Jon McGregor
Reservoir 13 by Jon McGregor opens with news of thirteen-year-old Rebecca Shaw who has gone missing. Her parents are frantic. The villagers form a search party and comb through the area looking for the girl. Divers search the reservoirs. The police investigate; the news media flood the area. But there’s no sign of the girl anywhere.
McGregor plays on our expectations that the novel will be about the missing girl and what became of her. But just as he did in his later novel, Lean Fall Stand, he pivots to a new direction. His focus shifts to the collective group of villagers. In thirteen chapters, each of which represents a new year, McGregor offers brief glimpses of the villagers’ daily lives in painstaking detail. As a detached, impartial observer, the omniscient narrator takes us inside their hearts and minds, their conversations, their work, their loves, and their fears. Babies are born; people die; people get married; and people get divorced. Children grow up and head to university. Some find jobs; some come back. Narrative threads hinted at in one chapter are picked up in the subsequent years of the later chapters.
McGregor immerses us in the totality of village life—the people and the surrounding ecology. He shifts seamlessly from narrative to indirect dialogue to a character’s interiority to a detailed observation of an animal, a plant, or nature’s seasonal changes. A sentence about Sally and her abusive brother or Irene and her son with special needs is juxtaposed with a sentence describing a heron on the lake or a badger messing about in the woods. Nestling between insights into the villagers and their lives, we witness the inexorable passage of time. The sheep are herded; the fox gives birth; the boar calls out to the sow in mating season; the fish are biting; the weather turns. The juxtaposition appears random; the effect is cumulative; the view is both panoramic and all-encompassing.
The missing girl haunts the pages of the book. References to her or to her clothing crop up intermittently with each passing year. Her absence gnaws at us just as it does the villagers. We anticipate that on any page now, she will pop up alive and well or her body will be discovered when someone wades in the river or walks along the reservoir or trudges through the muddy woods.
McGregor’s control of his material is impressive. His prose is deliberate, dispassionate, contained. In lengthy paragraphs, in sentences choke-full of detail, in conversations reported exclusively in the indirect voice, and in narrative threads that are casually mentioned only to be picked up in a later chapter, McGregor has achieved something quite remarkable. For a novel that offers no closure and no plot, this is a powerful, mesmerizing, and rhythmic read, skillfully executed by a craftsman very much in control of his craft. Its impact will linger long after the final page has been read.
Very highly recommended.