Missing girl story loses its way
Jon McGregor has been rightly celebrated for writing sophisticated, challenging novels that ignore the kind of on-trend themes and flashy plot points that land authors on the big awards short lists.
His work, written in a seemingly transparent style that achieves a remarkable range of literary effects, constitutes an ongoing meditation on and celebration of the quiet moments and incremental changes that constitute daily life.
This is not to say that McGregor is completely adverse to plot. His novel Even the Dogs, for instance, follows a group of drug addicts after their reluctant patriarch, an unemployed alcoholic, dies of a heart attack. Though not “rich in incident,” the narrative rarely flags as it draws together several broken lives into a moving group tableaux.
Given the nature of his previous work, it comes as some surprise then that McGregor’s latest novel, Reservoir 13, is structured around one of contemporary literature and film’s favourite storylines: the desperate search to find a girl missing under mysterious circumstances.
McGregor provides an optimum setting for the disappearance, an isolated village in the British Midlands, where even the locals are weary of the landscape, a veritable minefield of bogs, abandoned mines and reservoirs.
The novel opens over the Christmas holidays, with the news that 13-year-old Rebecca Shaw did not return to her family’s rented cottage the previous evening. Search parties are organized. Helicopters fly over the bleak moors. A group of local teenagers who’d gotten to know Rebecca are questioned by police.
When the police find no signs of the girl, her parents plea for information at a press conference.
This opening chapter, which covers the year between Rebecca’s disappearance and the following Christmas holidays, immerses the reader in the natural and human cycles of the village and countryside.
As the police and media interest die down and Rebecca’s family returns home, life largely goes on as it did before.
Each subsequent chapter chronicles another year of village life. Rebecca eventually achieves the status of a piece of minor local folklore, her presence occasionally felt by those who knew her or joined in the futile search.
McGregor is making a larger and perhaps more profound point than the conventional “missing girl” narrative, that the real tragedy of a lost loved one is that life does go on afterwards.
Children are born and the elderly pass away, love affairs run their course, children move away. Nature, especially, remains indifferent to family tragedy.
Unfortunately, McGregor’s point is muted by Rebecca’s tangential or nonexistent relationship to the novel’s principal characters, who remain passive witnesses to the tragedy.
Readers may well ask: Why didn’t a village girl go missing? Why have a missing girl at all if her tragedy all but disappears from the narrative after the opening chapter?
Perhaps McGregor considers himself too “literary” to concern himself with reader expectations or the conventions of the mystery novel. Wonderful writing aside, Reservoir 13 proves to be a frustrating tease. James Grainger is the author of Harmless, which also features a missing girl.