The Reservoir Tapes

by Jon McGregor

Returning us to the extraordinary territory of Jon McGregor's Man Booker Prize long-listed novel Reservoir 13, The Reservoir Tapes take us deep into the heart of an English village that is trying to come to terms with what has happened on its watch.A teenage girl has gone missing. The whole community has been called upon to join the search. And now an interviewer arrives, intent on capturing the community's unstable stories about life in the weeks and months before Becky Shaw vanished. Each villager has a memory to share or a secret to conceal, a connection to Becky that they are trying to make or break. A young wife pushes against the boundaries of her marriage, and another seeks a means of surviving within hers. A group of teenagers dare one another to jump into a flooded quarry, the one weak swimmer still awaiting his turn. A laborer lies trapped under rocks and dry limestone dust as his fellow workers attempt a risky rescue. And meanwhile a fractured portrait of Becky emerges at the edges of our vision-a girl swimming, climbing, and smearing dirt onto a scared boy's face, images to be cherished and challenged as the search for her goes on.

Genres: Fiction, Mystery, Short Stories, Mystery Thriller, Audiobook, Literary Fiction, British Literature

Audio CD

First published December 28, 2017

About the author

Jon McGregor is a British author who has written three novels. His first novel, If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things, was nominated for the 2002 Booker Prize and was the winner of both the Betty Trask Prize and the Somerset Maugham Award in 2003. So Many Ways to Begin was published in 2006 and was on the Booker prize long list. Even the Dogs was published in 2010, and his newest work, Reservoir 13, was published in April 2017.

Reviews

[Paula K · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a delightful and beautifully written follow-up to Reservoir 13!

The Reservoir Tapes is a superb companion piece to the Booker long-listed and Costa Book Award winner of 2017, Reservoir 13. Reservoir Tapes focuses on specific characters that inhabit the small, quite English village where the 13 year old Becky Shaw disappeared. Where as it’s predecessor had a distant focus to the inhabitants and more towards the overall village’s seasons and it’s surrounding nature.

An interviewer comes to get local citizens stories of what happened in the weeks prior to Becky’s disappearance. Each of the 15 chapters brings a memory shared by a different character. Each memory gives a closer look at moments with Becky Shaw and a more in-depth look at the lives of the characters. Gaps are filled in and a variety of possible answers surface.

The Tapes fill in some more details, but also raise additional questions to the mystery of the teenager’s disappearance. We learn a lot more about Becky’s actions and her character. She is a thrill seeker who likes to go off on her own. She is moody and can be cruel. Her actions prove her to be insecure. Each memory adds to more possibilities as to how she might have disappeared. The 15 stories are all loosely connected.

British author, Jon McGregor, writes with such beautiful prose. Reservoir 13, which I read earlier this year, is one of the best novels I have read in 2018. Reservoir Tapes has given me the opportunity to revisit the story and enjoy it’s beauty all over again.

I highly recommend both of these books and reading them in order.

5 out of 5 stars

Many thanks to Annesha from publicity / marketing at Catapult for providing a hard copy of Reservoir Tapes.

[Cecily · Rating 4 out of 5]

“A secret is something you tell only one other person.” - proverbial explanation of how secrets spread, even with good(ish) intentions.

This is a companion piece to the excellent Reservoir 13, which I reviewed HERE, in which thirteen-year old Becky went missing while on holiday, leaving ripples across the village for the next thirteen years. This short book is neither a prequel nor a postscript, though it was written afterwards, and is probably best read after. It was commissioned by the BBC as fifteen short monologues (McGregor’s request to make it thirteen was apparently rejected).

The first chapter is one side of a conversation with Charlotte, mother of Becky. She’s being given “a chance for you to put your side of the story”, even though she’s been through it many times with the police. We read only the words of the person we assume is a journalist. It seems to be the summer after Becky disappeared.

In contrast, all the subsequent chapters paraphrase each person’s testimony, including a couple of people not in the original book. These chapters echo each character’s manner of speech and omit the journalist’s words. The final chapter is Joe, father of Becky. The one person we never hear from is, of course, Becky.


