Reservoir 13

I was concerned, on starting this novel, by the proportion of truly terrible reviews it has. There are many five-stars, but also a significant proportion of one-stars. Having enjoyed McGregor's earlier novel, If Nobody Speaks Of Remarkable Things, though, I wanted to read this one as well and fairly soon realised why Reservoir 13 causes such division amongst reviewers. The story starts with the disappearance of Rebecca, a teenage girl, so convention has it that this event should soon be followed by the appearance of a Dysfunctional Detective, possibly with a tenuous Personal Connection to the case, and culminate in an against-the-clock race to save another Innocent Victim. McGregor steers well clear of all these tropes! Instead he tells the stories of the village from which the girl disappeared in the thirteen years following her disappearance. It's a beautiful portrait of a community ripped open and then finding its heart again, but I think more suited to fans of Robert McFarlane than, say, Lauren Carr.

I loved McGregor's inclusion of the natural world rhythms alongside people's lives and traditions. Fox cubs learn to play as swallows arrive and then depart. Cricket matches are lost, harvest festival altars decorated, and the well must be dressed. It often seems as though Rebecca (or Becky or Bex) has been forgotten, but the effect of her tragedy is long-lasting. She is at the centre of the novel both for what happened and in time. She was thirteen at the beginning of this book and McGregor chronicles the next thirteen years, one per chapter, which I felt gave a good sense of balance to the story. The villagers are reminded by news crews descending on significant anniversaries or the rarely-seen presence of her mother. However, they also have their own lives to live and McGregor's observations of daily minutiae is superb. A wonderful and wonderfully unexpected novel!

I sort of went into this novel assuming I would be frustrated by an intriguing but ultimately aimless conceit. I'm so glad I was wrong. Indeed, it takes a lot of skill and focus to open a story with a missing girl and yet make the central question layers deeper than what happened to her, to instead write a story about what the missing girl signifies and how her significance develops over time in the social consciousness of a village. Fortunately, McGregor possesses such skill and the result is a narrative that is intellectually satisfying and constantly entertaining.

Each of the 13 chapters reveals more and more of the rural village and its inhabitants and the more we learn the more hopeless it seems for the reader, and yet we never really give up hope. Certain ordinary scenes take on the dramatic weight of significance they wouldn't ordinarily take on when a reader is searching for clues, for meaning. Time passes and the story endures and the case of the missing girl stays open because how could we close it? Each character wrestles with the obstacles time presents in their lives and they persist day after day, assuming something will make sense eventually.

This is an excellent novel as long as you know what you're getting into. The prose is crisp and efficient, the artistic conceit of the novel is sound, and the mood of loss pervades the story but doesn't overwhelm the reader.

I highly recommend this one.

Reservoir 13 tells the story of a girl who goes missing in a village on New Year’s Eve. It chronicles the effect of her disappearance on the people of be village and they go on living despite that impact.

This is a remarkable book and there is much I want to say about it, but I’ll limit it to three related things that struck me as I read the book: the structure, the layers and the characters.

The structure of the book only really became apparent to me as I finished the book. The book is written as if it were a piece of music, though not a typical Western piece of music. The book is cyclical, rather than linear. Each cycle is based on years, months and seasons. With each cycle, reoccurring themes and variations come come to the fore and fade into the background. It reminded me of Gamelan or an Indian Raga. In many ways this could have been a book written by an Oulipo author, though the structure here felt much more natural than many Oulipo books.

The cyclical nature of the book allows McGregor to build layer upon layer. The stories here don’t feel as if they are being told. Instead, they feel like they slowly emerge. As I read, a clear picture of the village, its yearly traditions and its surroundings became clearer and clearer with each passing year. Not entirely unlike moving someplace new and slowly getting to know it.

More than anything it is the characters that come through in this book. As with everything else in this book, I felt I was getting to know them bit by bit. Each character become more familiar even as the memory of the missing girl ever so slowly began to fade. McGregor’s calm descriptive prose revealed the characters through their comings and goings, their fallings in love and their fallings out, their rises and falls. As with all great characters, it is their relationships — to each other, to the village and to their surroundings — that defined them.

In the end, this was a book that I didn’t want to end, such was my investment in the village and the people that lived there. Despite the nonlinear structure, the clear straightforward writing made reading it a pleasure. This is a book I could return to and always find something new. I hope to read it again in a year or two.