McGregor teaches creative writing, and it is evident from all his works that not only does he have prodigious talent, but that he is unashamedly happy to push boundaries too. The genius of Reservoir 13 is that both everything happens and nothing too. While the novel opens conventionally enough with the disappearance of a teenage girl from a small village in the Peak District, the novel focuses on the rhythms and reverberations on the community. Some readers were frustrated that the girl is never found, even by the novel's close, but this is to miss the point. There is a haunting and elegiac quality to McGregor's prose. Life has to go on. What we see is a narrated, distanced portrait of the sheer ordinariness of people's lives: tragedy happens, but so do moments of elation. Nature plays an important role in the novel, as do people. Seasons change; people change. Think of Reservoir 13 as a meditation on time and loss through change. Individual voices become communal, similar to If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things. This is a novel that will stay long in readers' minds: nine and a half out of ten.
By Jon McGregor