The Reservoir Tapes

Starred review from May 15, 2018
McGregor revisits the world of his Costa Award-winning novel, Reservoir 13 (2017), grimly complicating everything.This novel and its predecessor are organized around the same mystery: A 13-year-old girl named Rebecca Shaw has disappeared while walking on an English moor with her mom and dad. The parent novel then glides omnisciently through village life for the next 13 years, describing divorces, death, the changing seasons, and dreams haunted by Becky Shaw. It is a lyric experiment, with the details of an almanac or poetic gossip rag, and it is at once mesmerizing and subtly tragic: Lives unfold impassively, with a minimum of both intention and result, while the reservoirs swell with rain and foxes give birth and Becky slowly fades from memory. Now, in this companion volume, McGregor has taken a different approach, brilliantly repainting (in mostly darker hues) a village we thought we knew. The book's conceit is introduced in the first chapter: In the wake of Becky's disappearance an interviewer arrives to collect stories and "help to build a picture." The following 14 chapters are those stories, rendered in an urgent, close third-person. In some we meet Becky alive, a precocious "live wire" who leaps into a flooded quarry, smears dirt onto a self-conscious boy's face, and steals an apple from an old woman's garden. In others we are offered glimpses of her possible fates: stumbled into a sinkhole, run away from home, fallen afoul of the "bogeyman figure" who's briefly suspected by the police in the early pages of Reservoir 13. But, as with its predecessor, this book is not singly concerned with Becky. In fact, her disappearance is used--by the narrator in Reservoir 13, by the interviewer in its sequel--as an excuse for observation, a reason to listen to the gossip and mark the seasons, a reason to dive beneath the surface of a place to grapple with the lives and stories transpiring there.On its own, this book is a noteworthy event. When put in conversation with Reservoir 13, it is nothing short of a remarkable experiment in storytelling. McGregor is a must-read writer.

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June 18, 2018
On the heels of his Man Booker Prize–longlisted Reservoir 13, McGregor brings readers back to that novel’s English Midlands village, subtly shining new light on the novel’s central mystery: the disappearance of 13-year-old Becky Shaw. When a reporter arrives to conduct a series of interviews about the girl’s disappearance, the tightly knit villagers try their best to go on with their daily lives: squirming their ways out of stagnant marriages, leading Girl Guide expeditions, and risking lives working in the quarries. Becky and her outsider parents exist as a sort of background noise—a terrible, still unsolved event that lingers over the years. Readers are spies into the lives of those affected by Becky’s absence, and into those affected before she disappeared: the young teenager who flirted with her, the lonely women who once caught her eating apples in her backyard. McGregor is a maestro at demonstrating the reverberations of catastrophe across space and time, building strong backstory and consequences in only a few lines. As a standalone, the novel is quietly consuming, but as a companion to Reservoir 13, it serves as an exquisite elaboration on the mysterious characters that are the heart of both novels.

Starred review from July 1, 2018
Her name is Becky; she's 13, and she's gone missing from an English village. Her absence serves as the catalyst for this remarkable collection of linked short stories that takes us into the lives of a group of the villagers, some of whose lives are directly touched by Becky's absence but most of whom have in common only the village setting. The first story is in the form of an interview with Becky's mother, but, in a bit of a tour de force, readers are given only the interviewer's questions, leaving it to them to infer the woman's answers. Readers see Becky most clearly in a story in which she and a group of teenagers go swimming in a reservoir and then, led by Becky, torment the boy who, a weak swimmer, has refused to join them in the water. Or consider the woman who pursues one-night stands to save her faltering marriage; or the man who, in a darkly amusing story, attempts, in the company of his insufferably chatty friend, to buy a dog and winds up with something quite different. McGregor demonstrates an extraordinary ability to create complex, multidimensional characters in only a few spare sentences. He is also a master of mood, investing his stories with an air of the ominous while proving also to be a superb stylist (bees buzz fatly in foxgloves; a baggy flock of crows lift from trees). Irresistibly readable, the book is, in sum, a memorable celebration of literary fiction.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)