The Barnes & Noble Review
Set in our own day in a village in England's Peak District, Jon McGregor's Reservoir 13 opens with searchers assembling to look for thirteen-year-old Rebecca Shaw, last seen out on a walk in the countryside with her parents, who had somehow lost sight of her. It is year's end, and the family has been spending the holiday in the village, a place surrounded by hills and moors, marshy areas, watery ravines, caves, abandoned lead mines, quarries, and reservoirs -- all possible sites of misadventure. And, of course, there is always the thought of abduction and foul play. Rebecca has been gone for hours, then days. Divers are called in to search the river and reservoirs. The media descends with all its paraphernalia and presumption.
At this point it is only right to say that if you are expecting a missing-girl thriller: don't. This extraordinary novel is a different and much greater affair. As the pages turn into weeks and months and years, our attention -- along with that of the villagers themselves -- never drifts entirely from the girl and her possible fate; but the everyday goings-on around the place, of the people and, equally, of the creatures of nature, come increasingly into focus and begin to take over. Blackbirds, swallows, butterflies, foxes, badgers, and other beasts, birds, bugs, and even vegetation, are shown following their annual cycles regardless of human drama.
The villagers eventually return to their own traditional round of activities: the New Year's celebration, the Spring Dance, "well- dressing," Mischief Night, Bonfire Night, sheep tupping, lambing, and so on. But at the same time, the village is following a larger, by-now familiar course: It is dissolving under the corporate rationale of late capitalism. The new owners of the adjacent great estate do not hold themselves responsible for the upkeep of public amenities as the original owners had and have hired lawyers to prove it. The butcher shop cannot compete with the new supermarket, and the owner loses the business, along with the knives that were his father's before him. His wife leaves him, and he is reduced to working at the supermarket's meat counter. ("They gave him a striped apron and a badge saying "Master Butcher," but it wasn't butchery. The meat came in ready-jointed, and he was just there to hand it over.") The dairyman is increasingly pressed and depressed by the low price of milk. The village youths grow up to find there are no jobs.
The novel unspools, becoming a mural in time depicting the changing lives of these people over a dozen or so years, but the continuing question of Rebecca's fate gives the progression a dark tincture. Events are reported in a detached, almost hypnotic manner, the story becoming an intoxicating distillate of gossip. The adolescents who had known Rebecca form and reform into couples; they grow up, go away, come back. The girl's parents stay on, the father roaming the countryside, ever searching; the marriage breaks up. Protesters come from afar to block the blasting out of another quarry. They set up an encampment that flourishes, fades, disappears. The village Don Juan discovers he has lost his irresistible appeal; his brother breaks off his affair with a young schoolteacher and marries the mother of his son; they have another child and eventually separate again; the school caretaker is charged with downloading child pornography. The divers show up year after year, reviving the memory of the search for the girl's body in the river and reservoirs, though now they are unclogging spillways and making routine checks of the dams for structural deterioration.
Unadorned and tightly controlled, the style possesses plain-spun eloquence, and for all its bland affect and austerity it conveys a lived feeling of the rhythm of things in the village. Here, for instance, is what happens when there is blasting at the quarry:
When the first siren sounded over at the quarry the workers cleared the area. When the second siren sounded the birds fell silent. In the village, windows and doors were pulled shut. The third siren sounded, and the birds rose in the air, and the explosion came from deep behind the working face, spreading through the body of the earth, a low crumping shudder that shrugged huge slabs of limestone to the quarry floor. The dust rose and continued rising and drifted out through the air for five minutes or more. The first all-clear sounded, and the birds returned noisily to the treetops. The second all-clear sounded, and the workers returned to their places. In the village, the windows and doors were kept closed as the dust spread. On the bus back from town Winnie saw Irene and asked whether she'd had her hair done. Irene's hand went up to her head, although she hadn't meant it to. She told Winnie it was only the usual.
This style gives plenty of scope for the sort of inadvertent, deadpan humor that is the special province of police logs and committee- meeting minutes. ("Miss Dale asked Ms. French if her mother was any better, and Ms. French outlined the ways in which she wasn't.") In fact, despite the novel's grim start, it is leavened throughout by wry humor. ("In an attempt to meet the county council's target for budget cutting, the parish council agreed to the street lighting being turned off between midnight and five, not without much discussion, during which Miriam Pearson was advised that the expression black hole of Calcutta was no longer acceptable.")
