A short novel about a girl going missing while on holiday near a reservoir. Atmospheric and riveting at times as I kept expecting Becky’s body to be discovered, but disappointed as there was no real ending to the story.

Companion novel to one of my favourite books of 2017, Resevoir 13, this novella looks at the lives of the people living near the reservoir in the run up to the disappearance of the young girl. Beautiful, precise character depictions, the only thing I didn’t like about it was that it was too short, just as I was really getting into it, it ended!

Jon McGregor’s Reservoir 13 stepped out life in a small town, year by year, over the 13 years since a teenage visitor, Becky Shaw, went missing. One of the most powerful aspects of the novel was the lack of sensationalism about the disappearance; it was mentioned in the first year or two, but faded into the backstory. Occasionally a piece of clothing would turn up or a memory would be stirred, but it was merely incidental.

So the Reservoir Tapes is a companion piece. In that first year, we have 15 narratives from 15 different people regarding Becky’s disappearance. Bookended by the two parents, there is puzzlement, sadness and a great deal of indifference demonstrated by the town’s residents.

I believe this was first conceived as a series of short radio broadcasts, so each narrative is roughly the same length and self-contained in terms of telling a story with a beginning, a middle and an end. Each narrator has a quite different voice, each has an agenda…

Just like Reservoir 13, the pitch is gentle, subtle and beguiling. There is as much told through reading between the lines, spotting what is not being said, as by the words themselves. This is a perfect companion piece that adds significantly to Reservoir 13 without taking anything away.

Reservoir 13 was without doubt, one of the standout books of 2017.

A book which was shortlisted for two prizes at either extreme of the Book prize spectrum: the Goldsmith Prize (designed to reward fiction that breaks the mould or extends the possibilities of the novel form) and the Costa Prize (which focuses on recognising the most enjoyable book of the year) – a book both mould breaking and hugely enjoyable and which was inexplicably omitted from the disappointing Booker shortlist (despite making the much stronger longlist).

I particularly enjoyed reading a recent profile of Jon McGregor and his work by James Wood in the New Yorker (link below)

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/11/27/the-visionary-power-of-the-novelist-jon-mcgregor

This article draws out the common themes in what seems like a very disparate set of novels that McGregor has written in his career (4 novels – one of which won the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the other three of which were Booker longlisted) and identified that one of these is a sense of McGregor capturing an entire community, but that in Reservoir 13 with its innovative style “There is little direct dialogue. There are no moments set aside for privileged epiphany or revelation”.

Another key part of Reservoir 13 is that it starts with the disappearance of a young girl – Becky Shaw – staying at a holiday cottage in the village, but the impact of that disappearance fades over the 13 years in which the book is set.

The Reservoir Tapes is very much a companion piece to Reservoir 13 – one that explores more the community of that novel, but in this case in a much more conventional way and with little other than individual reflection and with more space for privileged epiphany or revelation. Further Becky’s disappearance, the events leading up to it and those immediately following it are much more central to this book.

The Reservoir Tapes is a series of 15, 15 minute radio episodes (Mc Gregor had hoped for 13 episodes of 13 minutes each, as the number 13 plays more than just a role in the title of the previous book) which are being broadcast on Radio 4. Each episode is named after a character and written from their point of view – some are familiar characters from Reservoir 13, some characters unnamed but present in that book, and others new characters but with strong links to the village. This book is the script of those broadcasts.

To say too much more would be to dampen the pleasure of the book itself.

If you have read Reservoir 13 and loved it then this book is a must buy (I can only equate it to finding that Jane Austen had actually written a Pride and Prejudice companion), if you have not read it then but that first but then this.

And if you have read Reservoir 13 and did not love it .......... then well I really have nothing to say to you.

My thanks to 4th Estate for an ARC provided via NetGalley.

Reservoir Tapes is a collection of short stories written as a prequel to Reservoir 13. I found though the stories were very well written and I felt I knew the characters as the stories are short nothing comes to fruition .I would think you would need to have read Reservoir 13 to fully appreciate the stories .I didn't feel it stood up as a stand alone book .

I really enjoyed The Reservoir Tapes. You really need to have read Reservoir 13 to fully appreciate these tales.

I enjoyed every tale in this collection.

Not every story solely focused on Becky’s disappearance. Many of them touch on it in some form or another but for the most part Becky’s disappearance serves as a springboard for other secrets and revelations. I liked this because I was expecting to read stories that were just other people’s opinion of Becky.

Some of the stories, especially towards the end of the collection had pretty dark overtones as it’s revealed Becky is not as sweet and innocent as originally thought.

I loved the idea behind The Reservoir Tapes and wish more authors would do something similar.

Prequel to Reservoir 13 this radio broadcast brings together the stories of a community devasted by tragedy. They link events that happened before and after the disappearance of 13-year old Becky while she was walking on the moors with her family. Each tale has its own uniqueness but together they give an in-depth portrait of individuals affected by Becky's absence and consequent hunt. Extremely well written, each portrayal offers a nugget of information and possible solution to what might have taken place.

Written in the same hypnotic style as Reservoir 13, this set of short prequel stories is a companion piece which offers some further insights into the lives of those affected by the disappearance of Becky, including some glimpses of Becky herself. The stories are also available as a BBC podcast after their broadcast on Radio 4.

"They'd agreed to talk to Becky about it later, when they went out for their walk."

