Reservoir 13

I almost dnf around page 50, but I’m glad that I pushed through and finished this. I won’t say I loved it, but it is very well crafted and something unexpected. While the “missing girl” element is important, the story is not really about that and it’s certainly not a mystery.

This is more like Akenfield plus the Up documentaries plus A Dance to the Music of Time, maybe? At first I didn’t really connect to the characters because there were so many of them and I couldn’t keep them straight. But over time, it swelled and built, and by the end I felt downright emotional about how beautifully the author built these simple lives into something so true-feeling. I know this village; I have lived there. But in the end I too would show more just be a few sentences in the long life of the place. show less

A thirteen year old girl goes missing one night on the moors. Although her parents aren’t locals, the villagers all join in the search. They find nothing. Time passes. Birds migrate. Foxes breed. Villagers go to and fro. The seasons change. A year runs its course. And still no sign of Rebecca, or Becky, or Bex. And so the next year starts on its way.

This is a truly fascinating novel. Jon McGregor follows the events of this English village and its surrounding moorland over the course of 13 years. But the viewpoint is distant, so far above the lives of the villagers that their actions are no more significant than those in the badger sett on the edge of the town near the allotments. Yet at times McGregor swoops down on individuals, like show more a bird of prey, so that we see them up close, larger than life. And then, without passing judgement, he swoops out again and time passes. No single story line holds sway. There is no apparent object. Progress is entirely temporal, i.e. the passing months that mark out the year. People age. They come and go. But with no more significance than the passing rains that fill the reservoirs or the hot summers that deplete them. It’s mesmerizing.

Ultimately this is a tour de force that may not be more than that. Although McGregor’s achievement here is remarkable, I doubt it sets out a new direction for the novel form. It’s an impressive feat, but once encountered I don’t see it being repeated. I could be wrong. Nevertheless, even if this is a one-off, it is certainly well worth reading and thinking about how it achieves its ends, and what that might mean. Highly recommended. show less

Almost like a collection of short stories about the people in a small town, except instead of consecutive tales, they are woven together by year starting with the disappearance of a young tourist. The interspersed nature vignettes and the ethereal narration (all-knowing yet remote and unemotional) creates quite an atmosphere to the novel. It is so captivating even though you never get to know any one character really well. The sparse but significant details of the various stories are amazingly crafted. What a work of art!

This is the kind of book that probably divides people into love it or hate it camps. But if you love the deliberation of craft and effective, precise writing, you’ll fall into the love it camp. If you need lots of plot, action and things tied up with a bow, you’ll fall in with the haters. It is an engrossing novel, but not an exciting one. It elegantly weaves the lives of English villagers with a tragedy that haunts them. Those are mere components though; tools that work the story forward. The real story is the rhythm and flow of daily life and the large and small changes at its core.

The thing that is most satisfying and impressive about this book is its style and approach. I’ve read two other McGregor novels and let me tell you - show more he varies his language and story-telling technique to serve the story itself. In this case his sentences and phrases are repeated often as the tale goes forward. You will recognize the themes and situations, but they are ever so slightly altered in each year so that there is progress made or a new aspect shown. As an example I’ll repeat the opening lines to each chapter marking the years since Rebecca’s disappearance -

“At midnight when the year turned there were fireworks going up from the towns beyond the valley but they were too far off for the sound to carry and no one came out to watch.”

“At midnight when the year turned there were fireworks going up from towns beyond the valley but they were too far off for the sound to carry to the few who’d come out to watch.”

“At midnight when the year turned there were fireworks going up from all across the village.”

“At midnight when the year turned there were fireworks from the Hunter place.”

“At midnight when the year turned there were fireworks on the television in the pub and dancing in the street outside.”

“At midnight when the year turned there were fireworks going up all across the village but from the hill they looked faint and the sound failed to carry.”

“At midnight when the year turned there were fireworks on the big screen in the village hall and the sound of ‘Auld Lang Syne’ along the street.”

“At midnight when the year turned there were fireworks in the rain, and thunder in the next valley.”

“At midnight when the year turned Rohan found Lyndsey on the dance floor at the village hall and hissed her while ‘Auld Lang Syne’ was sung.”

“At midnight when the year turned there was a fire in the caravan in the Fletcher’s orchard.”

“At midnight when the year turned there fires in three sheds at the allotments, and again they were burnt out before the fire brigade arrived.”

“At midnight when the year turned there were fireworks going up from the towns beyond the valley but no one in the village even lifted their heads to look.”

“At midnight there were fireworks in the next valley and tension in the village and no fires were set.”

All other aspects of village life are related in this repeating cycle. People’s situations and relationships, the state of bridges and well dressing, births, deaths, marriages and affairs. And not just for the humans, but animals, too - wood pigeons, springtails, foxes, badgers and the cycles of the river and reservoirs. Each aspect related is strung together one sentence to the next and not isolated in its own paragraph or section. Even though there are many actual reservoirs in the book, I think that the title refers to the number of chapters and that each one is a reservoir of village life as told over the course of one year. The deliberateness of this adds to the sense of the whole working together as one clockwork. When one thing is out of balance, all things are out of balance. It’s an amazing piece of work and beautifully rendered. show less

I found "Reservoir 13" hard to engage with at first. This partly the (I suspect, deliberate) frustration of my expectations and partly the style in which the the people and events are presented.

