Reservoir 13

People wanted the girl to come back, so she could tell them where she'd been. There were too many ways she could have disappeared, and they were thought about, often. She could have run down from the hill and a man could have stopped to offer her a lift, and taken her away, and buried her body in a dense thicket of trees beside a motorway junction a hundred miles to the north where she would still be lying now in the cold wet ground. There were dreams about her walking home. Walking beside the motorway, walking across the moor, walking up out of one of the reservoirs, rising from the dark grey water with her hair streaming and her clothes draped with long green weeds.

Reservoir 13 immediately opens with a mystery: A thirteen-year-old girl, Rebecca (Becky, or Bex) Shaw was last seen moodily following behind her parents on a hike through England's Peak District, and at some point, she simply disappeared. A search party is assembled, detectives hold news conferences, the local village (in which the family had been holidaying) cancel the annual New Year's festivities out of respect, but the girl is never found. What follows is no thrilling whodunnit, but rather, a slow-moving examination of this tragedy's effects on the local village – the ways in which life changes, but more so, the ways in which life goes on – and in a nod to the thirteen reservoirs in the surrounding hills, the narrative plays out over thirteen chapters, covering the ensuing thirteen years. The teenagers who had briefly gotten to know the Shaw girl are followed as they go through high school and university and enter their adult lives, there are births and deaths amongst the other villagers, marriages and divorces, strangers move in and familiars move away, and behind everything, nature blithely rotates through the seasons; from bud to harvest; from rut to wean. This is unlike anything I've read before, and while I found it somewhat hard to enter, patience does pay off: Jon McGregor just might win the Man Booker Prize with this moody experiment.

There are several blurbs of praise from other authors in my edition of this book, and part of what Sarah Hall says is, “Reservoir 13 is a unique feat of communitarian storytelling”. While I can't find a definition of “communitarian” as a literary technique, this book would seem to serve as its exemplar. An omniscient narrator flits among every character in the village (from the Vicar to the badgers under the hedgerow) with hardly any breathing space between each. The following excerpt is typical of this, and despite its length, only a third of one paragraph:

At the butcher's for May Day weekend there was a queue but nothing like there once would have been. Nothing like the queue Martin and Ruth needed to keep the shop going. Martin had been keeping this to himself, although it was becoming obvious and nobody asked. Irene was at the front of the queue telling everyone what she knew about the situation at the Hunters'. She did the cleaning there, and knew a thing or two. You can imagine what it's like for the girl's parents, she said. Having to watch us all down here just getting on with things. Ruth saying but surely the village couldn't be expected to put life on hold. Austin Cooper came in with copies of the Valley Echo newsletter and laid them on the counter. Ruth wished him congratulations, and he looked confused for a moment before smiling and backing away towards the door. Irene watched him go, and asked if Su Cooper was expecting. Ruth said yes, at last, and from the back of the queue Gordon Jackson asked would there be any chance of getting served before the baby was born.

There are just enough characters in this book to make it hard to keep them straight by name alone, but McGregor does a fine job of adding enough context that he doesn't need to continually write “Jones the custodian” or “Thompson the dairy farmer”. And while there isn't much given by way of back story for anyone, following them over thirteen years paints a full picture of everyone. And everything. For example, the first time “well dressing” was brought up, I had no idea what that meant. But one year there will be a mention of soaking the boards for the well dressing, another year, someone draws out a plan for the well dressing. After thirteen years, I had a pretty complete picture of everything that's involved with this custom. And that pertains to the whole as well: what isn't clear about the people or setting at first will all eventually be filled in; what a remarkably satisfying effect this format develops. 

I also really enjoyed the rural setting and what changes a picture painted over thirteen years captures. I loved that the local Estate employs an old-fashioned riverkeeper, while out by the reservoirs, a wind farm is built. I liked the image of urban activists coming out to protest the opening of a new quarry (with their tents and drumming) while the unruffled locals knew to keep their windows closed and their laundry indoors when the blasting starts. I appreciated that an organic green grocer's in the bigger town over makes more profit than a local butcher's; that the biggest worries of the parish council concern verge maintenance and parking issues. And as the book ends and some of the local houses are being bought up as second homes by Londoners, I had to wonder how things might change going forward.

As for the mystery of Rebecca Shaw: there are anniversary commemorations and babies born after the fact who will grow up to ask questions, but as the pages I had left to read began to dwindle, I fretted that I would be left without an answer. Along the way, over the course of the years, secrets are revealed that raise the prospect that one or the other of the locals might have been capable of harming the girl; just as likely that one of the many abandoned mines, peatbogs, or cloughs had swallowed her up. The lingering uncertainty drives the narrative forward while adding dread to the atmosphere (every time a diver entered a reservoir for routine maintenance, I expected him to surface with a skull). That McGregor is playing with the reader by undermining expectations seems guaranteed.

Reservoir 13 wasn't my favourite, so far, on the 2017 Man Booker longlist, but it has a lot of the elements that the prize's jury seems to perennially gravitate towards: experimental format; the encapsulation of a particular time and place; a focus on humanity. I wouldn't be unhappy if it won; I'll seek out prior works by the author either way.

The Man Booker 2017 Longlist: 

4 3 2 1 by Paul Auster 
Days Without End by Sebastian Barry 
History of Wolves by Emily Fridlund 
Exit West by Mohsin Hamid 
Solar Bones by Mike McCormack 
Reservoir 13 by Jon McGregor 
Elmet by Fiona Mozley 
The Ministry Of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy 
Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders 
Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie 
Autumn by Ali Smith 
Swing Time by Zadie Smith 
The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead 

Eventually won by Lincoln in the Bardo, I would have given the Booker this year to Days Without End. My ranking, based solely on my own reading enjoyment, of the shortlist is:

Autumn

Exit West

Lincoln in the Bardo

Elmet

4321

History of Wolves