Reservoir 13 – Jon McGregor (4th Estate 2017)

The river ran empty and clear, turning beneath the bridge. There were clouds and the evening was dark and people moved through the streets with their heads lowered.

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Early in the novel the third-person narrator says ‘there was a weariness to proceedings’ as the paraphernalia for a police press conference is set up and taken down – a weariness that pervades the annual cycle of events in this story and seems embedded in its structure. It is this ‘creeping normality’ that is so disconcerting.

The gloomy memory of an unsolved mystery hangs heavy on the characters as they go about their village lives; it influences their perspectives and relationships, and colours the very landscape they exist in. Thus a place of great natural beauty, which has drawn tourists and holidaymakers, is subtly tainted: although the river ‘carried scraps of light to the weir’, ‘the butterflies rose like ash on the breeze’.

The ‘missing girl’ is the defining absence of the book and its setting. She is the focus –sometimes subconscious but always dominating – of all the characters. Some are busy trying to help find her; some are certain these efforts are futile; some remember her fondly or guiltily; some wish to move on from her disappearance. The cycle of seasons revolves and relationships between characters shift, as do attitudes towards the mystery. It is an absence through which McGregor cleverly explores the different personalities of the village: because she is no longer there, she can be altered to represent or mean whatever a character needs her to. She was ‘Becky, or Rebecca, or Bex’; ‘she could be close to six feet tall’; she elicits confessions; she raises suspicions; she prompts resolutions.

A particular strength is McGregor’s handling of time, which has the effect of burying characters’ memories of the girl deeper as each year passes. This is conveyed by the changing landscape according to season. Spring is signified by ‘a heady tang of nutrition coming up the from the land’, lambs ‘electric with life’ and how fledgling swallows’ ‘white flashing underbellies curved through evening.’ The ending of summer by ‘the smell of sap as it fell in the field’ and ‘the long steady evenings barely turning blue’. The stratification of the years that pass has the power to conceal and smother, harden and bury. But the memories of the missing girl never sink deep enough to prevent their effects.

And, of course, like the characters, the reader is waiting to discover what has happened to her. The village is surrounded by the numbered reservoirs, making the titular one prominent and ominous. Events or memories take place at different reservoirs but, inevitably, any mention of number 13 feels more significant. And imagery of violence abounds, bringing its additional weight: ‘At the top end of the beech wood a badger held a hedgehog down on its back and peeled it open.’ But McGregor is doing something unusual in this novel as he layers year over year, intertwines the threads of the police investigation, and alters the interactions between his characters. Arriving at the novel’s conclusion, forces a realisation in the reader that something else has been going on all along.