Jon McGregor has been quietly building a reputation as one of the outstanding writers of his generation since 2002, when he became the youngest writer to be longlisted for the Booker prize with his debut, If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things, published when he was 26. Reservoir 13 is only his fourth novel, but it confirms his gift as a poet of ordinary lives and his skill in taking risks with form and style.
After the experimental narrative of 2010’s Even the Dogs, a story of drug and alcohol addiction told in fragmented bursts by a series of urban ghosts, Reservoir 13 may seem, at first glance, a more conventional and pastoral novel. This could come as a relief to those who felt the stylistic devices were too much to the fore in its predecessor. But Reservoir 13 offers its own subtler experimentation; a short way into the book, it becomes clear that McGregor has succeeded in pulling off one of the most difficult tricks in fiction – a true ensemble piece of storytelling.
Reservoir 13 opens with the classic trope of a crime novel: Rebecca Shaw, a 13-year-old on holiday with her family, goes missing at New Year on the hills above an unnamed Peak District village. The locals are marshalled to help with search parties; for a while, the quiet village achieves national fame: “At the visitor centre television trucks filled the car park and journalists started to gather.”
But this is not a thriller; McGregor is not interested in the missing girl’s family, nor the investigating detectives, who remain peripheral figures without names. Instead, the focus is all on the small community disrupted by a tragedy that may or may not have a direct connection with them. The author’s concern is with the way people go on with their lives, not only in the immediate aftermath but over the course of the next 13 years.
Gradually, in painstakingly accumulated detail, the reader becomes familiar with the villagers as if he or she lived among them: their shifting allegiances, their small sorrows and disappointments, the efforts they make to put on a brave face to their neighbours.
This is a novel that demands patience of the reader, but rewards it a hundredfold. McGregor achieves his effects with a careful layering of repetition, mirroring the turning of the years, as children grow up and move away, marriages are made and broken, older residents inevitably succumb to illness or death and people continue to imagine what might have happened to the missing girl. His descriptions of the landscape, wildlife, local traditions and economic concerns are rendered with careful precision, so that there is a sense of being rooted absolutely in time and place, even as the lack of exact dates or geographical location lend the story a universal, elegiac quality.
He writes in even, measured sentences that appear purely descriptive, detailing the progress of the natural world with the same attention he gives to the lives of the villagers. Yet the simplicity can be deceptive; McGregor is a writer of great compassion and insight who can convey a character’s heartache or loneliness in a few brief lines. There are moments of tenderness and others of unexpected, snort-aloud comedy.
Inevitably with such a large cast, some characters fail to feel as fully realised as others and McGregor is not in the business of definitive resolutions. But there is no doubt that Reservoir 13 is an extraordinary achievement; a portrait of a community that leaves the reader with an abiding affection for its characters, because we recognise their follies and frailties and the small acts of kindness and courage that bind them together.
• Reservoir 13 by Jon McGregor is published by 4th Estate (£14.99). To order a copy for £11.24 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