I have never read a book quite like this, a novel whose stark, declaratory sentences are so vital, whose overall plotlessness is so completely absorbing, and in which the universes of nature's creatures and human beings are so powerfully presented as inhabiting the same world, though running along parallel courses, oblivious to the other's concerns. McGregor's previous novel won the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and I truly hope this one achieves a similar honor.
Katherine A. Powers reviews books widely and has been a finalist for the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing from the National Book Critics Circle. She is the editor of Suitable Accommodations: An Autobiographical Story of Family Life: The Letters of J. F. Powers, 1942–1963. Reviewer: Katherine A. Powers
The New York Times Book Review - Kate Taylor
McGregor is a beautiful, controlled writer, who can convey the pathos of a life in a few lines. Despite the large cast of characters, each feels specific and real…[Reservoir 13 is] unconventional but affecting…
Publishers Weekly
★ 08/21/2017
McGregor’s unforgettable novel begins with a 13-year-old girl’s disappearance from an English village, and then tracks the village through the following years, as teenagers become adults, babies are born, people grow old and die, and couples get together and separate while what happened to the girl remains a mystery. Rebecca Shaw and her parents are visiting the village over Christmas, staying at the barn conversion they rented the previous summer, when Rebecca vanishes during a walk on the moors. Residents, police, and mountain and cave rescue teams search but find nothing. As time passes, the case stays open and unsolved. Local teenagers who knew Becky better than they admit to parents or police share memories of her among themselves while having sex, drinking alcohol, doing drugs, and growing up; the school custodian is arrested on child pornography charges; a successful man returns to the village temporarily; an unhappy wife leaves permanently; the vicar collects confidences; one day the potter smashes his pottery. Twins born early in the novel grow up to hear the story of the missing girl, now part of a village culture marked by dark undercurrents and occasional moments of light. McGregor portrays individuals and the community as a whole, across seasons, in mundane scenes and moments of heartbreak, cruelty, and guilt. Close-ups of flora and fauna are set against a landscape of reservoirs, dens, and caves, the village hall, the pub, and the flooded quarry. This is an ambitious tour de force that demands the reader’s attention; those willing to follow along will be rewarded with a singular and haunting story. (Oct.)
From the Publisher
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice
Winner of the Costa Novel Award
Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2017
Shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize 2017
Named a Best Book of the Year by Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kirkus Reviews, & the Los Angeles Review
“McGregor's book achieves a visionary power . . . he has written a novel with a quiet but insistently demanding, even experimental form. The word 'collage' implies something static and finally fixed, but the beauty of Reservoir 13 is in fact rhythmic, musical, ceaselessly contrapuntal . . . A remarkable achievement [and a] subtle unravelling of what we think of as the conventional project of the novel.” —James Wood, The New Yorker
“McGregor is a beautiful, controlled writer, who can convey the pathos of a life in a few lines. Despite the large cast of characters, each feels specific and real. . . . [An] unconventional but affecting novel.” —The New York Times Book Review
“Jon McGregor has revolutionized that most hallowed of mystery plots: the one where some foul deed takes place in a tranquil English village that, by the close of the case, doesn’t feel so tranquil anymore. . . . McGregor’s writing style is ingenious.” —Maureen Corrigan, The Washington Post
“Disturbing, one–of–a–kind . . . Most books involving crime and foul play provide the consolation of some sort of resolution. But Mr. McGregor's novel, which was long–listed for this year's Man Booker Prize, shows how life, however unsettlingly, continues in the absence of such explanation.” —Tom Nolan, The Wall Street Journal
“An intricate and absorbing mosaic–like structure of miniature stories, scenes and snapshots. . . . While Reservoir 13 starts out with the familiar hallmarks of a crime novel, it quickly develops into a quite different literary beast, one that acquires power and depth through bold form and style, not gripping drama and suspense . . . This is unconventional storytelling, a daring way to tell a tale, but one that yields haunting and stimulating results.” —Star Tribune (Minneapolis)
“Fiercely intelligent . . . [An] astonishing new novel . . . strange, daring, and very moving . . . The book is a rare and dazzling feat of art that also (in my reading of it) outs us, in a gentle way, for a certain gratuitous drama–seeking tendency we all tend to have as readers—a tendency that makes it harder to see the very real, consequential, beautiful, and human–scaled dramas occurring all around is in real life, in every moment (in nature, in human affairs).” —George Saunders, The Paris Review Daily