Image: Hand thrusting a mic to the viewer, by BrianAJackson (Source)

Investigative, not contemplative

This has very few of the immersive descriptions of the natural world that mark Reservoir 13, though the occasional one slips in:
“It [old quarry] was clear blue water, trees, birdsong. The evening air beginning to cool after a long hot August day. Dragonflies zipping about above the water, no doubt. Swallows skimming low across the surface.”

Media interest was one thread of the original book, so it makes sense to use that as the vehicle for a tangential and more forensic look at the story. I really enjoyed revisiting the people and place, but in an utterly different format. It felt simultaneously fresh and true to the source.

We learn much about Becky and her family, and more about many of the villagers, who generally seem unguarded, rambling, and confessional. Perhaps a traumatic event loosens tongues that would normally be more taciturn with outsiders?

The more we know, the more we realise we don’t know. The concept may be a cliché but the execution is not. Some suspicions from the original narrative are quashed, but many new ones are introduced. Trust no one! Except that’s unfair: most of us have said and done things we’re ashamed of, but that doesn’t mean we’re guilty of serious crimes. And it’s not even clear if Becky’s disappearance is a crime.

Quotes

• “Information got around quickly, and if people didn’t have actual facts they seemed very capable of filling in the gaps.”

• “Not quite silk but something pretending towards it.” - dress fabric

• “They’d both grown up in the village… Those long summers, with no way out. Seeing the same faces day after day. You feel trapped. Sometimes you’d break things just to see what would happen.”

[Jaline · Rating 5 out of 5]

An interviewer comes to the small English village to interview Becky Shaw’s parents after she has disappeared. On the tape, we only hear the interviewer’s words, not those of Becky’s parents. What happened to the tape?

Where we previously (in Reservoir 13) experienced this village from a more distant perspective, we are now invited to see the lives of several villagers much closer in a time frame that is months, weeks, or days before Becky went missing. We catch glimpses of her through incidents in the various character’s lives. In exposing the branches hidden among the leaves of their daily lives, we see a kaleidoscope of colour.

The colours are shades of brown and darkness and have a strange bitter taste, like tea steeped too long or coffee that is left on the warmer an hour or two past its time. I was compelled to keep turning the kaleidoscope, hoping for a glimpse of a possible happy ending. Or for clues or answers that would tell me where Becky is.

It was too soon. Even then, in the days prior to 13-year-old Becky’s disappearance, there is a sense of wrongness. Just under the surface, it breaks through at the moment I pass it by, yet when I look, it is gone. The surface is smoothed over again and all I see are the daily concerns, the fears and deceits, the hard moments and the soft – all the ordinariness of village life.

Did I glimpse a girl who could be golden? Tarnished? Caring? Mean? Over-confident or insecure? Bold or brash? Did I glimpse motives of harmful intent? Of neglect? Of retaliation? Of defiant will meeting a solid wall of non-forgiveness? Or nothing at all?

The puzzling queries surrounding Becky’s disappearance take on shape and form in this novel. They multiply into possible answers that meet dead ends; they multiply until they become more of themselves: more questions.

Jon McGregor’s writing found me invested in this prelude from the beginning. I don’t know how he does it, but there is definitely an alchemy with his words and the story he is telling. The Reservoir Tapes crackles with that alchemy, and all I know for sure is that I want more.

Note: I strongly recommend reading Reservoir 13 before attempting this book. Although this is a prequel, it will lose most of its meaning without the framework of Reservoir 13.

With gratitude to Annesha of the Publicity and Marketing team of Catapult for sending me this book with no obligation to read or review.

[Elyse Walters · Rating 5 out of 5]

In this companion follow- up book to “The Reservoir 13”,
where a teenage girl has gone missing,
In “The Reservoir Tapes”,
.....an interviewer has now arrived.... with the intention of capturing the communities stories -about life in the weeks and months before she vanished. Each villager has a memory to share or secret to conceal.
You’ll meet:
Charlotte, Vicky, Deepak, Graham, Liam, Claire, Clive,
Martin, Stephanie, Donna, Ian, Irene, Ginny, Jess, and Joe
With 15 chapters, each of the above 15 characters are the narrator for one of them.

