Reservoir 13

During school time I find it difficult to read. I start a new term with noble intentions, resolving to read at least half an hour a day- to be the reader I wish my students to be. Unfortunately, it’s not long before this pragmatism undergoes a chemical change, vaporising into idealism, before reducing into absurdism. After marking assessments, correcting books and planning lessons, I’m mentally exhausted. 

Good prose should be a stimulant: lead to increased brain activity, prove pleasurable and invigorating. When taken on a busy working day though, its impact isn’t just negligible, but contrary. A writer’s finest passage is no match for tired eyes. Literary magic cannot compete with life’s sleepy dust. Yes, acclaimed authors your sentences are hypnotic: hypnotic enough to send me under, to put me to sleep. At least your harshest critic reads to the end of the book; I don’t even get to the end of the page.  If lauded authors saw the soporific effect of their writing, they would give up tomorrow, citing 'existential crisis' in their press release, wailing: “If my work meant anything, it should be able to sustain an English teacher into turning one page.” 

Do not be offended authors. I mean no offence. Its just reading- like sex- is a young man’s game: I can’t do it like I used to. Just give me a nap and I’ll try again in the morning.

In the holiday though I’m a different animal. I’m a man possessed. I’m popping books left. right and centre. I’m dancing to an author’s tune all night long. I’m having it large. A wild week of excess, a literary bender, a total blowout until responsibility comes calling. This week I’ve read Jon Ronson’s Frank and Reservoir 13 by Jon McGregor. I’ve also started The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead. I’ll try and finish Whitehead’s book before Monday, otherwise it will be the Easter holiday until I’ve found out what’s happened.  

Me on books.

McGregor’s book is the one that I feel compelled to write about. I try to read a lot. I often like what I read. I attribute this to my friends, who have great taste, and the Radio 4 show A Good Read, where famous faces nominate their favourite books. However, it’s rare that I truly love a book. The last book I got really fanatical about was Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. As a teacher I’ve taught Of Mice and Men for years: I still think it’s wonderful. What it is though is small, contained, a fable in many ways. I didn’t know Steinbeck could examine something with the rigour he does in The Grapes of Wrath. Its style is different too with the plainness of Mice replaced with something more ornate. I read it nearly two years ago. It’s taken me that long to fall for a book again.

McGregor’s book begins with the village disappearance of tourist and teenager Rebecca Shaw. From here on we would expect the book to be a generic crime-drama, a who and whydunnit. However, it never becomes that story. In an interview with The Guardian McGregor explained that he wasn’t interested in telling a murder mystery, rather he was more piqued in “the passing of time and routines of life, the dailyness of life.” For someone unwilling to write a Broadchurch­-type narrative, McGregor ironically uses the tricks of crime fiction: the red herring is there, only it isn’t a suspect, but the body. Rebecca is the MacGuffin that the reader focuses on, unaware the true mystery being exposed is life itself.

It isn't like Broadchurch.

What’s most impressive about this book is how it combines style and accessibility. McGregor’s story has thirteen chapters, each focussing on the year and subsequent years of the girl’s vanishing. To tell a story of a year in one chapter is something of an undertaking: David Nicholls managed it in One Day and McGregor executes it here. The latter’s approach is different though as where Nicholls adopted a fill-in-the-gaps approach to an annual form, McGregor gives us the details. Through sliding in and out of people’s lives in just a few sentences, he chronicles the major life events of villagers, somehow without leaving any out.

Each chapter begins at New Year fireworks.

