Roger Brunyate's Reviews > Reservoir 13

WINNER OF THE COSTA NOVEL AWARD, 2017.

A Pennine Almanac

They gathered at the car park in the hour before dawn and waited to be told what to do. It was cold and there was little conversation. There were question that weren't being asked. The missing girl's name was Rebecca Shaw. When last seen she'd been wearing a white hooded top. A mist hung low across the moor and the ground was frozen hard. They were given instructions and then they moved off, their boots crunching on the stiffened ground and their tracks fading behind them as the heather sprang back into shape. […]

Opening sentences. A missing teenager, the possibilities on everybody's mind. The dangers of the terrain and weather, rocky hillsides, the reservoirs and swollen river, the disused mines. And human dangers, not articulated as yet. In clean declarative sentences with hardly even a comma, Jon McGregor describes the search, which goes into a second day and then a third:

[…] The divers were going through the river again. A group of journalists waited for the shot, standing behind a cordon by the packhorse bridge, cameras aimed at the empty stretch of water, the breath clouding over their heads. In the lower field two of Jackson's boys were kneeling over a fallen ewe. There was a racket of camera shutters as the first diver appeared, the wetsuited head sleek and slow through the water. A second diver came around the bend, and a third. They took turns ducking through the arch on the bridge and then they were out of sight. The camera crews jerked their cameras from their tripods and began folding everything away. One of the Jackson boys bucked a quad bike across the field and told the journalists to move. The river ran empty and quick. The cement works was shut down to allow for a search. In a week the first snowdrops emerged along the verges past the cricket ground, which it seemed winter had yet a way to go. At the school, in the staff room the teachers kept their coats on and waited. Everything that might be said seemed like the wrong thing to say. […]

This comes from the middle of only the second long paragraph, on the fourth page of text, but two things have changed already: it mentions names, and it includes happenings that have nothing to do with the girl's disappearance. That nature note about the snowdrops made me sit up; it seemed irrelevant, even callous. But that is McGregor's point; the life of the village must go on; the sheep must be tended on a daily basis, even when something as terrible as a missing girl disrupts the routine. And nature too has its cycles, totally unaware of human tragedies. John Wood's review of McGregor's novel in the New Yorker compared it to an almanac, and that's in part what it is: a meticulous account of the natural history of a small English village, the cycle of seasons repeated over the course of thirteen years, one chapter for each, one paragraph for each month. McGregor's writing is extraordinary, his sensitivity to sight, scent, and sound, the breadth and detail of his vision:

[…] There was talk. In the meadows Thompson's men worked the baler along the lines of cut grass, the thick sward gathered up and spun into dense bales. Every few hundred yards the tractor paused and there was a tumbling inside the machine and a neatly wrapped bale rolled softly from the hatch onto the field. The wood pigeons laid eggs in their nests in the beech wood and in the horse chestnut by the cricket ground. They took turns sitting on the eggs, but there were still plenty stolen by magpies and crows. On the bank above the abandoned lead pits the badgers started coming out of their sett before dark. The sows with cubs were looking for food and the boars were looking for mates. There were conflicts. […]

I put ellipses before and after these passages to show that they are all part of much longer paragraphs. I had a hard time finding an extended passage of nature writing, because most often McGregor interleaves a line or two about the natural world with passing remarks about the people that live in it; the following passage is more typical:

[…] White campion thronged the verges along the road towards town, their neat flowers wrinkling as the seed-heads began to swell. In the beech wood the young foxes were ready to move on. It was Martin's turn to put together the Harvest Festival display at the church, and despite regular promises not to let anyone down he disappeared at the last moment. Irene and Winnie stepped in. The river turned over beneath the packhorse bridge and ran steady to the millpond weir. Lynsey Smith came home from Leeds and moved back in with her parents. […]

Such brief references to people do make the novel a challenge to read. On page 7 alone, 13 new names are introduced, mainly children and teachers in the village school. The cast will continue to build over the next dozen pages, to a total of around 60, all in brief references of seldom more than a sentence or two at a time. Again, I have to demonstrate:

[…] Lynsey Smith said it was a safe bet Ms. Bowman would ask if they needed to chat. She made finger-quotes around the word chat. Deepak said at least it would be a way of getting out of French. Sophie looked away, and saw Andrew waiting at the other bus stop with Irene, his mother. He was the same age as they were but he went to a special school. Their bus pulled up and James warned Liam not to make up any bullshit about Beck Shaw. It snowed and the snow settled thickly. […]

