Jon McGregor on his award-winning novel, Reservoir 13

Jon McGregor wrote one of the best novels of 2017. In advance of his visit to Listowel, he tells Richard Fitzpatrick about his magnificent tale

THERE are certain novels that get under your skin. Jon McGregor’s fourth novel, Reservoir 13 – which won last year’s Costa Novel Award and was chosen by the Irish writer Kevin Barry as his favourite book from 2017 – is one of those reads.

There is a set-up to the novel. The opening pages are taken from a short story McGregor wrote years ago. A 13-year-old girl has gone missing near a village in England’s Lake District. The villagers are out looking for her.

The novel unfolds from this beginning, with this unresolved mystery bubbling away in the background, over a 13-year span.

“It was as though the ground had just opened up and swallowed her whole,” the narrator says.

Journalists used this phrase by way of metaphor or hyperbole; people in the village knew it as a thing that could happen.

Her disappearance pervades the lives of the villagers. They dream about her, about finding her dead body, about seeing her being driven away to safety. To toddlers, born around the time she disappears, she becomes a legend, who might be living in the caves on the outskirts of the village.

The girl, Rebecca, who has disappeared, is an outsider. She had been holidaying in the region over the Christmas holidays with her parents. Her tragedy is a degree removed from the villagers’ lives, but it is a haunting absence nonetheless – the tragedy of not knowing.

Their village, too, becomes oddly associated in the consciousness of people not from there with a specific tragic event, just in the way say Dunblane in Scotland (where a mass shooting occurred in 1996), or

Aberfan in Wales (a mining town where over a hundred children died from a colliery spill in 1966) conjures specific associations.

PLACE NAMES

It comes as a shock to teenage villagers when they go off to university – several years after Rebecca’s disappearance – that their village carries a label.

“It’s kind of inevitable when something like this happens in the news that lodges in our memories – the place becomes the first thing we associate with it,” says McGregor.

“Another one I had in mind was the Soham murders. I can’t remember the names of the girls who were murdered or the guy who eventually they caught for it. I just remember the name of the place.”

“If I ever met anyone who was from Soham – [the murders] must have taken place 10, 20 years ago – for them they have probably absorbed that and moved on. For anyone else that place name has that meaning now.

I was partly interested in the novel in playing with that idea that the girl and her family are not from the village. Nobody in the village feels the loss of the girl in any real personal way. They’re obviously touched by it and affected by it but it’s not their tragedy, which I thought was important.

The guts of the novel proceeds in building out the lives of the 60 or so characters we meet from the village. There have stock positions – the publican, the vicar, the sheep farmer, the schoolteacher and so on – and there is blow-ins.

We learn about their private lives – their failures, their broken marriages, their lusty affairs, the way a young mother goes slightly loopy at home trying to raise twins. Violence is never far away.

Gossip, delivered in the third person, is the medium for relaying information to the reader: “Will Jackson was seen with the teacher from his son’s class at school.” It’s a wonderful vehicle, and the lifeblood, of course, of communities and the stories we tell each other, for entertainment or out of spite.

“In the novel, it’s the lens through which the whole story is told,” says McGregor. “I was really keen to make that a big part of the structure of the book. In the book, nobody really owns the gossip. Nobody says, ‘I saw so-and-so leaving the house.’ It’s always: ‘so-and-so was seen’. It’s passive. Gossip becomes fact.”

McGregor’s novel ebbs and flows with the seasons. “There was weather”, is a pet, throwaway line. You can almost smell the animals and the life of the natural world, which he paints in vividly around the villagers’ action in bold colours. It makes for a rare reading experience.

He researched carefully to prepare for it. “I’ve always enjoyed walking and cycling and being out and about,” says McGregor. “It’s not something I’ve known very much about. I had to do a lot of research for this book in terms of the detail of the life cycle of a swallow or a blackbird, when badgers mate and where foxes make their dens.

At the same time, I was trying to get a little bit of detail about a lot of things. That was my model.

"I never learned a ton of stuff about foxes. I just learned enough to give the reader a sense of what a family of foxes might be doing during each month of the year over a couple of years. Or when it is that swallows arrive and when they leave. When the wild garlic comes up in the woods. When the bluebells come up. Specific details, but minimal details spread throughout the book to give an overall picture of the natural world.”

RIDE ON

McGregor, who also teaches creative writing at the University of Nottingham, has had a gilded writing life. His first novel, If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things, was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2002, making him the youngest ever to achieve such recognition. In 2012, he scooped the International Impac Dublin Literary Award for his third novel, Even the Dogs. It came with a hefty prize-winning cheque, which he spent in several ways.

“It was a lot of money,” he says. “I spent some of it on frivolous things. I bought myself a very nice bike. Quite a lot of it became part of my income as a writer. The writing income is quite irregular and unreliable so to have a chunk of money that smoothed those gaps was very useful.

And a chunk of it I left in Ireland – there were a few projects in Dublin that I gave the money to. I was very conscious that Even the Dogs was a book about the excluded and the marginalised and people without finance and I was also conscious that it was a time of austerity and things being quite tough so it didn’t feel right to leave the country with a hundred grand. Taking into account all those things, it’s all gone.

Does he still have the bicycle? “I do, and a very nice bike it is too.”

Jon McGregor is at Listowel Writers’ Week, and will read on Thursday, May 31, at St John’s Theatre & Art Centre. See writersweek.ie