It has all the ingredients of a classic crime drama. A 13-year-old girl on holiday disappears on a lonely, wintry English moor. The tight-knit rural community solemnly hunts for her as helicopters buzz overhead. Press conferences are called, rumours circulate and the parents begin to lose hope. Hours, days, weeks and months pass, but in Jon McGregor’s enthralling new novel Reservoir 13, the girl remains elusive.
“I saw an image on the news of a search for a missing child, this aerial shot of 100 people spread across a hillside,” says the twice Booker-nominated 41-year-old of the starting point for his fourth novel.
“And it just got me thinking that if you were part of such a search, you’d start off feeling very focused, but sooner or later you’d inevitably let your guard down, start getting distracted by the fact your feet are wet, or that you’ve got to go back and feed the cows.
“Normal life intrudes on even the most heightened moments.”
That is exactly what happens in Reservoir 13. Normal life intrudes in the most unassuming but gradually spectacular way.
Taking place over the following 13 years, each chapter chronicles a year in the village and is broken down again into months. Children are born or grow into adults, old people die, there are couplings and separations.
And all the while, in the background “Rebecca, Becky or Bex” as she is repeatedly described, remains a missing 13-year-old.
It quickly becomes clear that Reservoir 13 isn’t a crime drama at all. It’s something much more significant: a story of the pace and sweep of real life.
“Actually, I hope that people don’t feel cheated that there isn’t some big revelation,” says McGregor. “I knew from the outset that I wasn’t just keeping what happened to the girl a secret: I don’t know and that’s the point.
“In John McGahern’s That They May Face the Rising Sun, or Tom Drury’s Grouse County novels, there’s a real enjoyment in being completely immersed in a community. It’s entertainment in a slower way.”
This is a theme McGregor has often explored in his writing. His 2002 debut, If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things, zeroes in on the lives of people on one street over a single day. The narrative of his previous novel, Even the Dogs, is from the point of view of a group of homeless people.
“I became aware of the parallels,” he says. “They’re collective character portraits, where the community is the character as much as each individual.
“In the street of If Nobody Speaks … it was very disjointed but still a community; in the village they’re much more self-conscious about the idea of community.”
But the major difference is that If Nobody Speaks … takes place in an obviously urban setting, but in Reservoir 13, McGregor writes brilliantly about the natural world, its rhythms, repetitions and intimate wonders.
Foxes, buzzards and hedgerows almost take on personalities of their own – perhaps deliberately so, given McGregor talks of having come to an understanding that “the natural world is much bigger than individual human lives”.
With such sparkling prose in these sections, it seems incredible to learn that McGregor felt out of his depth writing about a rural setting.
“It’s not my place – I’ve lived in the city for most of my life,” he says. “I cycle and walk a lot in the countryside, I appreciate trees and flowers and birds and stuff but I don’t know their names. I don’t know what it’s like to grow up in these places, to have ‘proper’ jobs like my characters do.
“I had to do a lot of research, and then make sure it didn’t feel like an almanac to the natural world in Central England.
“This is where the structure of the book really helped me: actually there’s only 13 passages about foxes spread out over an annual cycle. So I had to find out what they were doing in each month, and write a couple of nice sentences about each of those moments.
“Once you spread that through the book, it feels much more substantial than it actually is. Cumulatively it builds up quite a rich picture without being too dense.”
All of which makes Reservoir 13 sound methodical, prosaic, even. It is anything but. In fact, these snapshots of nature and humanity are layered into something tremendously powerful as characters and the landscape grow old together.
“What fiction can do when it’s set over this kind of length is make the reader feel they are taking part in the process of time itself,” McGregor says.
“Because of that you can feel very immersed in a story, complicit even. That can be so enjoyable.
“I really wanted to make sure that came across. In Reservoir 13, life goes on, even though some people may well read this book and find it too sombre.
“For me, though, there’s some comedy in there, real joy and, well, ‘life is beautiful’ type stuff.”