Copying this out now, it seems very different from when I first read it. I now feel I know Lynsey, Sophie, Andrew, Irene, and James at least, because I have followed what became of them. But at the time, they were just so many names. McGregor doesn't introduce them, but refers to them as casually as though you already know them, which of course you don't. I wondered if I should be keeping notes. Fortunately, having seen McGregor use a very similar technique (though in a an urban context) in his first novel, If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things, I knew to trust him. But it is hard to put your normal character-based expectations on hold. Indeed, it is wrong to speak of "characters" at all. McGregor does not focus on one or two figures to propel his plot. Instead, he takes us into the midst of an ecosystem, in which no one person is more important than any other, and the lives of human beings is merely one of many cycles, along with the plants, and the animals, and the weather. His combination of human and natural stories reminded me of Jim Crace's Being Dead, one of the most extraordinary novels I have ever read, and that put me at ease.

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But there is a difference. Crace, for all his detail, is describing an imagined world. McGregor depicts a real one. I had assumed originally that the village was somewhere in the Yorkshire Dales, Wuthering Heights country. But repeated references to something called "well dressing" eventually made me look it up, and suddenly everything came into focus. Well dressing, apparently, is the custom of decorating wells, springs, and other water sources with pictorial boards covered with moist clay with flower petals and other natural materials pressed into it to make the design. And it is practiced almost exclusively by certain villages in the Derbyshire Peak District.


Derbyshire well-dressing designs

Apart from one happy holiday week when I was a child, and a couple of outings with the Cambridge Climbing Club, I do not know the Peak District as well I might. The word "peak" is a misnomer; this is rocky moorland which barely reaches 2,000 feet above sea level, part of the Pennine chain that makes the backbone of England. But it is superb hiking country, rugged and challenging, and by the same token potentially dangerous in bad weather. Looking up photos of the area soon made me feel at home in the landscape of McGregor's novel. I felt them under my feet, the paths leading up the hillside from the valley below. I knew the sheep sheltering in the lee of a drystone wall. On the top, I breathed the bracing air as I looked down over the many reservoirs to the agricultural land below. And I now understood several of the references that had puzzled me before, such as the flagstones laid on the fragile moorland to create the hiking paths, or the ancient packhorse bridges, one horse-width wide, that are also a feature of the area.




Views in the Peak District


Holme Bridge at Bakewell, Derbyshire

It is about scale and completeness and continuity. My sense of scale finally made my give in and stop sweating the small stuff. I became more aware of McGregor's music, his use of repetitions, symphonic movements shaped by the seasons. And feeling at home in the landscape gradually made me feel at home with the people too. No, I couldn't always place everyone, and I can't say that I had my heart in my mouth wondering how anyone's particular story would turn out. But I did begin to get to know many of them, much as one gets to know one's neighbors and is genuinely interested to hear that their daughter is getting married. McGregor plays into this by giving longer sections to some people as the book nears its end. It is not about bringing closure to a particular story—McGregor is not big on closure—but making you feel that you are no longer a stranger in the village, but connected, at one with its rhythms, one of them.

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My Top Ten list this year is selected from a smaller than usual pool. I really only started reading again in May, and even then deliberately kept new books to under 50% of my total. In compiling the list, I also did not exactly follow my original star ratings, but rather the takeaway value after time has passed. In particular, there are two books, Lincoln in the Bardo and Go, Went, Gone) to which I gave only 4 stars, but which I recognize as important books, with more staying power than many that I enjoyed more at the time, but have since forgotten.

For some reason, three of the ten books (Forest Dark, A Horse Walks into a Bar, and Three Floors Up) are by Jewish authors, set in Israel. To those, I would add a fourth: Judas by Amos Oz, read at the same time and of similar quality, but actually published at the end of 2016.

The ten titles below are in descending order (i.e. with The Essex Serpent being my favorite). The links are to my reviews:

1. The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry
2. Autumn by Ali Smith
3. Forest Dark by Nicole Krauss
4. The Heart's Invisible Furies by John Boyne
5. Reservoir 13 by Jon McGregor
6. A Horse Walks into a Bar by David Grossman
7. Exit West by Moshin Hamid
8. Three Floors Up by Eshkol Nevo
9. Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders
10. Go, Went, Gone by Jenny Erpenbeck

And half that number again that didn't quite make it, in alphabetical order by authors:

11. Souvenirs dormants by Patrick Modiano
12. All We Shall Know by Donal Ryan
13. Improvement by Joan Silber
14. Anything Is Possible by Elizabeth Strout
15. Rose & Poe by Jack Todd