‘Reservoir Tapes’ explores mystery and community

One of the most justly famous passages in literature is the final paragraph of “The Dead” by James Joyce. It’s late on a winter evening in Dublin. Gabriel Conroy is by the window, his wife asleep nearby.

He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, on the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

After I finished “Reservoir 13,” the strange, stirring novel that English writer Jon McGregor published last year, I thought of this passage repeatedly. The book focuses on the disappearance of a girl named Rebecca Shaw from a northern town, but it moves on to first the months and then the years that follow, the case lingering unsolved.

In his narrative, McGregor devotes almost equal amounts of time to describing the village’s people (a teacher is caught in possession of child pornography; Becky’s father lurches down a ravine) and the seasonal progress of its

natural world (“In the beech wood the foxes gave birth, earthed down in the dark and wet with pain, the blind cubs pressing against their mothers for warmth. The dog foxes went out fetching food. The primroses yellowed up in the woods.”)

The effect of McGregor’s dispassionate descriptive method is first disconcerting, then uncanny and finally magnificent. His slow, even chapters, often pointedly unhuman — a reservoir sits exactly at the juncture between mankind and nature — come to seem like the snow falling across Joyce’s Dublin: a reminder that every moment, no matter how shocking, recesses with equal speed into the indifferent past.

Now, barely a yearly later, McGregor has published “The Reservoir Tapes.” Though it concerns the same events, it is a radically different book.

It is more like a play. Told from 15 perspectives, it consists of quick, often tender fragments. One side of a police officer’s interview; a paperboy’s encounter with a man who fixes his bike (Could he be a murderer? The briefly imprisoned pedophile?); even a scene that proves Becky to be a bully.

As different as the two works are, they share a purpose. This is McGregor’s sixth book, and he has shown himself to be engaged most finally and seriously with the idea of community. Specifically, a fascination with what exactly a small community becomes together over time, its spider web intricacy and delicacy.

This is part of the offhand skill of “The Reservoir Tapes.” We’re used to stories in which a single fatal moment radiates outward, but McGregor is interested, rather, in the inverse, inspecting how incidental a tragedy can become to the life of a village after its first moments of gossipy tension and excitement. Each of his 15 stories echoes back to Becky Shaw, but often only from a great distance.

After he wrote “Dubliners,” which concludes with “The Dead,” Joyce slowly abandoned the immense lyric gift that he displayed in it, in favor of the antic, polyphonic style that eventually led him to write “Ulysses.”

For those readers — I’m one — who like Joyce’s early stories best, McGregor may offer the closest contemporary approximation we have to them. Both writers have a gift for the feel of adolescence. And both can summon a language that pierces our deepest habituations.

It’s clear that McGregor, working from subtle materials, has become a major writer. “The Reservoir Tapes” is further confirmation of it. Now we wait.

Charles Finch is the author of the forthcoming novel “The Vanishing Man.”