in the depth of its truth. Bill, the young narrator, is a lost, desperately lonely man whose life has become a twisted, painful thing because of an absence of familial love; a man whose grandfather was a tyrannical self-made immigrant millionaire and whose father was a suicide. Bill is brilliant, almost too aware of society deconstructing before his eyes, and a truly touching character.

The major problem I had with this book was the time frame. The references are all over the map and at most points the story would appear to be set in the 70s; yet there are references forward in time that confuse the issue so that one is left wondering if there are anachronisms on the page or if one has misunderstood the time frame. Given the significance of Vietnam to the story, I had trouble determining just when the action was taking place.

That said, this is well worth reading--particularly Bill's fascination with Lucas, the child of Ronny Lawton's "estranged"--as she is referred to throughout the book--with whom Bill becomes involved, almost against his will. At the end, there is the hope that Bill will rescue little Lucas from a fate too similar to his own. And that is something remarkably uplifting in a book that is so very grim.
Recommended.

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. The voice within is the voice of the American people, and Collins (an immigrant) has such an ear for our language its uncanny that we wholly feel that we are reading an author who is one of us. The banter, the pace, the descriptions are all quintessentially American, but lurking throughout the book is this outside voice, a voice that cleaves apart the political and social matrix of who and what we are. We see ourselves again for the first time through this voice. Our America is presented in all its familiarity, but somehow there is a spin on this vision.
It's hard really to describe this book more than to speak of its mood, of its profound ability to get at your psyche, but it does and for the few friends I've lent the book, they also feel its resonance, that it has a life after you finish it.

I think this book is destined to be read for years. It rings with such authenticity and raises so many questions on the predicament of humanity in the late and early 21st century, that it serves the launching pad for understanding where we are at this time in history. It does not provide the answers, but sometimes the questions need to be asked first...

This Irish book of the year, and Booker Shortlist is nothing short of brilliant and deserves the praise it has already earned. It is in some respects the most unlikely of novels to win such major distinctions, and was the first ever murder mystery to earn a Booker nomination. But of course this is no mere pot boiler.
The Keepers of Truth is a murder mystery and political novel rolled into one, a novel that achieves a unique balance of entertainment and political insight without ever becoming pedantic.
The novel captures the late seventies, that pivotal flux in American history, when we went from an industrial nation to a post-industrial nation. Centered on a small town's implosion following the closure of numerous factories, the novel follows the thread of a dismemberment murder that mirrors the dismantling of the nation. In balancing the political and the murder mystery aspect, Collins creates memorable characters that give us a glimpse into the chaos of change, and how people struggle to survive and adapt.
I cannot recommend this book highly enough. There is nothing like it. Collins has invented a sub genre of his own.

There is something old-fashioned about "The Keepers of Truth". Aside of the fact that this is a story set in the historical past (pre-Reaganite America), and aside of the fact that the narrator (Bill) is caught up in the idea of the better days that existed for previous generations, this is an old-fashioned book.

The first real sign of this is to do with what "The Keepers of Truth" is : it's a whodunnit. That's right, you heard me good. A whodunnit. Like Agatha Christie (or the ghost of Agatha Christie at any rate). A whodunnit played out against a backdrop of closed factories, abandoned warehouses and rusted-up cranes, populated by people with vacant stares, hollowed out and left puzzled by the fact that all of the skills they learned to get them through life no longer serve their purpose.

Old Man Lawton (a character as old as Steinbeck's dustbowl, as familiar as Huckleberry Finn) has upped and disappeared. The town points the finger at Ronny, Old Man Lawton's no-good son. Ronny and the old man were always fighting, they say. Seems perfectly natural one time it went too far. Ronny done gone chopped up his Pa. Only Pa is nowhere to be found. The police discover a severed finger but nobody ever died of a lost finger. Like everything else in the choked town, the investigation stalls before it starts.

