Last April, when his Costa award-winning novel Reservoir 13 was published, Jon McGregor gave an interview in which he took polite issue with the praise heaped on him throughout his career for writing about “ordinary” lives. “It’s quite an othering statement,” he said. “My take is that nobody is ordinary to themselves. Everyone’s life story is interesting, complicated and nuanced.”
As a position, it’s irrefutable – but to me it seemed to undercut McGregor’s formal experiment. Despite Reservoir 13’s classic crime-fiction set-up (it opens with the New Year’s Eve disappearance of a 13-year-old girl), the book soon reveals itself to be the chronicle of a community, in which the lives of the inhabitants are merely threads in the wider warp and weft of village life. The novel is delivered almost entirely in the passive voice: sentences that are framed as subjectless observations (“they were seen”; “questions were asked”) gradually accrete to create an atmosphere of local gossip.
The book, which spins out languidly over 13 years, is a dioramic masterpiece; a quietly revolutionary reappropriation of the novel-as-Bildungsroman, in which individual voices are subsumed into the communal one. It’s an astonishing achievement, both effective and deeply affecting – but in its structure and ambition, it seems to be almost the antithesis of an interrogation of the extraordinariness of individual lives.
With The Reservoir Tapes, which was originally broadcast on Radio 4 as a series of short stories, McGregor has squared the circle. The book returns us to Reservoir 13’s hills and valleys and shifting seasons, but here the collective voice of the novel has fractured. Instead of a broad but shallow composite perspective, the stories, each from the viewpoint of a single character, present a series of narrow but far deeper insights, altering our understanding both of the familiar landscape and the actions of the people moving through it.
Set in the months leading up to and the days immediately following the loss of the girl, Becky, The Reservoir Tapes has the effect of retrospectively casting the sourceless shared consciousness of the first book in a sinister, rather than lulling, light: as a great, slow-moving river whose smooth surface conceals myriad quick, vicious currents beneath, ready to catch at your feet and pull you under.
Despite the scenes of search parties and helicopters that kickstarted Reservoir 13, a critical aspect of that novel was that the expected narrative arc – the mystery of Becky’s disappearance – was not pursued. By plunging us inside the heads of the village’s inhabitants in The Reservoir Tapes, however, McGregor appears to be offering a more conventional pass at the crime genre.
Motives emerge, alongside potential malefactors: the farmer who delivers his son to a prostitute, then attempts to abuse her after she relieves the boy of his virginity; the loner who invites a teenager into his kitchen, where he keeps a gun on the table; the bully who runs what passes locally for a criminal underworld. Even the landscape turns out to have previous. In the fourth story, told from the perspective of Graham, a conservationist at the national park, girl guides are led on to the moors on a butterfly safari but are overtaken by a “rolling milky mist”. One girl becomes separated from the others and steps “into a deep crevasse, hidden by the tussocks of bog-grass”. If she hadn’t thought to blow her emergency whistle, Graham reflects later, the chances are “she would have still been down there now”. This is terrain that has already opened up to swallow a girl whole. Finally, there’s Becky herself, who in the first book is present only as an absence, the hollow at the centre of the whirlpool. Here, she appears on the pages – living, breathing and causing chaos: a 13-year-old firebrand who runs wild, hides out and leads the kids she hangs out with in disquieting not-quite-games.
The extent to which she is implicated in her own exodus is ultimately left unresolved – as are all the other possibilities that The Reservoir Tapes raises. In the book’s second story, which unfolds on the night of the search, the main character, Vicky, overhears “someone talk about expanding the search zone, which she guessed meant they had very little idea where the girl might be”. It’s neat shorthand for the book itself: in The Reservoir Tapes so many possible lines of inquiry are offered that we end up no wiser than before.
It’s not until the final chapter closes that one can see this book for what it is: an extension of the formal experimentation that was begun in Reservoir 13; a millefeuille confection of layers of ambiguity and occlusion that conceal even as they promise to reveal.
• The Reservoir Tapes is published by 4th Estate. To order a copy for £7.49 (RRP £9.99) go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
