Book Review: Reservoir 13 by Jon McGregor

Reservoir 13 won the Costa Novel Award in 2017, but has very mixed reviews from readers on Amazon. So I knew before I started this would be be an unusual novel and not to everyone's taste, but I was completely blown away by it.

In the early years of the 21st century a 13 year old girl goes missing whilst on holiday in a Peak District village. The book follows the life of the village and villagers over the next 13 years. Each chapter covers 1 year of village life. There's no denying that the narrative style is unusual: there are no paragraphs and no "main characters". Instead the omniscient narrator seems somewhat removed from what is happening as he narrates on the annual cycles of the plants, animals and humans in the village, almost as if for a documentary, and therefore the reader feels somewhat removed from the characters. No character is given any more importance in terms of storyline or word count than any of the others. The prose is sparse and the details gleaned about each character are few and far between but over time the reader does feel close to each character and begins to feel that they know them intimately. Indeed the reader becomes totally immersed in the rhythms and life of this small, un-named rural community. At the same time the natural world and its seasonal rhythms are described with poetic beauty, often reminding me of the novels of Melissa Harrison (http://thisreadingmummy.blogspot.com/2018/03/book-review-clay-by-melissa-harrison.html).

There are no extraneous words in this novel. It is remarkable how McGregor manages to say so much and create such beautiful pictures and so much empathy for characters with so few words. The magic comes in the ordering of the sentences. A sentence or 2 about one character (always providing a snippet of important information about their life - sometimes heart breaking, sometimes brutal, sometimes funny) before moving on to the next character or village event, interspersed with fascinating details about the natural world.

I found this to be a beautiful and very affecting novel. I could not stop thinking about the characters. A real triumph of descriptive writing, celebrating the power of words to convey both pictures and emotions. I would wholeheartedly recommend it.