I actually liked this book better than “Reservoir 13”. We are taken right into the heads - with more focus of each of the different people. It was an aspect about “Reservoir 13”, which I had personally ‘missed’.
We definitely get ‘stories’ in this time around.
We are still left with questions - maybe even more questions than in “ Reservoir 13”, but we see many different possibilities and scenarios.

In one story we see - the teenage missing girl -Becky Shaw alive.

In another story a young boy on his paper round, walks into a strangers house. The fear I felt had me definitely ‘wondering’ about danger connected to Becky.

The question is - how would readers react to this book without reading “Reservoir 13”, first?
I’m betting most people would say read “Reservoir 13” first .
But, I don’t feel it’s absolutely necessary. It’s very clear that a community is trying to come to terms with what happened to a missing girl in their English Village.

I liked ‘all’ 15 stories ...each were intimate... filled with insights - yet leaving our and minds heats wide open with questions.

[Jenny (Reading Envy) · Rating 4 out of 5]

When I read Reservoir 13 less than a year ago, it lingered with me for days. I couldn't shake the feeling that the book wasn't about what it purported to be about. It kept being pitched as a girl-disappearance, village-reacts story, but that wasn't it. It was about the place and its own secrets. The way time moves fast and slow depending how close you are to a tragedy or a mystery. The way each small person has their own stories that end up with more of the focus than someone else's drama. It was like the author aided the reader slowly backing away, leaving each place and person to their own story.

This collection of "prequel" stories, originally commissioned by and broadcast on BBC Radio 4, serves to simultaneously perpetuate this individual story theory and to fill in some of the gaps left by Reservoir 13. I would have loved to hear the original broadcast but reading them back to back allowed my brain to follow more threads through, I think. I'm reading between the lines a lot, as the detectives must have. Everything is fragmented because nobody has the whole story, and even the parts of the story they have, they don't necessarily understand the full meaning. I loved thinking and wondering about all of it again.

ETA: After a tip from a reader in the UK, I was able to listen to the complete BBC Radio 4 recordings of these stories. I enjoyed them, but there is one interview with the author where he talks about writing these with the idea that the reader would be a participant in the investigation. So the audio is great with all the different voices, but it's the text that seems helpful should you want to go back to a detail of sorts.

The publisher approached me to offer a complimentary copy for review, and I said yes, of course. It comes out in the USA on 7 August, 2018. Read Reservoir 13 first.

[Hugh · Rating 4 out of 5]

I find it impossible to review this without reference to the book that spawned it, Reservoir 13 which was my favourite book of 2017 and finally gained the award it deserved from the Costa prize after missing out on the Booker and the Goldsmiths.

These 15 monologues were commissioned by BBC Radio 4 and broadcast over the last few months. I caught most of them then but to be honest was a little disappointed because my expectations were so high.

Now, brought together as a book, I was able to read them almost uninterrupted and in this form they impressed me much more. The order seems less random and I spotted a lot more nuances and connections. Maybe I am not a good listener or maybe a week between episodes is too long for my memory.

Those who disliked Reservoir 13 will probably find this almost as frustrating since once again little is resolved and there are more questions than answers. This version is more focused on the characters and less on the landscape and the seasons.

This time all of the episodes are set either where Reservoir 13 started, in the aftermath of Becky's disappearance or the previous summer, but some of the newer story-lines are pursued through several episodes. Each episode focuses on a different character but a variety of narrative styles are employed - for example in the first part we get an interviewer's side of a conversation with Becky's mother without the responses.

Both here and on the radio version the final part, in which Becky's father reviews the history of his failing marriage was the most moving. Other episodes are more comic or fill holes in the back story, creating new questions in the process.

I have no idea how I would have responded to this one without having read Reservoir 13, and it made me want to go back and reread that, but my to-read pile is too overloaded for that to happen any time soon.

[PattyMacDotComma · Rating 5 out of 5]

5★
“And had you seen anyone else, had you passed anyone on the track, had you seen anyone in the distance?

Now

this will, I understand

I’m sorry


Can you be clear about when you first realised Becky was out of sight?



And you assumed.

she was coming up the steps out of the clough? You were not long out of it yourselves?

How far behind would you say she was when you saw her last?”

