What happens to people when a girl goes missing

Reservoir 13, Jon McGregor's fourth novel and first for seven years, opens with a familiar scene: a child has gone missing (on the moors of Derbyshire) and in the foggy dawn, a gaggle of locals are organised into a search party. They fan out, searching in the heather, a helicopter above them. It's a scenario we've seen countless times on television, on the news and in the kind of grim police procedurals that dominate evening schedules.

McGregor is a novelist, not a scriptwriter. His first book, the Booker-nominated If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things, was an earnest young man's novel; energetic, florid and sentimental. By the time of his third, the Impac-winning Even The Dogs, the voices were more complex, more full-bodied, less given to the writer's flights of fancy.

In each case, the book centres on a death, a single event that the characters circle around. Watching news footage on television one day, McGregor realised that a missing child might be the same kind of spark: a framing device that casts a whole world into motion.

There's a lot of books about missing girls, missing women, murdered women, and they always end up focusing on the woman as a dead body

“The image I had in my head had been taken from a helicopter, this line of people strung across the moor,” he says. “I was always wondering what it would be like to be part of that search. Imagining that you’d start out, at the beginning of the day, being very earnest and serious and focused and upset about what you were doing.

“But that at some point, presumably, you would inevitably lower your guard somehow and just be talking about more mundane, everyday things. [You’d] Start worrying about how long you were going to be, whether you were going to get back in time to feed the dog, or whatever. You’d sort of feel guilty about letting life intrude like that, but it would be inevitable.”

Mystery

The book follows this train of thought for 13 years in the lives of those involved with the search. The missing girl is the talk of the town for the first few months, until gradually the incident fades into the background. Sometimes it echoes again, when her father is spotted out walking or when the village teenagers talk among themselves.

People are affected, none more so than the girl's family, but everybody moves on and eventually it's just something that happened. With this fading comes the realisation there isn't going to be an answer, and we will never know for sure what happened to the girl. Reservoir 13 is not a crime thriller and McGregor has no interest in solving the mystery.

“There’s a lot of books about missing girls, missing women, murdered women, and they always end up focusing on the woman as a dead body,” he says. “They’re always about the woman as an object and there’s something really uncomfortable about that. I wanted to very genuinely leave it open. The girl has disappeared, but she might be fine. She’s got her own life, she might just be doing her own thing – that’s part of the spectrum of possibilities. I wanted to hold that open and I wanted to just be a bit more realistic about the fact that life doesn’t neatly resolve. People do disappear and there is no closure. Why should a book be so neat and tidy like that?”

Reservoir 13 is similar in many ways to McGregor's earlier books, with a narrative style that floats between characters, rarely settling into a single voice or a single perspective for any length of time. The sense is always of a communal scene, a fascination with the way life emerges between people, and not entirely through the eyes or mind of an individual. In this case, it's the voice of the village that emerges, the voice of what McGregor calls "a gossiping community who aren't really taking responsibility for their own gossip".

“No one ever says, ‘I saw so-and-so coming out of someone else’s house’,” he says. “It’s always just ‘so-and-so was seen, it was said that something something’. That was a lot of fun to play with. In my head, it’s not really an omniscient narrator, it’s more [that] the collective consciousness of the village is the narrator.”

Where the characters in McGregor's first novel in 2002 were almost self-consciously diverse – a snapshot of a multicultural Britain in the early years of New Labour – Reservoir 13's villagers are more closed off, more sceptical of strangers and outsiders, more tightly knotted into each other. McGregor grew up in a small town in Norfolk and, while the Derbyshire village where Reservoir 13 is set is quite different, there is an obvious understanding of the dynamics of a small, relatively homogenous community. He credits some of this to the experience of growing up in a vicarage; his father was the local Church of England vicar and there was, he says, "a lot of life in the household".

“You get a lot of people ringing up to arrange funerals and wanting to arrange baptisms and weddings, you get people coming to the door. You get all of that life going on in a way that is just incorporated into daily life.”

McGregor's father died just a couple of years ago and Reservoir 13 is dedicated to him. One of the most interesting characters in the book is a vicar, and the story of her passion for a job which is rarely understood, and her commitment to a diminishing congregation, is one of the more moving threads running through the narrative.

Life is short, we're not here for long, the world goes on without us

“I think I just had all that to hand without having to think about it,” says McGregor of the character. “I wasn’t really conscious of that while I was writing it, and I certainly wasn’t writing that character as any kind of tribute. I’d pretty much finished the book before my dad died. Before your parents die, you take them for granted completely so it wasn’t on my mind at all. I think I got quite near the end of the book and I went, ‘Oh yeah, she’s quite a nice character, she’s good at her job’. That reflects quite well on my dad and I’m quite pleased about that.”

19th-century novel

In one sense, Reservoir 13 is not unlike a traditional 19th-century novel, a mini-Middlemarch with Facebook posts, city commuters and staycation cottages. It is an attempt, however condensed, to tell the story of an entire community, and through that to capture something of the nature of life in a particular time and place. The events in any individual character's life are somehow less important than the sense of time moving on, blithely absorbing every scrap of energy we have, every plan or mistake we make. It's not intensely dramatic, but then life rarely is.

“Life is short, we’re not here for long, the world goes on without us,” says McGregor. “That can be a very scary thought or a very despondent thought, or it can be quite an uplifting thought. It just is. But within life being short, it’s very intense and very complex and very nuanced and very specific. I like the balance between those two notions.”

Reservoir 13 hangs in that balance, an accumulation of births, deaths, marriages, betrayals, petty grievances and private triumphs blurred into a humming vision of something like life.