Reading group: Reservoir 13 by Jon McGregor

Well, here was a novel that everyone present thought 'wonderful' - that was the word people used.

It opens at New Year when the people of a Pennines village gather to help in the search for a thirteen-year-old girl, a holidaymaker, who has gone missing during a walk with her parents on the moor. But this book is not a crime thriller: the mystery is no curious puzzle to be neatly solved by the final pages; the concerns of this book are elsewhere, and indeed it interrogates the very genre. The girl here is not found, and in thirteen chapters each beginning at New Year, the book charts the effect on the community over the next thirteen years, and the fading yet lasting significance of the unsolved mystery.

The style is spare, calm and objective, the narratorial eye entirely omniscient, often watching as if indeed from above. The book begins:

They gathered in the car park in the hour before dawn and waited to be told what to do. It was cold and there was little conversation. There were questions that weren't being asked. The missing girl's name was Rebecca Shaw. When last seen she'd been wearing a white hooded top. A mist hung low across the moor and the ground was frozen hard.

Someone even said the style was almost 'cold', and what bowled everyone over was how paradoxically moving the effect was - everyone had been extremely moved by the book.
People puzzled about how McGregor had achieved this. A chief characteristic of the book is the constant juxtaposition of the progress of the human developments in the village with nature and the weather, creating a poignant sense of human dramas taking place within the greater scheme of things and evolving time, a moving sense of 'life goes on'. McGregor emphasises this juxtaposition by moving from one to the other without paragraph breaks:

It has, Cathy agreed, and Richard heard the rustle of her coat being slipped from her shoulders. It was daft but something stirred in him. A fog came in and lay heavy for a week...

Dialogue, too, is unpunctuated by speech marks, thus merging the conversation of human dramas with the overall narrative flow.

Someone commented that McGregor never actually tells you what people feel, but simply shows you through their actions. As can be seen in the quote immediately above, that's not exactly the case: he does in fact quite often spell out the way people feel, but there is something about the context in which he does so that makes it utterly convincing, and part of this I think is the humanity of his vision. Over the thirteen years we follow the lives and relationships of several of the village people with all their flaws. The narratorial view is entirely democratic and never ever judgemental, so we feel for them all. There is so much sadness as marriages break up and people die, yet there is a matter-of-factness too, as the foxes and badgers go on breeding in the woods and the goldfinches nest yearly in the fir copse. This soothing regularity is codified by McGregor in a constant repetition of phrases that achieves the effect of poetry, and which, as the years go round, we come to expect like a familiar lullaby. Every subsequent chapter begins with a line from the first, 'At midnight when the year turned there were fireworks...' and each repetition is followed by a different circumstance concerning the fireworks, poignantly illustrating the effects of events and change within the wider cycle of the life of the village.

Some people commented that McGregor does use the crime thriller genre to tease the reader and keep the narrative tension going: there are several characters whose behaviour could bring them under suspicion, and there are moments when clues to Rebecca's disappearance seem to emerge or to be about to emerge: a white top is found on the moor, for instance, and identified as hers; maintenance men dive in the reservoirs and the river keeper frees a blockage. These things struck me rather as aspects of the unending uncertainty and unfinished nature of the mystery for the inhabitants of the village. Everyone agreed how striking was the moment when a dog being walked comes across the navy-blue gilet which only the reader will recognise as Rebecca's - the dog's owner doesn't even notice it: a devastating moment of utter loss of significance for something held on the human scale as so significant.

Basically, we loved the book!


Our archive discussions can be found here and a list of the books we have discussed, with links to the discussions, here.

Reading Group: The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

There were only four of us to discuss this, Arundhati Roy's 1996 Booker-winning debut - Ann, Jenny, John and me. It's now two months since our discussion - I've been extremely busy and distracted by my own writing and research for an article - so by now my memory of our discussion is patchy, and I'm afraid I'm not likely to do justice to everybody's contribution. However - stretching my brain to remember - here goes.

The novel opens with the return of a young woman, Rahel, to the Indian village of Ayemenem, where, in the summer of 1969 when she and her twin brother were seven years old, a tragedy befell their Christian Syrian family, involving the 'laws that lay down who should be loved, and how'. The tragic outcome - which included the death of a child - is flagged early on, though not the details of how or why, and it is only slowly unravelled via extended non-chronological flashbacks mimicking the operations of memory, often (though not always) seen through the unknowing child Rahel's perspective, and set against India's political turmoil of the time.

We all agreed, I think, that the book's depiction of the downfall and decline of the family, and the lushness and squalor of the surroundings in which it takes place, are vividly depicted. The characterisation is rich, and the book is full of startling observations of the physical world - water falls from a swimmer's arm 'like a silver sleeve', for instance. Jason Cowley, a judge for the 1997 Booker prize, justified the book's win by pointing to Roy's childlike ability to see the world anew, and it's hard to argue with this.

However, John, Ann and I did have some problems with the language and voice connected with this vision. Rahel and her twin Estha are especially bright children with a particular language facility - they have the quick-fire ability to read sentences backwards, play word games, make verbal lists, and apply to words (in their heads) the quaintness of capital initial letters. This works beautifully when we are seeing the world and events through their perspective. However, Roy extends this 'childlike' wordplay to moments when our perspective is not that of the children, and the effect for us was coy, and for me often introduced a levity inappropriate to the situation. To some extent, I guess, when the perspective is that of the adult Rahel, this could be said to be Rahel inserting herself back into her childhood mentality, but it didn't always feel like that, and the same language play is used when the perspective is that of other adults. Salma Rushdie uses the same techniques in Midnight's Children, but in my view they work much better in that novel, since it is more outrightly comic. Jenny didn't agree with us. She thought that the self-conscious spellings - 'Lay-Ter' - reflected the dialect left behind by the Raj, but even allowing for that, I found the self-consciousness of its usage in the book coy and possibly flippant. For me there was also a more fundamental problem of perspective: the whole novel is framed by Rahel's present-tense adult perspective, yet scenes are described (in vivid detail) - and in particular a crucial one near the end - of which even the adult Rahel can know nothing, or which she can at best only speculate about.

In particular, for me, the linked problem of tone came to a head in a scene towards the end where a posse of policemen files through a field towards a hut where they know a fugitive is hiding. By this time we identify with their prey, and we have known since the beginning of the novel that the outcome will be tragic, so one would expect the narrative tone to be one of tension. Yet not only is the scene described at length with a leisurely relish - 'ancient trees cloaked in vines. Gigantic mani plants. Wild pepper. Cascading purple acuminus' - the policemen are portrayed in comic terms - 'Their wide khaki shorts were rigid with starch, and bobbed over the tall grass like a row of stiff skirts'; they 'mince' across a fallen tree trunk - and however ironically this is intended, I found it almost dismayingly inappropriate.

We did all feel that the closeness of the twins, and the fact that they were separated by the tragedy, was very moving, but because of the very vividness of the depiction of the brotherly-sisterly nature of that early closeness, we did not find the present-day ending between them (which I won't give away here) at all convincing.

Mark was away when we held the meeting. Afterwards he told us that he'd taken a brief look at the book and put it aside - I think he said it was 'tedious'. An Angela's Ashes for India, he said, and he wasn't at all surprised that we'd been only four for the meeting: the others, he said, must have been frightened away.

Our archive discussions can be found here and a list of the books we have discussed, with links to the discussions, here.