A missing teenage girl, a rural northern setting, a close-knit community. So far, so cliched. But Reservoir 13 is no run-of-the-mill murder mystery; on the contrary, it's much more subtly affecting than that. Author Jon McGregor seems to take delight in confounding our expectations by toying with the tropes of the genre. We're sucked into searching for clues and speculating about suspicious behaviour because we think that's how it works - and it usually does. But we're blindsided to discover that McGregor isn't so much serving up red herrings as playing a different game altogether.
Reservoir 13 is about what happens when tragedy strikes, its shadow hanging over a place - but also about what happens as that shadow gradually recedes and the incident fades from memory. The novel is primarily a portrait of a community, and of the dramas that unfold both daily and over time: people growing up and growing apart, relationships repaired and disintegrating, separations and reunions, infidelities and incompatibilities, joy and pain.
Each chapter recounts the events of another year, the steady and even pace dictated by the passage of time and the turning of the seasons (in this, there are similarities with Benjamin Myers, though McGregor's descriptions of the natural world are less wide-eyed and lyrical).
But what is most remarkable is the way in which it is told: from the perspective of an omniscient narrator who observes from afar/above but misses nothing, making regular gossipy insinuations and routinely reporting that the characters are "seen" to be doing things. This style gives Reservoir 13 a sinister feel, the reader rendered uncomfortably complicit in the narrator's merciless surveillance of the community and drawn into the role of a voyeur. As unsettling a book as I've read for some time.
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