Reservoir 13 - Jon McGregor

This was my first Jon McGregor novel and I'm sad to say it was a bit of a disappointment for me! Reservoir 13 was first published in 2017 and won the Costa prize, as well as being longlisted for the Man Booker, which gave me high hopes for the book. The synopsis was so promising - a missing girl in a remote landscape and a village coming together in search of a body - and I was really expecting a crime thriller which would leave me on the edge of my seat and keep me engaged throughout. It began well, and I quickly warmed to McGregor's style, but sadly this was not the narrative I had hoped for.

The book is set in the early noughties, in the middle of winter - bleak, eerie, and the perfect moody setting for a mystery. A thirteen-year-old girl has gone missing without a trace, and the villagers come together to form a search party and head out across the moors. This is certainly a subtle book, and the plot is not the driving force of it - I can appreciate this as a style, but we all know I like a good plot! I was expecting the case of the missing girl to be the main thread of the novel, with the case and suspects unfolding throughout the narrative. But McGregor's aim with this book was clearly to focus in on the lives of the locals, and how the disappearance impacted both the girl's friends as well as the people in the village. The narrative zooms in on different families and individuals who have been affected by the event, detailing the mundanity and cyclical nature of their everyday lives - which inevitably continues.

This novel is fairly stylised and there were many aspects of language and form which I really enjoyed - the chapters were very much governed by season, not only to identify how much time had passed since the last chapter but also to signify the fact that life will go on and the seasons will continue to change. Although life may be at a standstill for the people affected by the trauma, McGregor aims to highlight the inevitability of nature and time. Perhaps I should've read some reviews of the novel before I began it, and then I would've known not to expect answers about the missing girl - sorry for the spoiler, but I wish I'd known! - because ultimately, you don't find out what happened to her. But despite being pretty annoyed about this realisation when I got to the end of the novel, I can now look back at it and appreciate McGregor's use of language and symbolism. I would like to read McGregor's other popular novel, If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things, and focus more on appreciating his use of language and descriptions of nature. Sadly this was another case where the blurb of a book was pretty misleading for me!