No Beating Heart

Reservoir 13 by Jon McGregor

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


I always start on a book with high hopes. Life is short and my to-read pile is selected carefully. I had loved John McGregor's 'If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things' and 'Reservoir 13' sounded equally compelling. The story of a missing girl. A community torn apart. Broadchurch, but in the hands of a mesmeric writer. No wonder it had made it onto the Booker long list.

At first it was fine. Brilliant even. With the distance of a camera lens McGregor hovers over the drama unfolding in the heart of a rural village. A teenager called Rebecca, visiting the area with her parents, has disappeared. Locals, shocked and discombobulated, are gathering to assist in the search. McGregor's voice is poetic. As time passes, it moves like a laser beam back and forth across every aspect of this small patch of the world, from the goings on in burrows of nesting animals to scenes taking place in the kitchens and meeting rooms of the villagers - dozens and dozens of them, protagonists all.

Except, with so many lives mentioned, it started to become a blur. No one and nothing in particular is highlighted, not even the missing girl. As the seasons pass everybody and everything receives equal, fleeting attention, whether it is people, places, or animals. And so it continues. For thirteen chapters and thirteen years. (Thirteen, geddit?). The crime, if that is what it is, barely gets a look-in. Children grow up, teenagers go to university, marriages falter or settle, relationships start up and fall apart. Babies are born, people die. Bats feed their young. Snow falls. Melts. Badgers and foxes prowl. The wheel of nature keeps turning. As do the lives of the villagers. While the water levels in the thirteen nearby reservoirs rise and fall. For thirteen years. Or maybe I already mentioned that.

The genius of the core idea is plain to see. And for a while the reader is kept on tenterhooks, turning the pages because something - SOMETHING - surely, has to happen. John McGregor has famously said that he is "allergic to trying to make points in fiction" and I applaud him for that. However, for me the tenterhooks dissolved. Though poetic, the voice he used began to feel increasingly distant and devoid of energy. Just as the supposed dramas going on in the lives of the villagers grew increasingly remote, almost like events on a check-list. Same for the nesting animals. (Apart from the herons, I was always pleased when one of them got a mention.) But all that other stuff just went on and on and on: more foxes born, more pints poured, someone moves in with someone, someone else moves out. I was soon not so much mesmerised as quite bored.

Generous critics have described the tone of 'Reservoir 13' as 'sinister'. I found it merely cold. There was no hook to make me care properly for any of the characters. Worse, there was no sense that the characters themselves were ever - even during the early days - truly fraught about the missing girl. The teenager who had kissed her should have been scared at the very least, or conflicted about not coming forward, or racked with.....something! Likewise the girl's parents were merely reported visiting the area, together, then separately, then with other people ie their relationship fell apart, but we are never invited deep enough into the narrative to care about that either.

Yes, shock can induce numbness, and even the greatest tragedies are met by the reality of life ploughing on. But for me it was getting to the end of 'Reservoir 13' that took the ploughing. I even started to count the pages - the reader's equivalent of watching the clock. And if that was John McGregor's aim, then bravo. But there is a world of difference between recognising something is clever and being genuinely engaged by that cleverness. A book needs a beating heart and I couldn't find it.



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