"An enchanting, revelatory portrait of a place, its seasons, and its people." —Carolyn Kuebler, Literary Hub
More Praise for Jon McGregor
“Jon McGregor is a writer who will make a significant stamp on world literature. In fact, he already has.” —Colum McCann
“Jon McGregor writes with frightening intelligence and impeccable technique. Every page is a revelation.” —Teju Cole
“Jon McGregor’s stories are full of unremarkable landscape, destabilizing drama, and people— pinned in place by themselves. But they gleam with endearing detail. His writing is unnerving, unconventional and lovely.” —Leanne Shapton
“These stories are illuminated by Jon McGregor’s fearless and humane imagination. Both tragic and comic, they form a polyphonic portrait of a people and a place. Exhilarating.” —Katie Kitamura
“Jon McGregor's uncanny stories linger long after you have finished them. He quietly inserts distinct, convincing voices into vivid and compelling landscapes.” ―Dana Spiotta
Library Journal
★ 09/01/2017
While on a winter vacation with her parents in a northern England village, a 13-year-old girl goes for a walk on the moors alone and disappears. This event, plus the intrusive police investigation and fruitless search of the area's multiple reservoirs and surrounding territory, shock the townspeople, lending the story its tense tone. But the presumed crime remains unsolved, and though the teen is not forgotten, life goes on. As the novel unfolds, an unrelenting accretion of declarative sentences describe the village residents, their local traditions, the weather, the seasons, and even the wildlife, the narrative deftly getting us inside the lives of the many characters, allowing us to understand their isolation and interdependence. Years slowly pass within the tale yet go all too quickly—as in real life. McGregor's (This Isn't the Sort of Thing That Happens to Someone Like You) writing is extraordinary, and while the narrative technique is initially wearing in the way village life can be—the monotony, the knowledge of everybody's business—it coheres remarkably into a knowable, comforting, ultimately compelling world. VERDICT This treatise on timelessness and human nature was recently long-listed for the Man Booker Prize. Highly recommended.—Reba Leiding, emeritus, James Madison Univ. Lib., Harrisonburg, VA
DECEMBER 2017 - AudioFile
A young girl disappears in the north of England while on holiday with her parents and is never found. This sober examination of long-lasting grief and village life is presented in somber tones by Matt Bates. He's an excellent choice of narrator for an audiobook that explores the minutiae of how people return to daily life after a tragedy has struck. Prospective listeners will want to be aware that this is a novel focusing on the inner lives of its characters, not a mystery or police procedural. Listeners will hear a tightly controlled, low-voiced portrayal of inexplicable loss. Fans of literary fiction delivered in the style of radio theater will enjoy the experience. M.R. © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2017-09-19
A young girl disappears outside a small village in northern England.With just four books, McGregor (This Isn't the Sort of Thing That Happens to Someone Like You, 2012, etc.) has already made a substantial impact on the literary scene; three of his novels, including this one, have been longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and he won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for Even the Dogs (2010). His latest, an atmospheric, meticulously crafted novel, begins like a mystery then quickly morphs into something altogether different. A family is visiting an English village for the New Year, and their 13-year-old daughter, Rebecca, goes for a walk and doesn't return. The police conduct a search with some villagers at dawn. A helicopter has been out all night but found nothing. A van with fake number plates is discovered near Reservoir 7, and someone says it belonged to a man named Woods, who "wasn't the type of bloke you wanted to be talking to the police about." Six months pass: "It was as though the ground had just opened up and swallowed her whole." In 13 chapters, each dealing with one year, an omniscient narrator chronicles the lives of the villagers and the impact the girl's disappearance has on them. All the chapters after the first begin the same way, "At midnight when the year turned," like refrains in the stanzas of a prose poem. Sentences and words are rhythmically repeated. People have dreams about Rebecca "walking home. Walking beside the motorway, walking across the moor, walking up out of one of the reservoirs." A "creeping normality" sets in. In simple, quiet, and deliberate prose, McGregor describes the passing months. The seasons change, "bees stumbled fatly between the flowers and the slugs gorged" while "in the dusk the wood pigeons gathered to roost." The villagers—Jones the carpenter; Jane Hughes the vicar; Sally; Liam—go on with their lives. "It went on like this. This was how it went on." The pantomime is performed every December. "Dreams were had about her, still."A stunningly good, understated novel told in a mesmerizing voice.
