Reservoir 13: A Novel

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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: But it’s not just flyovers of the community and landscape. The author gets right into the minds, hearts, and skins of his people. This is the father of twins, who have fallen asleep on the couch with their mother as the family was watching a movie together. Beautifully written, with an ever-present sense of the narrator being less of a person or a being, and more as th

The passive voice was really deliberate because it just feels very English to me,” McGregor says. “It’s a gossipy village, but they would never think of themselves as gossips. ‘Somebody was seen.’ They’re not going to say: ‘I saw so and so.’ Small communities can be very inclusive, but they can also be very claustrophobic.”This was McGregor’s 4th novel and he has a collection of short stories. I found this such a unique and intriguing read I am going to seek out his other works. But while absorbed in their own personal dramas, the village can never fully escape what happened 13 years ago. We follow a group of local teenagers of the same age as the missing girl as they grow up and go to University, only to find that all their acquaintances there immediately want to ask about the drama. The quote that opened my review comes from the last chapter - almost 12.5 years after the girl went missing. The book has thirteen chapters and aside from the first chapter, all subsequent chapters start, “At midnight when the year turned….” Each chapter contains the events of one year’s time following Rebecca’s disappearance. Fascinating... McGregor is a writer with extraordinary control… Reservoir 13 is an enthralling and brilliant investigation of disturbing elements embedded deeply in our story tradition." - Tessa Hadley, The Guardian

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.” I don’t know where we get this idea that the countryside is unchanging,” says the novelist Amanda Craig. “It’s atomised and isolated. It’s overlooked and undervalued. But it’s violently changing beneath our noses.” Reservoir 13 is set in a village in the Peak District. As the novel opens, just before New Year, a 13 year-old girl, holidaying in the village with her parents in a barn conversion, is reported missing, and the police organise the villagers into a search party:This isn't a who-dunnit crime novel full of suspense and action. This is a quietly beautifully written novel, that draws you into the life of the village and its residents over a 14/15 year period. How the villagers react and cope with the girls disappearance, and the dark shadow looming over them of her unknown whereabouts. Reservoir 13 is, quite simply, an extraordinary novel. It gives an innovative twist to the device of a missing girl; has a meticulously plotted structure and a mesmeric poetic style of writing.

Longlisted for the Booker, shortlisted for the Goldsmiths, now winner of the Costa Prize - indisputably the book of 2017 .... I loved this wonderfully written novel with it’s beautifully detailed prose and unusual style. Winner of the Costa Book Award and Booker nominee, Reservoir 13 was such a fulfilling read.Update 29/8/17: Having read all but four of the longlist, this one is still my favourite. The rest of my shortlist would be Autumn, Home Fire, Days Without End, Solar Bones and Elmet. Of the remaining four, Lincoln in the Bardo is the most likely to change my mind. Group therapy is an intriguing choice of subject matter. As participants are urged to choose smiley or unhappy emojis to describe their week, and dancers arrive to encourage expression through movement, the whole narrative feels poised between scepticism, impatience and admiration. Robert walks out twice. But the novel holds us there in the room. It’s in these sessions that we come closest to the kind of collective voice that McGregor has explored in previous novels – in the shared narration of the troubled, vociferous, unheard addicts of Even the Dogs, rising between them like a Greek chorus, and in the passive, impersonal recording of the whole village in Reservoir 13. Now the strenuously made words of the group members float together on a common stream of effort. The Costa beats the Booker and Goldsmith this year as second most perceptive judging panel of the year.

Weaving together different characters, interspersing private thoughts with public dramas, fleeting details with life-changing events, McGregor builds an extraordinary collective symphony of community life. It’s the fruition of a project that began with his Booker-longlisted debut, 2002’s If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things, which focuses on the inhabitants of a single street over the course of one day, and continued in the Impac-winning Even the Dogs (2010), where the narrative is shared between a group of homeless addicts. “It’s the idea that you have lots of people and they’re individuals but they overlap,” McGregor explains. In Reservoir 13 he uses the passive voice to evoke a communal identity, which encompasses a shared unconscious where the missing girl haunts the villagers’ dreams, and a curtain-twitching nosiness in which everybody knows everybody else’s business. The book is not as “heavy” as I’ve probably made it sound. I thought this was lovely; one of the highlights of the reading year for me. I loved it – I didn’t find it boring or dull and I am in awe of how McGregor constructed his quiet and contemplative novel. I suspect the book will jump from Man Book long list to shortlist because the judges will like this juxtaposition. For me I'm still not convinced both work in the same book, but I still can't sort it all out. This is decidedly not the read for someone looking for a thrill. Reservoir 13” starts with a search for a missing thirteen year old girl named Rebecca Shaw. Rebecca has gone missing in a rural English village. She and her parents were visiting and staying in a barn conversion. The three of them went for a walk on a cold winter’s day and Rebecca lagged behind – and then disappeared. Series two of This Country begins on BBC One on 6 March. Both series are available now on BBC iPlayer .

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Ulrich's description of the experiences of a social historian unravelling primary sources is familiar to me from my own work analyzing sexual misconduct records from Hereford Diocese in the late Middle Ages, and perhaps shaped my reaction to Reservoir 13, which I loved. I don't trust neat beginnings and endings of novels. I am much more comfortable with uncertainty, and with relationships among characters that seem to grow organically. Jon McGregor's approach to this novel is extraordinary. His prose is beautiful, contained, and haunting. Even more impressive is the novel's structure. McGregor gives glimpses, in every chapter, to what is happening in the lives of the villagers and some of their visitors. The reader can trace these developments from chapter to chapter through a careful process of accretion. However, there are holes -- characters enter and exit, sometimes without a clear explanation of what has happened to them. Relationships among characters morph over time. Some characters die, some fight, some fall in love, some change jobs. And around these actions is the progress of a year, as seen in weather, festivals and celebrations, the life cycles of animals, and always the changes of the seasons. She could have walked high over the moor and stumbled into a flooded clough and sunk cold and deep in the wet peat before the dogs and thermal cameras came anywhere near, her skin tanned leather-brown and soft and her hair coiled neatly around her. She could have fallen anywhere and be lying there still.” For cost savings, you can change your plan at any time online in the “Settings & Account” section. If you’d like to retain your premium access and save 20%, you can opt to pay annually at the end of the trial.