The Reservoir Tapes

Could you

could we

if we could just talk a little bit about Becky. If you could describe her for me. In your own words. What she was like when she was younger. How's she's changed from being a child to being a young teenager. What her – gifts are, if you like. Any challenges there have been. Anything she has found difficult. Anything that comes to mind.

I know

                               I know this is difficult

                               this must be very hard for


                               of course.

I must have been pretty effusive in my Goodreads review for Jon McGregor's Reservoir 13 because his American publisher contacted me privately to see if I'd be interested in reading a related novel before its release in the States; um, yes please. What a delight, therefore, to have discovered The Reservoir Tapes in my mailbox this week; and what a further delight to have been so captivated by this read. I understand that these fifteen short pieces were originally commissioned by and performed on BBC Radio 4, and while I can see the appealling tension of listening to one per week over the course of a few months, I'm sure I much preferred the experience of reading them on the page, close together, and recognising where one person's story chimes with another's. (I especially enjoyed Ginny's chapter – spaced into stanzas with poetic line breaks – that I can't imagine was apparent to the ear.) 

Essentially, this book records the recollections of residents of the village where a thirteen-year-old girl has gone missing – some stories occuring in the aftermath, some just before, some recalled from long before – collected by some unnamed “interviewer”. The first chapter (quoted from above) is solely from the interviewer's POV, without the corresponding answers, and I wasn't sure if I'd like the format. But every chapter after that is from a third person POV; each focussing on one character, and serving to fill in the people who were so sketchy in Reservoir 13. This is a totally different kind of book from the one that came before, and I don't know how satisfying it would be as a standalone read, but as a companion piece, I was deeply interested and found myself to be ultimately satisfied. This book is more about the people than the landscape (the nature writing and progression of the seasons was outstanding in the earlier work), but the setting still plays its part:

The flat heather moorland was featureless to the untrained eye, but in fact was teeming with detail: the bilberries and bog grasses, the mosses and moths and butterflies, the birds nesting in scoops and scrapes, the bogwater shining in the late-afternoon sun. The warmth was rising from the ground already, the sky a rich blue above the reservoirs in the distance. A hundred yards away, a mountain hare broke from cover and thundered across the heather.

Just as the flat moorland might seem “featureless to the untrained eye”, so too were the lurking dangers of this village (and of the villagers themselves) underplayed in the first book. In one chapter, the story of a Girl Guide who once fell into a sinkhole (in the same area where Becky later disappeared) is recounted:

It seemed the prolonged dry spell, following months of rain, had caused a sort of rupture between different layers of peat, those layers shifting and opening up a deep crevasse, hidden by the tussocks of bog grass.

The summer before her disappearance, Becky went swimming with a group of local kids; sneaking through a safety fence (and perhaps provoking a young man to later seek revenge against her):

People talked about how deep the water was, and how cold. People said it would be impossible to find your body if you drowned. People said a lot of things.

In one character's story of a long ago quarry accident, we not only see the obvious physical danger but learn more about some of the relationships between the villagers:

There's always a pressure to get the job done. And then some small thing goes wrong. Something geological. The temperature changes, the ground shifts, and all of a sudden you're a man lying in the dirt with a ton of rocks stacked up upon him.

Not only is the setting fraught with these hidden dangers, but one would do well to be wary of the villagers themselves: We meet a man with a shotgun who acts creepy around children; a squatter in the woods who makes grown men quake with fear; a woman who knows all too well that sometimes children simply walk away. In one section, a developmentally challenged young man assures his mother that Becky was fine, “He knew a few things and he knew she'd come to no harm”. And in the final, moving, chapter we meet Becky's mother and father; finally learning their names and why they were on this holiday. 

I remain delighted to have had this opportunity to revisit McGregor's world, and while I would reiterate that this slim volume (it only takes a couple of hours to read) might not make complete sense on its own, it was an intriguing companion piece to Reservoir 13.