The blurb describes

"Reservoir 13 tells the story of many lives haunted by one family's loss."

The book opens with a search across the hills of an English National Park, for a teenage girl who has gone missing. My genre-led expectations kicked in and I settled down to a book about crime and guilt and secrets in a small village, with the mystery solved in a few weeks, during which colourful local characters and traditions are scrutinised and set aside as the villain is uncovered. I knew that the book was on the Mann Booker Longlist, so I was show more expecting some trope twisting but I wasn't expecting something that rejects every convention of a crime novel.

I quickly amended my view of what the book was about but still found it difficult to care about because the story is told in an authorial voice that reports what little dialogue there is, rather than using direct speech and describes people and events with all the passion of an academic wildlife study.

I felt that I was being given a pencil sketch sprinkled with small details highlighted in colour for reasons that weren't immediately clear to me.

I recognised that I was being shown the rhythm of rural village life where people's lives are governed by the seasons, personal routines and the politenesses required by long-term propinquity but the rhythms did not provide a narrative thrust.

I felt locked out of the inner thoughts or emotions of the people. The authorial voice seemed to have all the intimacy of a camera drone filming a landscape: all-seeing but from an alien non-human perspective.

About a third of the way through, I finally surrendered myself to the rhythm of the book and let it carry me along. It reminded me of the adjustment in pace that I had to make when I moved to a village in Somerset after living for years in London. I had to slow down to see the place. I had to let it absorb me before I could be part of it.

"Reservoir 13" showa how life is lived in a village. As thirteen years worth of seasons passed, I was given a surface view of all the things that people in a small village know about each other: the gossip, the constant observation of each others acts and the things they don't say or don't ask. I cam to understand how the politeness of being indirect grants dignity and privacy while still offering the possibility of sharing the things you cannot bear alone.

Initially, direct speech was less frequent than descriptions of wildlife or weather but, as the years passed and the context had been established, I was allowed to hear certain conversations and evesdrop on interior monologues.

The people in the the village are following the same tidal flows as the wildlife around them and, just as Il earned about the courtship of badgers in the woods, I was shown that most humn mating rituals are led by women and conducted through body language and eye contact more than words.

Some characters found there way into my affections: the vicar, carrying around everyone's cares and confidences, like heavy stones in her pockets, who brings comfort and compassion wherever she goes; the woman who walks her neighbour's dog every day but still treats each time as if it were something new.

The missing girl is not the centre of the book but rather something that distorts the flow of village life without adding to it, She is ike a water-logged piece of driftwood that only occasionally surfaces but is always there, disturbing the peace of the water.

She has her own leitmotiv that often marks her appearance

"The girl's name was Rebecca or Becky or Beks. She had been looked for and she hadn't been found."

She is a constant reminder of the possibility of loss and perhaps and incentive to hold on to those we love for as long as we can.
"Reservoir 13" has a distinct voice and an unusual structure that did, eventually, imprint the village on my imagination and made me reluctant to leave. The narrative doesn't thrust, it shapes your perception of people and events with gentle persistence, like a stream eroding one bank and building up another. show less

I wonder whether the literati have gone a little bit overboard about this novel. I certainly found it engrossing and well written (although I couldn't say I enjoyed it - whatever else this novel might be, I don't think it is exactly 'enjoyable'), and it adopted an unusual and enlightening perspective on an unpleasant crime. I am not sure, however, that I could go quite so far as critic George Saunders, who described it as 'a rare and dazzling feat of art' or The Guardian, where it was dubbed, 'an extraordinary achievement'.

The story surrounds the disappearance of Rebecca Shaw, a teenage girl who went missing while on holiday with her family in an unspecified locality 'at the heart of England'. A tragic, and sadly all too familiar a show more scenario. McGregor certainly captures the bleakness of the situation excellently, and also portrays the impact upon the local community. While everyone rallies around to help with the search for the missing girl, life does also go on, and as time goes by a sense of resentment grows among the locals. After all, everyone now remains under suspicion, and the village struggles to slough off its association with the disappearance.

McGregor's style has a starkness that becomes oppressive (and potential readers should perhaps be aware that there is no shred of light relief, at all), yet suits the bleak nature of the story. It also matches the landscape. This is a working countryside, not one of bucolic rhapsody, in which farmers and local businesses struggle to make a living, and the distractions and disruptions arising from the search for the missing girl only add to the bleakness and despair of life. show less

Location, location, location

This is set in a farming village, within sight of the lights of a motorway (freeway). It’s remarkably claustrophobic for a story set in the countryside, often outdoors.

Squabbles on the parish council. Cricket rivalry with neighbouring villages. Wariness of tourists and incomers, despite a limited pool of people to hang out with, let alone date. Dances, pantomimes, and festivals in the community hall. Church attendance that is about tradition as much as belief. And the camaraderie of the village pub. It was eerily familiar.

