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.