Obsessed by the Number 13

Gallery Cafe Book Club

EVERYONE thought that Reservoir 13 by Jon Mcgregor was an interesting read, albeit slightly frustrating.

Set in the early years of this century, during mid-winter, a teenage girl goes missing while on holiday in the Derbyshire hills.

The search for the girl continues for several years – but becomes secondary to the exploration of village life and the yearly cycle of the natural world.

The name of the village is not provided and I thought that Mcgregor had created a composite picture of many Derbyshire villages.

However group members who had lived in Derbyshire for many years thought the village was Bamford, near Hathersage, in the Dark Peaks.

Lots of natural monuments are mentioned but their names are a variant of the actual places.

The writer is obsessive with the number 13, the girl’s age, the nearby reservoir, the number of chapters.

There are 65 characters in the book, 35 in the first chapter. Linking the various names into family groups was challenging, especially as names appear randomly throughout the text.

Village life is minutely observed, featuring marriages, divorces, working from home with young children, children growing into teenagers then going off to university.

There are no secrets, as gossip revolves in and around the village shop.

The descriptions of the natural world, the landscape as well as the wildlife, are beautiful.

At most times this is a single phrase or a short sentence.

In general most of the sentences are short, flicking from a person to an animal to an incident to a sighting connected to the missing girl.

There are also some very funny one-liners which break the tensions within the village, and the meetings of the parish council are very revealing.

Three years ago Jon Mcgregor was interviewed at a Derby Book Festival event. He said that he expected readers to keep up with the large number of characters.

The tone of the novel was passive, and reflected the community voice. He is interested in the mundane details which paints a picture of village life.

He also wanted to portray the abundance of nature, and had to undertake lots of research to find 13 different facts about each animal or bird, (badgers, foxes, swallows, etc).

No one in the group could shine a light on “Mischief Night” nor explain if there was any significance in the number 13.