The Junction Chronicles
The Junction Chronicles is a trilogy of Canadian speculative thrillers by David Rotenberg, whose protagonist, acting coach Decker Roberts, a synaesthete with a special talent for determining the truth in statements, lives in the neighbourhood of The Junction in Toronto, supplementing his income with his unique talent and becoming involved with American intelligence agents after his life begins to fall apart. The series was first published by Simon & Schuster between 2012 and 2014.
File:Corner of Dundas St. & High Park Ave., The Junction.JPG|thumb|340px|Corner of Dundas Street and High Park Avenue, The Junction, July 2013
Synopsis
''The Placebo Effect''
In a prologue set in 1988, Decker Roberts, aged 22, stands in Chartres Cathedral, where he meets a monk who asks whether he has decided to stay. Brother Malcolm offers to teach him everything he knows and in return, the cathedral and ministry will become his home, and he will avoid "the room with no windows – and the hanging man".The young Roberts knew then, as the older Roberts knows now, that the monk spoke the truth, as he always knows when anyone speaks the truth, a unique benefit of his particular form of synaesthesia, a neurological condition. For years, this talent has proven to be a lucrative sideline to his regular work as a theatre director and acting coach based in The Junction, Toronto. Roberts is hired by companies because he can tell them if their potential recruits are lying. He leads a successful double life, carefully compartmentalized with a myriad of alter egos. His inner life, however, is one of sorrow, having lost his wife to ALS and missing his estranged son, Seth. He is also disturbed by the excessive number of churches in the area. He believes they are there to prevent an evil from re-appearing. He senses its existence when he walks the streets and feels the Junction "hunch around him in the cold."
When homeless synaesthete Michael Shedloski arrives in the Junction, he has a vision of a boy dangling from a lamp post across from the public library on Annette Street, grasping a rope at his neck, trying in vain to get his last breath. The event is real, but took place a century earlier. Hearing of this, Roberts knows that the hanged boy is a "marker" – that there must be a portal in the Junction. Then he realizes that its name does not really refer to a railroad depot as most of its residents believe, but rather to a point of connection, a connection between this world and another, and the hanged boy marks the access.
Henry-Clay Yolles, the CEO of a pharmaceutical company, exploits Sedloski's unique talent for determining perfect ratios, allowing the company to know how many placebo pills can be included in a prescription as a cost saving measure without affecting the drug's efficaciousness. Yolles Pharmaceuticals is now interested in Roberts. A resentful Shedloski publicly protests his dismissal by Yolles and tries to warn Roberts, but is killed. Yolles now needs to eliminate Roberts because he might discover the truth about its new product.
Meanwhile, in Washington D.C., the National Security Agency is also interested in Roberts as a means of evaluating statements by terrorists. Yslan Hicks, who studies synasethetes, has been observing him. The NSA becomes more involved as it perceives its potential asset is threatened.
Narrowly escaping death when his house burns down, it does not occur to Roberts that it was no accident. Next, his finances are crippled, and his studio condemned. He realizes that he must have heard something in one of his sessions that he should not have, and goes on the run trying to work out why he has been targeted and by whom.
His escape route takes him from coast to coast, north to south, through small towns and big cities across North America, as both pursuer and pursued. As Roberts draws closer to his quarry, he grudgingly agrees to work with and for the NSA. Agent Yslan Hicks tells him his friend Crazy Eddie betrayed him, but he refuses to believe it.
''A Murder of Crows''
Fourteen months have passed since the incident with Yolles Pharmaceuticals. Roberts has spent some time applying his talent in Las Vegas, simultaneously seeking information about Seth, who is suffering from am aggressive form of cancer of the bladder. Crazy Eddie is still trying to win back his daughter, and to do so he intends to incriminate Ira Charendoff, the lawyer to whom he betrayed Roberts over a year earlier. In order to clear the playing field and keep the NSA off his best friend's back at the same time, Eddie sends Roberts to South Africa. A close eye is being kept on both men and others like them by the NSA with a view to using them for combating terrorism.In upper New York State, the elite science-focused Ancaster College prepares for spring graduation. Aggrieved professor Neil Frost and resentful janitor Walter Jones conspire to exact violent revenge against the faculty and students. Bombs explode at the graduation ceremony killing over 200 people, the worst terrorist attack on American soil since 9/11. Led by the NSA, America's security forces descend upon Ancaster, and track down Roberts in South Africa, using Seth's whereabouts to persuade him to return to the United States and determine the veracity of hundreds of video statements.
Over the course of the work, Roberts shows that his gift has limitations: while he can tell that someone is not telling the truth, he cannot say whether that person is lying, that is, if an untruth is deliberate. Worse, since almost everyone in the videos is not telling the truth about something, it is hard to determine who may have been involved.
Roberts learns that the NSA has been tracking other people like him, including a tiny childlike woman named Viola Tripping who can reveal the final thoughts of a deceased person just before death. Agent Yslan Hicks takes the two of them to the crime scene at Ancaster so that Tripping can read the victims' final thoughts and Roberts can tell if those statements were truthful.