Bill, the provincial newspaperman writing up the history of small defeats for the local rag (called "The Truth") in the days and weeks before head honcho Sam sells up and moves to Florida, is a subdued hero. While investigating the disappearance of Ronny's old man (in the dusty hiatus that acts as a transition between did-anybody-do-anything and whodunnit), Bill becomes implicated in the tiny lives and futile gestures of the bit-part players involved (Ronny Lawton, his estranged trailer-trash wife and kid, the local hairdresser, the jaded policeman). Bill is a closed circuit. Nothing surprises him. Everything confirms his ennui.

The disappearance of Old Man Lawton echoes throughout the book. Bill's grandfather, the refrigerator magnate, had himself frozen two generations back, round about the time all the major businesses folded. The town used to produce things. Now it is a cobweb of places to eat. So people eat, hoping the food will plug up the holes left by what has gone. Bill's father killed himself. Ronny's brother dies in Vietnam. There is an unnamed baby buried in the Lawton cellar.

It's a syndrome, all of this : the apotheosis of Joachism, a transition without end that comes to define our lives. Bill's attachment to the past - and America's relationship with the types of industry it all but abandoned - is a kind of ever-decreasing circle, a trap too subtle to escape.

By eulogising the past, you derogate the present and abnegate the future. Truth itself (newspaper truth) becomes old-fashioned. Bill writes but nobody reads. Sales figures dwindle. People don't want bald statements in print. Reading takes time. TV is easy. TV is bite-sized. "The Truth" has become out-moded. TV offers myth and consolation. A newspaper is static and static is fuzzy.

The keepers of truth turn out to be the people who look after that which has ceased to mean anything. The keepers of truth are weak historians fending off the battery of the present with rolled-up newspapers. Satchel Page, an old ballplayer, said "Never look back, somebody might be gaining on you". Bill finds this "sad, and yet defiant." Sad, perhaps, because you must know what you have been to understand what you are. Defiant because it embodies a pioneering spirit of looking to the future that was frozen for Bill two generations earlier.

This book definitely held my attention, but it's not close to being a 'great book'. Most of the characters--especially women--boil down to tired stereotypes. And the philosophical and political passages are heavy-handed and belabored. It reads like a pseudo-intellectual miniseries. Get 'The Corrections' if you want to read something with philosophical and political content that's done really well!

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.

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. 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. Ronny lives in a shack and works at Denny's, where he takes pride in his designation as Employee of the Month. 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. As the spirit of frontier justice grows and the need for a scapegoat becomes more pressing, Bill and Ronny both become caught up in the out-of-control spiral which soon engulfs them both.

The pace of the novel is unrelenting. 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 that I found impossible to put down. It's easy to see why it was a Booker nominee. Mary Whipple

Bill, a law school dropout, is living in his home town because his cryogenically preserved grandfather has made it a condition of his will. Bill's father killed himself shortly before the he came home and he had a breakdown because of it and is slowly rebuilding his life, despite the break with his girl friend Diane.

He gets a job working for the dying town's dying newspaper, "The Daily Truth," which is run by two old men, Sam, the owner, and Ed, the paper's photographer. Sam and Ed believe Bill, who is somewhat of a wordsmith and given to fanciful prose, will someday turn out to be a good journalist.

Salvation for the newspaper comes when Ronny Lawton's father disappears. Lawton is a tattooed burger flipper at Denny's, who despite having reported his father's absence, becomes a suspect for the presumed murder. The case re-energizes the "Truth's" disillusioned staff, but the initial promise of a scoop for Bill gradually translates into an obsession with Lawton and his estranged wife. As the crime casts its shadow on the lives of his newspaper colleagues and on the nightmarish reverberations of his own father's suicide, it also begins to take on symbolic dimensions as many people in the town try to take advantage of the murder.

Michael Collins won the Irish Book of the Year Award for this book and it's easy to see why. It deserves the high esteem it has won in Ireland and I highly recommend it.

Karen Holtz, New Jersey Book Girl