This wonderful book follows Reservoir 13, a favourite of mine. A reporter, intent on getting background material, has returned to the village from which a girl disappeared. There is an attempt at being sensitive to raw feelings, but you can see from the quotations, that it is pretty superficial. Here, the conversation (one-sided) is with the mother of the missing girl.

The first part of the book is written in this fashion, with wide spaces breaking up lines, so that it gives a sense of hearing only one side of a conversation. Perhaps the villagers are not answering, just nodding, or hiding their faces. We can guess what their attitude would be.

It’s the kind of thing reporters, journalists, feature writers, authors do when interviewing people to try to glean a few more facts to embellish what is already known and make their story stand out.

“But we agreed, didn’t we, that this would be

a chance

a chance for you to put your side of the story.

Obviously I know you’ll have been through all this with the police, many times, I do appreciate

I do

But people have questions. Not just locally. People are


It would be helpful to clarify

It would be helpful to hear it from you. People would appreciate that.

Is this?

Can we?


No, absolutely. None of this will

You can decide, afterwards, you can reconsider.

I just want to help you tell your side of the story.

Absolutely.

So. If we can


You realised she was out of sight. You waited. She didn’t appear. You had already talked about cutting the walk short anyway so


one of you wanted to


You waited, and she didn’t appear. You went back to the top of the path leading up out of the clough, the valley, and you couldn’t see her there.


And you called for her, presumably?”

Presumably? They had to ask that? This is from the first chapter, titled Charlotte, Becky’s mother.

Subsequent chapters are named for other characters who are given some more back story. There is a young boy who does his morning paper rounds on his bike, and he is pretending to be a detective and decides to notice anything out of the ordinary. He makes a few interesting comments.

Then it’s someone else’s turn, and as in the original book, the stories of the people and families in this small rural village overlap. Some are farmers, some run local businesses, and some are tourists who come for holidays, like Becky’s family. Small towns are fascinating.

“One thing Vicky had learnt when she moved up here was that people liked to talk. Information got around quickly, and if people didn’t have actual facts they seemed very capable of filling in the gaps. She’d more than once had to deny being pregnant, after being seen with orange juice in the pub.”

The relationships are wonderfully well-drawn. Jon McGregor is just the best. Reservoir 13 was his first novel and was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2017. I am not the only fan.

Here’s my review:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

This one is a remarkable follow-up about the families and the village, not only through the intrusiveness of an interviewer (the “tapes” of the title), but also through the third-person observation.

At the end, the author thanks the BBC for commissioning the stories. I hope they commission some more.

Another favourite.

[Paul Fulcher · Rating 4 out of 5]

They'd agreed to talk to Becky about it later, when they went out for their walk.

Reservoir 13 will, I strongly suspect, end up as my book of 2017, one of the most innovative and enjoyable books I have read for years. My review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

It told the story of an English village for the 13 years after the disappearance of a 13 year old girl, Becky Shaw, but in a unique way. In the author’s words from a recent interview:

The narrative spark came first. And it was only once I realised that I'd landed myself with a rural novel that I understood how fully I wanted to immerse the reader in the landscape and the multiplicity of lives lived there. I imagine it's similar when an artist makes a drawing of a landscape – it's only once you start hatching in the detail that you realise how many rocks and trees and grasses and birds there actually are.

The structuring came after the writing, mostly. I wrote a series of texts for each character, animal, plant, weather condition, work routine, village tradition, location, etc (statisticians might care to know that there were 13 of these categories, with 13 examples in each category...) and once I was done I laid that text out across my timeline of 13 years. There were a lot of ring-binders involved, and scissors and Sellotape. It was rather chaotic, but I quite quickly landed on the rhythm I was looking for – the rhythm of the non-sequitur, where things are just happening one after the other and in fact one and the other at the same time, without having to gently guide the reader between events and observations.

https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/...

The Reservoir Tapes was (were?) commissioned by BBC Radio as a prequel to Reservoir 13 - and thanks the publisher via Netgalley for the ARC.

It contains 15 (a little disappointing it wasn’t 13*) ‘tapes’ or chapters, in the form of monologues, told as a 3rd person limited narrative, giving the story and perspective of one particular character. The organising idea - hence the name - is than an interviewer has gone around taping interviews with local people about their lives in the months leading up to Becky’s disappearance and in the immediately following days, then transcribed them in the form of these accounts.