Reservoir 13 will, I strongly suspect, end up as my book of 2017, one of the most innovative and enjoyable books I have read for years. My review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2007440422

It told the story of an English village for the 13 years after the disappearance of a 13 year old girl, Becky Shaw, but in a unique way. In the author’s words from a recent interview:

"The narrative spark came first. And it was only once I realised that I'd landed myself with a rural novel that I understood how fully I wanted to immerse the reader in the landscape and the multiplicity of lives lived there. I imagine it's similar when an artist makes a drawing of a landscape – it's only once you start hatching in the detail that you realise how many rocks and trees and grasses and birds there actually are.

The structuring came after the writing, mostly. I wrote a series of texts for each character, animal, plant, weather condition, work routine, village tradition, location, etc (statisticians might care to know that there were 13 of these categories, with 13 examples in each category...) and once I was done I laid that text out across my timeline of 13 years. There were a lot of ring-binders involved, and scissors and Sellotape. It was rather chaotic, but I quite quickly landed on the rhythm I was looking for – the rhythm of the non-sequitur, where things are just happening one after the other and in fact one and the other at the same time, without having to gently guide the reader between events and observations."
https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2017/11/jon-mcgregor-i-wanted-show-how-we-normalise-male-violence

The Reservoir Tapes was (were?) commissioned by BBC Radio as a prequel to Reservoir 13 - and thanks the publisher via Netgalley for the ARC.

It contains 15 (a little disappointing it wasn’t 13) ‘tapes’ or chapters, in the form of monologues, told as a 3rd person limited narrative, giving the story and perspective of one particular character. The organising idea - hence the name - is than an interviewer has gone around taping interviews with local people about their lives in the months leading up to Becky’s disappearance and in the immediately following days, then transcribed them in the form of these accounts.

Although McGregor doesn’t adhere too rigorously to the form. In the first tape where we here only side – the policewoman’s – of the official interview with Becky’s mother, here named as Charlotte, after Becky officially becomes a missing person. Some of the tapes are more told as stories, and others are private recollections very unlikely to have been shared with anyone.

McGregor has referred to the Tapes as a detective story where the reader is expected to do some work and fill in the gaps, and part of the fun for the reader is tracing links between them – a scream heard in one story can be traced to an incident in another, similarly an argument in a pub in the neighbouring village.

In particular several of the stories (those of Graham, Liam, Claire, Donna, Ian and Ginny) are set on one summer day a few months before the start of Reservoir 13, on the Shaw’s first visit to the village. Becky first meets the rest of the local teenagers, they go rather feral at the quarry, and later Becky herself goes missing for a while, prefiguring her actual and more permanent disappearance on their 2nd visit that winter. Meanwhile – and perhaps a little too much of a narrative coincidence – a girl guide falls into a sinkhole on the local moors and is rescued after an extensive search.

Another group are set in the immediate period before and also after Becky’s disappearance, as the search and police investigation commences, most poignantly the final story, told from the point of view of her father, named here (but not in Reservoir 13 where to the villagers he just remains ‘the girl’s father) as Joe.

And others journey back through time, some to incidents completely unrelated (or at least it seems so) to Becky’s story.

And we’re introduced to some brand-new characters, notably Donna, Claire Jackson’s best friend, and Vicky an old friend and now colleague of Graham at the Visitor Centre.

But the biggest attraction to Reservoir 13 aficionados (which should be everyone) lies in recognising the various familiar characters and learning more about their back stories. If I was writing a blurb for such a reader, it would be:

Discover:
- The truth behind the façade of the Hunter’s marriage
- To whom arch-seducer Gordon Jackson lost his virginity
- Why Liam is the butt of all the jokes amongst the teenage gang
- When Martin the butcher first met Woods, his later partner in red diesel smuggling
- How a quarry accident to Irene’s husband led to Tony acquiring the Gladstone Pub
- And what Becky’s parents were going to tell her on their last walk together

The Tapes don’t explain what happened to Becky – McGregor has made it clear that he himself doesn’t know, and there is no between the lines solution to be found. But the various characters and stories do speculate on a number of possibilities: she succumbed to exposure; she fell down a sinkhole; she drowned in the quarry; she was kidnapped by the man with the gun who also tried to abduct Deepak (a later story resolves this one) or another character whose sinister side we learn in one story; she ran away from home – possibly as a result of what was said on the walk, or perhaps general teenage angst. Irene’s son Andrew claims to know the truth but will only assure Irene that ‘she is safe.’

I am not generally a fan of audiobooks – but here the words were written to be read on the radio, so an audiobook –or the BBC podcasts (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b097n5h3) – is the more natural format for this, but, that said, it still works surprisingly well on the written page.

And as a stand-alone book (or audiobook) it doesn’t have quite the same stunning originality as Reservoir 13. Indeed the style is very different to Reservoir 13 – none of the non-sequiturs, and the focused perspective and the entering into characters thoughts is actually a complete contrast – but it complements it beautifully.

A wonderful Christmas present for the Reservoir 13 fan in your life (which may be yourself) – and if he/she isn’t yet a Reservoir 13 fan, buy them that as well.

Comprising 15 short character studies, this is both prequel and complement to [book:Reservoir 13|33283659], filling out backstories and details of people in the first book. Read as a standalone, it feels like a literary exercise: all the characters and tales are deft and full of possibilities but they don't come to fruition in this volume.

An interesting idea to back-fill an existing text.