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highly recommended |
Intrigue and Blurred Political Mystery 
The unlikely murder of a non-descript farmer in the Upper P.I. charts one of the most amazing socio-political conundrums of our time - how we ended up undermining ourselves and our politics during the Cold War, how we buried our secrets and ended up spying on ourselves... e.g. Nixon and Watergate.
This bone chilling allegory highlights an era of my life, those crazy days of paranoia and fear when we were afraid to look into our own soul. An aberrant, and xenophobic politics ruled for much of my life, always under the guise that we were facing ultimate destruction, which we may have been.
The Resurrectionists takes the elements of the time, shock treatment, tapes, TV reruns, and creates a frenetic and disorienting vision of a time that was, frankly, hard to understand. Somehow all these elements, gut fear, anxiety, paranoia, are communed in the novel. It's a novel that stands apart from the contemporary navel-gazing that passes for literature at the moment.
Mystery within a mystery within a mystery 
Frank Cassidy isn't sure what happened with his life, but he sure as hell wants to find out. Living on the bare necessities when he learns that his Uncle Ward, the man who acted as his father when his real parents died in a mysterious fire when he young, has been murdered. Or has he? Travelling to the frigid climes of Michigan's Upper Peninsula to "get what's his" out of Uncle Ward's estate, Frank soon finds that his journey is taking him more places than he anticipated.When he attempts to discover how his parents really died, as well as his Uncle, Frank takes a perilous journey inward as well, on a path of self-discovery and redemption. Michael Collins' excellent story is told with style and panache, reaching deep into the hearts of his characters and drawing them out realistically. Though the narrative tends to meander often, the story is engaging enough to hold ones interest.
Collins Goes Digging in The Dirt
Truth seems to be at the center of Collins' writing. Truth was in his award-winning novel, The Keepers of Truth, a brilliant twisted tale of murder and mystery in small-town America. When I provisionally read the blurb, I thought, is this previously charted terrain. It's a reason I kept from buying the book until I found it second hand. (Apologies to the author.)
I could not have been further wrong, though The Resurrectionists concerns a murder, and its attenuated mystery, Collins has gone deeper, and created an intriguing and daring novel that charts the sub-conscious mind of a trouble man who witnessed, and was accused of setting the fire which killed his parents when he was five. The psychological trauma, and the narrator's subsequent care under psychiatrists who hypnotized him and his later episodes with shock treatment, create a fragmented and shifting reality, and as others have noted, Collins has deftly utilized the unreliable narrator technique like no other writer I've read. Collins' particular genius is wedding a story, idea and plot element to a literary technique, and here, Collins actually makes his reader experience the profound sense of loss and disorientation his narrator feels throughout the novel, as he moves close to solving the mystery at the heart of the novel - who is the mysterious murder suspect who now lies in a coma at the county hospital after having hung himself after killing the narrator's uncle at the beginning of the novel.
That Collins balances a mystery with a socio-political and psychological deep novel is noteworthy. He has an ability to make apparently simple stuff complicated, for isn't all life complicated at its core. What is misconceiving is how we don't see the ambiguities in life. Collins makes them shimmer. He goes digging in the dirt of the subconscious.
This was in my top two novels of 2002, second only by a hair's breath to, Middlesex.
The Cold War
Taking the apparent simplicity of a small town murder as its hook, Collins subverts the murder mystery genre in this highly unusual, psychological novel. Signposted with cultural references, we are transported back first to the late seventies, then further back to the fifties, wherein lies the secret to unraveling the plot. The sheer level of detail, both physical and psychological, the mood of the novel is done brilliantly. The Resurrectionists is a form of time travel.
Peppered with a host of surreal characters, from Frank's wife Honey to their two children, Robert Lee and Ernie, we share the foibles and fears of a family. We witness the interplay of nurture vs. nature as the two kids are exposed to the manic wandering and searching of its two main characters. We see life weigh down on the children with such moments of bone chilling realism that it reminded me of seeing people at stores who attack their children, or abuse them. The instinct is to protect them. However, the relationship with the children is far more complex, abuse, love and ultimately acceptance comes through. There are no easy answers in this novel. It's complex, often disorienting, given we are dealing with a narrator who is unreliable, a victim of shock treatment. What makes this novel stand apart are the moments of poignancy, bone chilling realism, and at times horror of real life. It holds no punches. It depicts a side of life and people we are at times wont to turn our backs on.... Highly recommended.
The Big Chill
Forget the pandering niceties of middle-American values, the sanitized prime-time banalities that plague TV, and journey with a modern Steinbeck, who takes us on a solitary journey across America in search of home and a new life. At least Steinbeck's Jode family had the collective solace of fellow Oakies while wandering West. There was a recognizable enemy. Here in late 20th century America, we face the disenfranchisement of a collective spirit. Frank the protagonist of The Resurrectionists, works as a short-order cook, isolated from his past, marooned in New Jersey in a dead-end life and dead-end marriage. He had two kids, one not of his own "begetting," a step-son, and one that is his own flesh and blood.
I would go further... There is a whirlwind of suspense, murder, pain and redemption in this novel. It was featured in our reading group, and it was a novel that was reviled and loved in equal measure, but the genuine vision and insights of the narrator and author cannot be denied. Not to everybody's tastes, but then again, taste should not be the discriminating factor in acknowledging the genius of a work.
The novel generated, let me be frank, a sense of antagonism between defenders and detractors, something that we?ve not experienced in the six years we?ve been meeting. I think the debate surrounded political ideology and social beliefs. The Resurrectionists pits us against a man who, despite his humanity by the end of the novel, is capable of murder and has an innate sense of survival. He is, as self-described, a scavenger at the edge of our consciousness? Scary stuff in the most real sense ?
reviews: 1, 2, 3, 4, page 5, 6, 7, 8
resurrectionists
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