"Reservoir 13" by Jon McGregor
This is an extraordinary novel and it has been enthusiastically praised by well-known critics, in particular by James Wood in The New Yorker. It is a portrait of life in an English village, probably somewhere in the Derbyshire Peak District and on the edge of 'the moors'--we hear a lot about the moors, the walkers on the moors who pass through the village, the sheep that get caught in the snow.
The novel starts with a girl who goes missing on the moors and the search and police investigation that follows. And over the course of the novel there are echoes of that disappearance, although no solution to the mystery is provided, and gradually it fades from the collective village memory.
The novel covers thirteen years in thirteen chapters, each starting on New Year's Eve with mention of the fireworks and usually ending with the amateur Christmas pantomime. We follow a fairly limited cast of characters over the thirteen years, the dairy farmer and his sons, the butcher whose shop has to close, the editor-writer-producer of a local weekly newspaper and his wife who works for the BBC and has twin sons, and others whose lives are intertwined in village life--teenagers who grow up and go to universities, a couple of semi-criminals living in a caravan, the vicar of the village church...and others. There is nothing sensational about their lives,
relationships come and go, and in some ways this is, I feel, the intention--to show the ordinariness of life as it flows along from year to year.
And the background is the annual cycle of nature, described in beautifully written detail. The fox cubs being born and raised. The coming of the swallows in Spring and their departure in the Autumn, and the reverse for the fieldfares. The blossoming of the primroses. The annual routines of planting and harvesting in the allotments (U.S. Victory Gardens). The weather, the rising and falling of the water in the river, the need for the bridge to be repaired. The heron in the river.
All extraordinarily well-written. And I am sure the critics are right about the book...but, dare I whisper, it can get a little tedious and even (again, dare I say it?) a little boring....