(* from an interview I subsequently found, the BBC were at fault here: I asked if I could 13 stories at 13 minutes each, and they wouldn’t have it)

Although McGregor doesn’t adhere too rigorously to the form. In the first tape we hear only one side – the policewoman’s – of the official interview with Becky’s mother, here named as Charlotte, after Becky officially becomes a missing person. Some of the tapes are more told as stories, and others are private recollections very unlikely to have been shared with anyone.

McGregor has referred to the Tapes as a detective story where the reader is expected to do some work and fill in the gaps, and part of the fun for the reader is tracing links between them – a scream heard in one story can be traced to an incident in another, similarly an argument in a pub in the neighbouring village.

In particular several of the stories (those of Graham, Liam, Claire, Donna, Ian and Ginny) are set on one summer day a few months before the start of Reservoir 13, on the Shaw’s first visit to the village. Becky first meets the rest of the local teenagers, they go rather feral at the quarry, and later Becky herself goes missing for a while, prefiguring her actual and more permanent disappearance on their 2nd visit that winter. Meanwhile – and perhaps a little too much of a narrative coincidence – a girl guide falls into a sinkhole on the local moors and is rescued after an extensive search.

Another group are set in the immediate period before and also after Becky’s disappearance, as the search and police investigation commences, most poignantly the final story, told from the point of view of her father, named here (but not in Reservoir 13 where to the villagers he just remains ‘the girl’s father) as Joe.

And others journey back through time, some to incidents completely unrelated (or at least it seems so) to Becky’s story.

And we’re introduced to some brand-new characters, notably Donna, Claire Jackson’s best friend, and Vicky an old friend and now colleague of Graham at the Visitor Centre.

But the biggest attraction to Reservoir 13 aficionados (which should be everyone) lies in recognising the various familiar characters and learning more about their back stories. If I was writing a blurb for such a reader, it would be:

Discover:
- The truth behind the façade of the Hunter’s marriage
- To whom arch-seducer Gordon Jackson lost his virginity
- Why Liam is the butt of all the jokes amongst the teenage gang
- When Martin the butcher first met Woods, his later partner in red diesel smuggling
- How a quarry accident to Irene’s husband led to Tony acquiring the Gladstone Pub
- And what Becky’s parents were going to tell her on their last walk together

The Tapes don’t explain what happened to Becky – McGregor has made it clear that he himself doesn’t know, and there is no between-the-lines solution to be found. But we do learn quite a lot more about her character - quite wild, prone to going off alone, distanced from her parents - which if anything extends the range of explanations. The various characters and stories do raise a number of possibilities: she succumbed to exposure; she fell down a sinkhole; she drowned in the quarry; she was kidnapped by the man with the gun who also tried to abduct Deepak (albeit a later story resolves this one) or perhaps another character whose sinister side we learn in one story set 15 years earlier; she ran away from home – possibly as a result of what was said on the walk, or perhaps general teenage angst. And Irene’s autistic son Andrew claims to know the truth but will only assure Irene that ‘she is safe.’

I am not generally a fan of audiobooks – but here the words were written to be read on the radio, so an audiobook –or the BBC podcasts (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b097n5h3) – is the more natural format for this, but, that said, it still works surprisingly well on the written page.

And as a stand-alone book (or audiobook) it doesn’t have quite the same stunning originality as Reservoir 13. Indeed the style is very different to Reservoir 13 – none of the non-sequiturs, and the focused perspective and the entering into characters thoughts is actually a complete contrast – but it complements it beautifully.

A wonderful Christmas present for the Reservoir 13 fan in your life (which may be yourself) – and if he/she/they aren’t yet a Reservoir 13 fan, buy them that as well.

[Cheri · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 Stars

When 13 year-old Rebecca Shaw disappeared on New Year’s Eve while walking an English moor with her parents, an interviewer is dispatched to interview her parents, along with others, at some point in the days after, in hopes of shedding light on where she might be found. There are 14 chapters that follow, and each shares a different picture of Becky, some show her as a spirited, fearless young girl, some show her as a somewhat sassy, cheeky bad-mannered girl, some share glimpses of what might have occurred, or what they believe might have happened to this young girl.

