Product Description

It is the mid-80s in post-industrial America. In a small town graced with the decaying hulks of defunct factories, young journalist and college dropout Bill churns out lengthy essays on the death of industry and of America itself for The Daily Truth, whose scoops rarely rise above the latest home-bake contest. The static summer is punctured when local bad boy Ronny Lawton reports his father missing. A dismembered finger is found and all suspect the son of murdering his hated father, but nothing can be proved. The sorry tale of the white trash Lawtons hypnotises the town and Ronny Lawton becomes a local icon. Bill becomes increasingly obsessed with the story - he gets involved with Ronny's estranged wife, finds a decomposing human head, and ends up as a suspect in the murder case himself. Things come to a head and Ronny Lawton holds his wife, child and Bill hostage in a confrontation with the FBI. Bill escapes with the woman and child and contemplates the American dream gone sour.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #474783 in Books
• Published on: 2001-05-03
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 304 pages

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

From the Publisher
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. Then old man Lawton goes missing and suspicion fixes on his son, Ronny, the local bad boy. The violent death breathes new life into the town with network attention and national scoops for The Truth. For Bill, a deeper, more disturbing involvement with the Lawsons ensues as the murder and obsessions it awakes in the town come to symbolise the mood of a nation on the edge.

Michael Collins has written two previous novels, The Life and Times of a Teaboy (New York Times Notable Book of the Year 1993) and Emerald Underground and two collections of short stories, The Meat Eaters and The Feminists Go Swimming. His work has been translated into several languages and has received widespread international acclaim.

Michael Collins was born in Limerick in 1964 and lives in Seattle.

About the Author
Michael Collins was born in 1964 in Limerick, Ireland. He is the author of six novels, and two collections of short stories. His work has garnered numerous awards, including a Pushcart Award for Best American Short Stories, The Kerry Ingredients Irish Novel of the Year, along with being shortlisted for The Booker Prize and IMPAC Prize. Collins is also an extreme athlete and has won The Last Marathon in the Antarctic and set a record time in winning both The Himalayan 100 Mile Stage Race and The Everest Challenge Marathon. He is currently training for The North Pole Marathon in 2006. www.michaelcollinsauthor.com

Customer Reviews

As intense and emotionally draining as your worst nightmare.
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

Dark and disturbing
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize a few years back, Collins' novel has been widely applauded - and with good reason. I found it to be a gripping, unputdownable read about a misfit journalist working on the biggest story of his new, fledgling career. Bill, the narrator, is well-educated and well-off, but he is not unlike the more lowly masses he finds himself writing about - the only difference is the money. Dark, disturbing and at times downright morbid, Collins' tale centres on a murder in small town America in the seventies. But it goes way beyond the crime genre, charting the social disintegration of an industrial town in decline. Some of his descriptions are particularly poignant given the recent events in America: "It's maybe the greatest secret we possess as a nation, our sense of alienation from everyone else around us, our ability to have no sympathy, no empathy for others' suffering, a decentralised philosophy of individual will, a culpability that always lands back on us." Not only is The Keepers of Truth an intelligent read, it's a gripping read as well.

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. 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