Jon McgregorReservoir 13: A Novel

I think I just discovered a new (for me) favorite author. British author Jon McGregor is unconventional, to say the least, and not what you may expect. Sure, the beginning is as a page ripped from the headlines—a 13 year-old girl goes missing from a northern English village. “When last seen she’d been wearing a white hooded top with a navy-blue body warmer, black jeans and canvas shoes. She was five feet tall, with straight, dark blond, shoulder-length hair.” Subsequently, the novel leaves the genre crime thriller behind. It becomes one of the most transcendent novels I have ever read, gently illuminating a portrait of a town and its people in a style closer to Virginia Woolf with a Michael Ondaatje sensuality.RESERVOIR 13 marks the life cycle, the microcosmic ecosystem of people and nature juxtaposed and turning year after year, the quotidian hum observed as from an omniscient eagle flying over the landscape or skimming over the terrain. The author has impeccable control over his narrative, glancing freely from one inhabitant to another, pairing with nature. The bats hibernated, the foxes gave birth, pheasants lift their plumage, people die, the clocks move forward or back.There is no one protagonist and no specific plot. Instead, there are themes of repetition, of community life and its social interplay, the way we inhabit our space, even the way McGregor inhabits space on the page, repeating certain sentences throughout the novel, marking time as infinite. We note the undercurrent of male violence. We observe the way people and nature affirm the cycle of perpetuity, regardless of individual struggles and in the face of our intimacies, secrets, personal tragedies, betrayals, and eventual obscurity. The community endures.Rebecca Shaw is the missing girl, and the author keeps her in the consciousness of the reader and the villagers with ceaseless rhythms and repetition, echoing her name as the narrative advances. “The missing girl’s name was Rebecca, or Becky, or Bex.” There are 13 reservoirs, thirteen chapters, thirteen years. Every chapter save the first and last begins with, “At midnight when the year turned there were fireworks…”The crystalline prose is truly exquisite, and its beauty made me gasp. All events are equal, and often in the same paragraph, the natural world and the domestic one coexist equally. This may be the only book I’ve read where I felt that almost entirely using the passive voice worked so magnificently to create the right mood, atmosphere, and superb restraint.“In August the young bats moved away from their mothers’ milk and the nursery colonies broke up. Their networks of flight were complex and unseen. They flung themselves through the grazing meadows taking dung beetles and moths while the adults began finding mates. On the baking stone path beside Reservoir no. 5 a slowworm was basking, and was taken by a buzzard to feed her chicks. Richard and Cathy were seen having lunch again at the new organic pub in Harefield. Questions were asked as to why they felt it necessary to go that far. Inferences were drawn. The cricket was canceled for weather, and the Cardwell team didn’t come over for drinks as they had done in previous years. Su and Austin Cooper had their twentieth anniversary.”There isn’t a moral point to this story. The emphasis and our attentions aren’t focused on one episode or another. The missing girl doesn’t age as years go by, she was sealed at thirteen, as she alternately surfaces like the seasons or is buried in their minds behind the everyday continuation of village life, and the world keeps on turning.

This book was dense and at time I was pretty well wrapped up in it. But, in the end, the style did not work for me. Whatever reader tricks I use to keep track of characters just didn't do it in a text that presented diary-like paragraphs about lots of people all run together, with no quotation marks and often not a clear feeling whose story a sentence belonged too. And maybe that was the idea. But in the end, I felt vaguely depressed, more like a voyeur than a reader. I am impressed with how much Jon McGregor did within those limitations. And maybe it's the times, and at a time when the world was not such a gray and dreary place, I would have felt better about this book. But it ended up bringing me down with not enough other value to make that worth it--although I'm not sure if I have expressed what I am trying to say very well!

After finishing this novel it took me awhile to sort of step back and think about how I really felt about it. When I first saw this book recommended for me I thought how strange I don't like Mystery novels and ignored it. Then I looked at it closer several months later and realized it's not a mystery novel at all. I think that is where some of the bad reviews come from, people who were expecting some elements of a mystery novel. The only thing mysterious that happens here is that a teenage girl disappears but we don't really spend much time trying to figure out how or why. Sure, there are possible reasons that are bandied about by the towns people, the police, other teenagers who sort of kind of knew her, but the main character in Reservoir 13 is the town and it's people and how the disappearance of the teenage girl may have affected the town, or maybe the point really is that her disappearance didn't affect the town much at all in the grand scheme of things. Everyone continued to live their lives, they went to school, went to their jobs, or found new jobs, fell in and out of love, had children, grew old, make mistakes and generally after awhile a sort of monotonous poetic beauty emerges from the narrative where we are given brief encounters with a plethora of people and their day to day and eventually year to year activities.Some people will and from the 1 star reviews find this boring. I found it hard to put it down once I started, not because I was expecting the girl to be found or some clue to be unearthed, but because I felt the writing and the story of the town beautiful and compelling. I almost felt like I was watching a local news channel. I think one of the greatest compliments I can pay Jon McGregor is that there were times I had to remind myself this was a work of fiction. Perhaps because essentially there is no story here is why is felt so raw and real.My only real complaint was that there were so many characters we come to know that after awhile I felt as if I was mixing some of them up and I almost felt like I needed a spreadsheet to keep track of them all.

A great read. Will read others by this author.

There are only three books I have failed to complete reading in 50 plus years. This was the third!