In the process of hearing these individual stories, we not only hear the surface stories shared, but the hurried whisperings of the what-might-have-happened, the rumours and hearsay, the talk behind the scene in this small village. The gossip overheard and then shared in hushed voices, something to take their minds off of the otherwise ordinariness of their many days they’ve lived here as seasons have come and gone, babies born, and people have died. Life observed, once again, from afar, with these stories to divert their thoughts from wandering back to the mundanities of their everyday lives.

Shared with hauntingly lovely prose, this is a bit more somber than I found Reservoir 13 to be, but it still had that sense of that omniscient view of this village, and these people, as though they are being watched over by an unseen presence, and the comfort of belonging that keeps them bound to this land.



Many thanks for the copy provided by Catapult Books

[Teresa · Rating 2 out of 5]

Reservoir 13 was a world unto itself. Despite a certain lack of character development and sometimes only mere hints about characters’ lives, it needed nothing else. But since I’ve read everything else Jon McGregor wrote, I was excited to read this prequel/companion to Reservoir 13. Each short chapter takes up a different character, one you’ll remember from the earlier novel, but I regret to say this ended up feeling superfluous to me. (And if you haven’t read Reservoir 13, I don’t see how this book can have much, if any, meaning for you.)

I read it in one night (not only are the pages few, but there’s a lot of white space). Perhaps due to its origins as a BBC radio serial, the prose is simple, not a bad thing in itself; but in many cases it’s too simplistic and (if nothing else) I couldn’t grab on to the rhythm of McGregor’s language as I usually can.

In some ways the chapters are like short stories, though with none being able to stand on its own; and when I finished, I was reminded I didn’t care nearly as much for McGregor's short-story collection This Isn't the Sort of Thing That Happens to Someone Like You as I did his novels. I was also reminded of my experience reading Michel Faber’s The Apple: New Crimson Petal Stories after reading his The Crimson Petal and the White: it didn’t need to happen.

[JimZ · Rating 5 out of 5]

Who is responsible for the disappearance of Becky Shaw? I know who. It was Jon McGregor, the author of this book!!!! He keeps on writing about her!!! His conscience won’t let him rest and move on to another subject matter. He wrote ‘The Reservoir 13’ in 2017 in which he writes in detail the events surrounding her disappearance and events that happened thereafter (for many years). Now he is back at it again — he won’t let it rest. I know why…it’s his guilty conscience. 😲

But seriously…I was not planning on reading this in one sitting. But I couldn’t help it. It was that good. For those who have not read Reservoir 13, first off you need to do that. And then you need to read this…preferably don’t let too much time elapse between when you read ‘Reservoir 13” and when you read this because if you are like me and my scatter-brained memory you won’t remember anything about ‘Reservoir 13 ‘when you get to this page-turner.

After I was through with reading this sequel to ‘Reservoir 13’, in which we are told additional details about some of the characters of that novel and possible relationships to Becky or to her parents, and we learn more about the parents themselves… I think everybody in that damn village is guilty! I wonder if there can be a citizen’s arrest on a whole village. Somebody should look into this.

Each chapter is titled with a name of a person who has a story to tell. It’s not clear to me however who they are telling the story to. In the inner cover of the book jacket we are told that an interviewer arrives “intent on capturing the community’s unstable stories about life in the weeks and months before Becky Shaw vanished” but the only story in which the interviewer appears to be interviewing is the first chapter when he or she is interviewing Becky’s mother. I didn’t quite get that, unless the interviewer is writing down what was told to him or her verbatim after the fact. Anyway, that’s not really important…what is important is the reader is given a lot more information about the villagers. And I don’t trust many of them, let me tell you! 😯

Note:
• Some pretty impressive writers liked this author including George Saunders, Colum McCann, and Yiyun Li, and Evie Wyld.

Reviews:
• https://www.theguardian.com/books/201...
• https://www.chicagotribune.com/entert...
• https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/bo...
• https://www.latimes.com/books/la-ca-j...