Roberts privately pieces together what happened, but withholds this information from the NSA. In the course of their work, Tripping also provides Roberts with a vision of his estranged son Seth's whereabouts — in Namibia.
File:Junction Dundas and Keele Looking East.jpg|thumb|325px|Dundas Street and Keele Avenue, The Junction
''The Glass House, or, When the Moon's Too Thin for Stories''
In Namibia, Roberts struggles to find his way in isolation. Seth, whose cancer is advancing swiftly, is kidnapped by WJ, a musical prodigy who is unable to feel and who desperately wants to learn from Seth's special abilities.The kidnapping sets a mysterious chain of events in motion. Seth, it seems, is the key to everyone's plans: his inherited "gifts" are more powerful than his father's, and there are many who will do anything to control them.
Yslan Hicks desperately needs to find both father and son to deal with an urgent threat faced by the NSA. When the trails run cold, Hicks turns to Roberts' old friends for help, but they quickly find themselves confronting an ancient conspiracy, one that draws the synaesthetes, via "waking dreams" of a "glass house", back to The Junction, the place where a young boy was killed by hanging shortly after 1900.
Roberts, his friends, and the NSA are inexorably drawn towards a conclusion that will change both themselves and the world around them.
Setting
The Placebo Effect features such Junction landmarks as Squirly's and the Swan Diner.Rotenberg spoke of the Junction area as "a different world" than the Greater Toronto Area: "For years we had the stockyards just around the corner, hot dog Tuesday was unbelievable... all those churches—so many churches in such a small area." referring to Annette Street. Rotenberg wondered if something happened in the neighbourhood that led to the building of so many churches, and did some research, discovering that some police records disappeared when the area was ammalgamated with Toronto: "I thought, 'What awful thing happened here that some police records were lost?'" and grew suspicious that ammalgamation provided a convenient opportunity to destroy evidence of a crime by "wealthy people". These ideas are explored in some depth in The Placebo Effect.
While the initial setting for the series is The Junction, a lot of the action in the first novel actually takes place in New York City, and its landmarks figure prominently. Rotenberg lived there for about a dozen years, and he still knew the city better than he did Greater Toronto. Much of the action in the second novel also takes place in other parts of Canada and the United States, in the wake of a terrorist attack at a college in Upper New York State. As well, the plot of the second and third novels takes the protagonist to South Africa and Namibia.
Characters
Decker Roberts
Series protagonist Decker Roberts is a middle aged acting coach and a widower, with a "strained" relationship with his son Seth. He has a neurological condition called synaesthesia, which, in his case, has led to the innate ability to "see if people are telling the truth".Roberts is a synesthete; he "sees" language and can tell when people are not telling the truth, but only just. He sees designs and lines that define absolute truth and an absolute lie, but the nuances evade him. If the speaker tells a lie he truly believes to be truth, Decker sees "truth."
When he hears a statement he can close his eyes and the patterns he sees tell him if the statement is true. When the ability manifests, Roberts senses "a stream of cool, clear air above him... something heavy in his right hand and a coldness." He sees "a series of squiggly lines that appear in his line of vision when someone is talking".
Despite his unique insight, or perhaps somehow because of it, Roberts is repeatedly told he is a "terrible liar." Rotenberg said of the character that he is an "outsider" and a "loner", and, "as in all my previous novels wants desperately to be part of his society but also fights to keep intact those things that make him special and apart." He dislikes police officers and the National Security Agency he grudgingly works for, as he "distrusts authority of any sort" He has "used his head to keep ahead of the inherent violence all around him", not because he is "a weakling or a coward"; rather, he "sees and understands the diminishing returns of violence." Only his "closest friends" know about his ability, which he has used for years to supplement his income through a sideline working for companies as a "human lie detector" screening potential new employees. He keeps his identity a secret from these employers through "a myriad of alter egos."
The notion that there may be others of "his kind" only dawns on him slowly, and "that he needs to find them to understand who and what he is." Steven Patrick Clare observes: "By day he seems sociable, liked and respected by his peers and pupils. After hours, however, he seeks solace with select company, often through synesthesia social-media sites." On more than one occasion Roberts says to himself: "You are from them, but not of them", as though he thinks of himself as other than, or perhaps better than, "his kind", other synaesthetes. Roberts also comes to believe that each time he uses his gift "someone close to him gets hurt." His wife's last words to him were, "What have you done, Decker: What have you done?"
Roberts teaches acting at the Pro Actors Lab, the institute founded by Rotenberg and where he was still teaching at the time the novels were written. Roberts even directed a couple of plays on Broadway, the same as Rotenberg. It is not the first time Rotenberg makes use of "autobiographical details": in the Zhong Fong novels there is a Canadian director, Geoffrey Hyland, who teaches "precisely" what Rotenberg did and directs "exactly" what he directed, and who in turn was taught by Toronto-based Charles Roeg, who can always tell when people are telling the truth.