/ _ |

A new Jon McGregor novel would be the highlight of any year – and this one will I can confidently say be a literary highlight of 2021.

The wonderful Reservoir 13 starts as a missing girl mystery but almost immediately becomes an multi-voice exploration of how quotidian dramas play out against the rhythmic seasons of village life and the natural world, while time continues to pass incessantly.

This book his latest (due to be published in April 2021) starts as a book around polar exploration (the author having visited the Antarctic with the British Antarctic Survey around 20 years ago I believe) and about survival in a calamity in extreme conditions. But over time it turns into an exploration of communication and story telling, and an examination of how true heroism can simply be found in the need to navigate and adapt to unexpected challenges of circumstance in normal life.

The blurb of the book already gives substantial information on the plot (perhaps even slightly too much – I would recommend not to read it as it dissipates some of the tension of the first part, which while not really the core of the book, still is an essential part of it) and at this stage (4 months prior to publication) I would not really want to add any more.

As I said communication and storytelling as a theme recurs through the novel – and in fact it’s the retrospective exploration of this idea that helped me realise the importance of the first section. We have: the contradictions of the initial training and its inability to map to a real world crisis; lost radios and then intermittent radio contact; uncharged and unused satellite phones; drifting GPS co-ordinates which tell a story which is not appreciated until too late; scheduled radio check ins with base which serve as a sign that all is well – with the absence of communication triggering an emergency.

In the second section we see the difficulty of expressing oneself in a foreign language; Bridget as someone who would be a great listener if only she could stop talking; Robert’s incessant relaying of tales of his exploration on his trips home and Anna’s final and ominously prescient request for silence; Anna’s love of the silence of the meetings of the Society of Friends; the different languages and alien communications of medical and legal professionals and technical experts.; Anna’s son’s comments on her monosyllabic shut downs; the story telling of an inquest report (and the trade off between having a story that makes sense to the victim’s family and not having any apportionment or admittance of guilt); speech therapy and communication workarounds (which then form the base of the third section).

One of McGregor’s greatest skills is his remarkable ability to voice a community: the street in his debut novel “If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things”, the chorus of voices in the remarkable “Even The Dogs” and of course the village in “Reservoir 13”. We see this perhaps most strongly in all of his writing in the book’s third section as the therapy group come together; by the final scene of the “showing” we are both able to identify immediately individual voices, and to understand the story they are trying to tell, even though a superficial examination of the voices would render them largely meaningless.

Other links to his previous books:

Here of course we have a group of people who would very much like to speak of normal things (let alone remarkable ones) but struggle to do so.

Readers of “Even The Dogs” will remember an inquest – and a man called Robert whose detailed and accurate testimony would be crucial but is missing (albeit for a very different reason).

Readers of “Reservoir 13” will see that the author’s ability to capture the natural cycles of an English village apply equally the breathtaking but harsh Antarctic landscape (and cleverly not just in the author’s own words but in his ability to capture the ability of Robert and a dancer, to capture this in slurred speech and mirrored movement.

And some links to my own life: I have a couple of tangential links to the BAS via University; my first job was with an insurance company founded by the Society of Friends; but most importantly both my late father and mother have suffered strokes: my father several (and a brain hemorrhage) and my mother only 12 months ago which means much of the book rings very true indeed.

Strongly recommended.

/ _ I

”Everyone’s story is important, she assured them”

/ _ |

Lean, Fall, Stand is a story about storytelling and about communication.

I want to start by saying that, in my view, the book blurb communicates rather too much and does a bit too much storytelling of its own. I would advise not reading it before reading the book itself, if you can possibly avoid it. If you read the blurb, all the tension disappears from the first part of the book. In truth this doesn’t really matter because that tension is a very minor part of the book, but the fact is you don’t know that whilst reading the book and it did taint the book a bit for me.

I had to pause about two-thirds through the book and gather my thoughts. And it was at this point that I realised the way the blurb had spoiled the tension of the first part didn’t really matter because the first part was about something other than a tense story. The reason I had to pause was that I started to feel that I was almost reading three separate, but related, books. That was in the early pages of the third part (the parts are call Lean, /, Fall, _, and Stand, |), and it is that part the gives the key to the book and its themes of storytelling and communication.

Part one (Lean, /) tells the story of an Antarctic expedition that goes wrong. You maybe don’t notice it at the time, but it is full of miscommunications, white noise, broken lines of communication and the unraveling of one person’s ability to communicate at all.

Speech therapy and alternative means of communication play an important role in part two (Fall, _). Again, there are multiple references to different forms of communication, often this time focusing on how difficult it can be to understand when you are on the receiving end (technical/medical talk, for example) or how much we are bombarded by communication in our lives (one character’s love of the silence in Society of Friends’ meetings is telling).

And the speech therapy theme develops in part three (Stand, |) which celebrates alternative forms of communication and ways to tell stories.

There’s a lot, lot more in the book about storytelling and about people’s struggles to communicate.

So, perhaps it is very deliberate on the part of the author and publisher to dissipate the tension of the story in part one so that other themes rise to the surface. Perhaps I am being unfair in criticising the blurb.

I can very much see this book as a movie. It has the drama at the start, the emotion and struggle in the middle and the perfect cinematic ending.