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Books : Fiction : Contemporary Fiction: 1970 Onwards : Authors A-Z : C : Collins, Michael
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The Resurrectionists finds Irish-born Michael Collins returning to the wastelands of Hicksville, USA: the same terrain as his Booker-shortlisted novel The Keepers of Truth. Set predominently in an anonymous Michigan town--"the world capital of nowhere"--at the fag end of the 1970s, this is a slightly muddled, if endearing, family saga cum murder mystery. The book is narrated by Frank Cassidy, a man whose parents burned to death in suspicious circumstances when he was just a child. He has discovered that his Uncle Ward, who raised him, has recently been murdered. The prime suspect is in a coma but the police are certain he is Chester Green, the Cassidys' old neighbour (Frank always believed that Green was somehow involved in the fatal fire). There is however, one slight problem; Chester died of influenza 27 years ago. Abandoning his tedious job in a New Jersey fast food restaurant, Frank gathers up his clan--wife Honey (whose ex-boyfriend is on death row), stepson Robert Lee and dinosaur-obsessed son Ernie--steals a car and heads for Michigan in search of answers and possibly a share of Ward's farm.Back in his Michigan hometown Frank settles down, gets a job and begins to unravel the enigmas surrounding his uncle's death with, genuinely, surprising results. Collins' might fill his tale with the kind of oddballs who tend to populate David Lynch films: one-legged encyclopaedia salesmen; rhinestone-shirted truckers, frazzled Vietnam war vets and enigmatic polyester-clad old-timers, but it is his touching, humorous descriptions of mundane family life that resonate. His television-addicted Cassidys owe a good deal to The Simpsons; their appetite for junk food, Sesame Street, The Brady Bunch and reruns of Gilligan's Island are carefully stitched into the narrative. At times Collins can mistake lists of their viewing habits for convincing period detail but this gripping, charming suspense novel offers a thoughtful snapshot of America shaking off Watergate and preparing for Reagan. --Travis Elborough
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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
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The Resurrectionists finds Irish-born Michael Collins returning to the wastelands of Hicksville, USA: the same terrain as his Booker-shortlisted novel The Keepers of Truth. Set predominently in an anonymous Michigan town--"the world capital of nowhere"--at the fag end of the 1970s, this is a slightly muddled, if endearing, family saga cum murder mystery. The book is narrated by Frank Cassidy, a man whose parents burned to death in suspicious circumstances when he was just a child. He has discovered that his Uncle Ward, who raised him, has recently been murdered. The prime suspect is in a coma but the police are certain he is Chester Green, the Cassidys' old neighbour (Frank always believed that Green was somehow involved in the fatal fire). There is however, one slight problem; Chester died of influenza 27 years ago. Abandoning his tedious job in a New Jersey fast food restaurant, Frank gathers up his clan--wife Honey (whose ex-boyfriend is on death row), stepson Robert Lee and dinosaur-obsessed son Ernie--steals a car and heads for Michigan in search of answers and possibly a share of Ward's farm.Back in his Michigan hometown Frank settles down, gets a job and begins to unravel the enigmas surrounding his uncle's death with, genuinely, surprising results. Collins' might fill his tale with the kind of oddballs who tend to populate David Lynch films: one-legged encyclopaedia salesmen; rhinestone-shirted truckers, frazzled Vietnam war vets and enigmatic polyester-clad old-timers, but it is his touching, humorous descriptions of mundane family life that resonate. His television-addicted Cassidys owe a good deal to The Simpsons; their appetite for junk food, Sesame Street, The Brady Bunch and reruns of Gilligan's Island are carefully stitched into the narrative. At times Collins can mistake lists of their viewing habits for convincing period detail but this gripping, charming suspense novel offers a thoughtful snapshot of America shaking off Watergate and preparing for Reagan. --Travis Elborough
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