In some respects the book reminded me of Dylan Thomas’ Under Milk Wood. In that play for voices, Thomas dropped in and out of character’s lives, registering triumphs and tragedies in poetic prose. Other reference points in my eyes were Keats and Heany’s nature poems, To Autumn and Blackberry Picking respectively. Since McGregor doesn’t just record the life cycle of humans, but nature too. So good is the depiction of the natural world, I thought the author must be something of a naturalist. According to an interview with Booker Prize winner George Saunders this isn’t the case: McGregor likes a stroll just like the rest of us, but most of his descriptions he argues comes from Google research and ‘a lot of smoke and mirrors as well.’ Expanding on this he reasoned, ‘There’s not a ton of detail about any one thing. There are a ton of things about which there is some detail.’ I think the writer doth protest too much. There’s not many layman that could write: 

The last days of August were heavy with heat and anything that had to move was slow. At the allotments the beds were bursting with beans and courgettes, the plants sprawling over the pathways. The bees stumbled fatly between the flowers and the slugs gorged. 

Lazy writers couldn’t capture listlessness so well. McGregor hasn’t experienced the countryside vicariously through search engines, he’s walked amongst it, breathing it in; his exhalations are seen on the page.

At school I was more interested in Human Geography than Physical Geography: the same applies to the book too. I still read the passages on nature, because I’m keen to know about a world I never experience; however, what I really enjoyed was tracking the characters. The whole of human life is here: the schoolteacher, the caretaker, the farmer, the landlord, the hotelier, the journalist, the student, the outsider, the vicar. Not one of these characters takes priority. There is no leading man or lady. This is an ensemble cast that coalesce to form a drama every bit as enriching as Chekov or Dickens. Look below at how he achieves this:

Along the river at dusk there were bats moving in number, coming down from their roosts to take the insects rising from the water. They moved in deft quietness and were gone by the time they were seen. The Spring Dance ended early when a fight between Liam Hooper and one of the boys from Cardwell spilled back in through the doors. It was soon broken up but by then there’d been damage and the Cardwell boys were asked to leave. Outside in the car park Will Jackson was seen again with Miss Carter from school.

The book and author.

The bats are returned to throughout the book. As in Of Mice and Men, the natural world mirrors the human one with them doing what they can to survive. Then, it’s the Spring Dance, an annual village fixture that we come back to in future chapters. The rivalry with the neighbouring town (Cardwell) is touched upon here, a motif that’s developed further through allusions to cricket. And look at that last line: a single sentence on a blossoming romance between farmer and teacher. This is the village condition: a dichotomy of public and private life where everything is observed (‘was seen again’), and nothing remarked upon. A surveillance state of compassion. Nosiness resting in seclusion.

That’s the thing I think I will take away from the book: society in action. No character is without fault. One may even be a killer. But all are of virtue. A favourite passage of mine involves Les Thompson, a parishioner, and the vicar Jane Hughes. After service, he asks her to come over. A village enjoys the benefits of a bygone age – closer community ties- but the disadvantages too – outmoded ideals. Les’ sister is dying, yet he can’t just come out with it. Therefore, it’s down to Jane to visit him on his home turf where he feels strong and masculine tending his cows. His avowal is beautifully rendered:

It took him a while to be out with it, and the cows were making a racket in the shed by the time he was done. She chatted to him a bit longer while he worked, and he turned down the offer of help. She collected these confidences from people, and carried them around. It was like piling rocks into the boot of a car, she told her dean once, and sooner or later there are too many rocks and the suspension bottoms out each time you hit a bump in the road.

Les struggles to open up, even in private to someone whose job it is to listen. His refusal to accept help could be viewed as a show of strength or the price of masculinity. For Jane, God’s work is both salvation and burden. Like a hobbyist, she enjoys collecting- only with her its problems, not stamps. The shift in verb from ‘collected’ to ‘piling’ indicates how there is a cumulative cost to her obsession: there’s only so many lives one can keep before you begin to lose a sense of your own.

In writing a book about a missing tourist, McGregor has unearthed a village’s soul. The book will be a disappointment to people who enjoy the big headlines of disappearance and murder; and catnip to those fascinated with park benches, headstones and obituaries: micro story dedications to quiet, remarkable lives.

Reservoir 13 is available in paperback now.