Gossip is the lifeblood of such communities.
“There was talk of nudity, although this was never confirmed.” [About a nearby eco-protest camp]
Everybody knows everything, or thinks they show more do, despite a very British reticence about asking anything personal outright.
“Nobody thought it appropriate to ask questions, and he didn’t volunteer.”

Image: Peak District village (Castleton) with moors beyond, by Archant (Source)

The omniscient narrator could be anyone, everyone, or some mystical overseer like Dead Pappa Toothwort in Max Porter’s Lanny, which has several similarities with this (see my review HERE). Extra distance often comes from the passive voice:
“There were questions that weren’t being asked.”

What happens - and doesn’t

This opens with the shock of a missing child, but it’s not a plot-driven novel and there is no main character except perhaps the village itself. Even the girl’s parents are just part of the ensemble, and Reservoir 13 is just one of the reservoirs.
“The missing girl’s name was Rebecca, or Becky, or Bex. She had been thirteen at the time of her disappearance.”
It’s one of several phrases that recur, sometimes with subtle but significant variations. The story starts immediately after her disappearance and continues for twelve more chapters for each of the subsequent years: thirteen in total.

In many ways, nothing else momentous happens; just regular village life, albeit tainted and scarred.
“There was a guilt in just walking the hills.”
And yet within a few weeks:
“A creeping normality had begun to settle over these press conferences.”

Image: View over Ladybower reservoir from rocks at Bamford Edge (Source)

There’s a constant trickle of little things that either make the reader expect the discovery of a body or else arouse suspicion about what happened and who might know something or even be responsible: reservoirs with leaks and blockages, men with secrets, youngsters with the urge to explore, and children with unspoken fears. Some are a one-off, and some build, only to fade away.

If you want a traditional crime or mystery novel, this is not it. It could almost be described as a series of damp squibs, which is an appropriate metaphor in one way: every subsequent chapter starts “At midnight when the year turned…” and uses the proximity and number of fireworks to reflect the gradual return to how things used to be. However, it’s too derogatory a metaphor for such a well-crafted book.

Lines and circles

The narrative is chronological, starting in the early 2000s, and continuing for a dozen years. People age, pair up, move in, are born, split, move away, and die, bringing changes big and small, some inevitable, others not. All so ordinary. Life goes on. And death happens. But Becky’s state is unknown.

“In June… the sun didn’t set so much as drift into the distance, leaving a trail of midsummer light that seemed to linger until morning.”

Within the linear story are cyclical events and phrases: similar, but rarely exactly the same. Daily routines like milking, and seasonal ones like shearing. A mix of personal, agricultural, and communal, as well as natural events like weather and what’s growing or dying back. The reassuring rhythms of rural life are something to cling to amid unsettling anxiety about the missing girl and the unknown perpetrator (if there was one).

Image: Spillway of Ladybower reservoir (Source)

Alchemical realism

Stream-of-consciousness non-sequiturs flood the pages. For example, a single paragraph on page 70 starts with swallows laying eggs, has the Jackson boys fetching the well-dressing boards from the river, mentions a spate of metal thefts, describes blackbirds catching worms, and ends up with Jones’ sister, who “was understood to be troubled in some way”, waiting for him to come home.

“The metallic smell of coming rain rose up and the air felt charged and tight.”
Unlike Lanny, there’s no suggestion of magic or myth, although it does have strong elemental vibes, often with sinister undercurrents.
There’s water (reservoirs, river, rain); metal (“The reservoirs were a flat metallic grey” and “like beaten pewter”); fire (arson) and sun; soil, stone and clay (farmers’ fields, allotments, quarry, disused mines, a potter), and wood (actual woods and a character of that name).

It takes rare authorial alchemy to make this immersive, believable, and captivating, rather than confusing or irritating.

What if?

Becky’s family were staying in a holiday cottage for new year. If Becky had been a child of the village, this would have been a rather different story. There are many possibilities…

Want more?

Read, The Reservoir Tapes, which I reviewed, HERE. It’s fifteen testimonies shedding light - and plenty of dark - onto what might have happened to Becky.

Quotes

• “The drains were gulping meltwater.”

• “[They] spent their first days in the village slouching about with the sullen expressions of children who’ve grown up in the city and feel threatened by people willing to say hello.”

• “A pale light moved slowly across the moor, catching in the flooded cloughs and ditches and sharpening until the clouds closed overhead.”

• “Their marriage was little understood. There was some speculation but most felt it was no concern of theirs.” And yet, “It was known they had separate bedrooms.”

• “The sun came out and the fields softened.”

• “They looked as though they had something to say and no intention of saying it out loud.” [A furtive teen couple]

• “The reservoirs were a gleaming silver-grey, scuffed by the wind and lapping against the breakwater shores.”

• “He’d not been much seen in the village and it was understood that his quietness might be part of the grieving. There was little known about the family he was said to have lost, and nobody wanted to ask.”
“When he turned out not to be a widower at all… It wasn’t clear how the misunderstanding had started but some people felt cheated.” show less