[Paul · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a follow up to Reservoir 13 and was originally commissioned for radio as a series of fifteen monologues. You do need to have read the original novel, this is not a standalone.
Here is a brief precis of the novel from my review:
The novel is set in a village in Derbyshire, the Peak District (the well dressing gives that away). It starts at New Year in the early 2000s with the disappearance of a thirteen year old girl, staying in a holiday rental with her family. The village is a tourist spot close to the moors and the title refers to a series of reservoirs in the hills above and beyond the town. The narrative consists of thirteen chapters, each of them covers a year, the chapters being split into smaller passages covering each month or so. There are snippets from the lives of the villagers, all ages and statuses and the reader gradually gets to know each of them.
This follow up as a less collective feel to it as we get inside the heads of some of the main players in the original. The monologues cover the time period before and after the disappearance. The girl who disappeared, Becky, is present in some of the monologues and the reader gets a sense of her as a presence rather than an absence. There are also sinister twists and undertones to some of the monologues which are in the form of interviews (without an interviewer). McGregor again resists the temptation to explain the disappearance.
This is just an extension of the layers of ambiguity, the reader is no clearer about what really happened. You do get into the minds of the fifteen but on a few occasions you wish you hadn’t. There are secrets, abuse, brutality and quite a few surprises. The portraits of the men are much starker and there is real menace.
McGregor uses humour well and has a way of starting the monologues that draws in:
“The important thing to remember, Graham always said afterwards, was that no one actually died.”
“If he’d known the day was going to end with blood and fire, Liam would probably have got up earlier.”
“It wasn’t even a llama, for starters.”
The whole does work, even the one sided conversations and this does add rather than detract from the original novel.

[Krista · Rating 4 out of 5]

Could you

could we

if we could just talk a little bit about Becky. If you could describe her for me. In your own words. What she was like when she was younger. How's she's changed from being a child to being a young teenager. What her – gifts are, if you like. Any challenges there have been. Anything she has found difficult. Anything that comes to mind.

I know

I know this is difficult

this must be very hard for



of course.

I must have been pretty effusive in my Goodreads review for Jon McGregor's Reservoir 13 because his American publisher contacted me privately to see if I'd be interested in reading a related novel before its release in the States; um, yes please. What a delight, therefore, to have discovered The Reservoir Tapes in my mailbox this week; and what a further delight to have been so captivated by this read. I understand that these fifteen short pieces were originally commissioned by and performed on BBC Radio 4, and while I can see the appealling tension of listening to one per week over the course of a few months, I'm sure I much preferred the experience of reading them on the page, close together, and recognising where one person's story chimes with another's. (I especially enjoyed Ginny's chapter – spaced into stanzas with poetic line breaks – that I can't imagine was apparent to the ear.)

Essentially, this book records the recollections of residents of the village where a thirteen-year-old girl has gone missing – some stories occuring in the aftermath, some just before, some recalled from long before – collected by some unnamed “interviewer”. The first chapter (quoted from above) is solely from the interviewer's POV, without the corresponding answers, and I wasn't sure if I'd like the format. But every chapter after that is from a third person POV; each focussing on one character, and serving to fill in the people who were so sketchy in Reservoir 13. This is a totally different kind of book from the one that came before, and I don't know how satisfying it would be as a standalone read, but as a companion piece, I was deeply interested and found myself to be ultimately satisfied. This book is more about the people than the landscape (the nature writing and progression of the seasons was outstanding in the earlier work), but the setting still plays its part:

The flat heather moorland was featureless to the untrained eye, but in fact was teeming with detail: the bilberries and bog grasses, the mosses and moths and butterflies, the birds nesting in scoops and scrapes, the bogwater shining in the late-afternoon sun. The warmth was rising from the ground already, the sky a rich blue above the reservoirs in the distance. A hundred yards away, a mountain hare broke from cover and thundered across the heather.

Just as the flat moorland might seem “featureless to the untrained eye”, so too were the lurking dangers of this village (and of the villagers themselves) underplayed in the first book. In one chapter, the story of a Girl Guide who once fell into a sinkhole (in the same area where Becky later disappeared) is recounted:

It seemed the prolonged dry spell, following months of rain, had caused a sort of rupture between different layers of peat, those layers shifting and opening up a deep crevasse, hidden by the tussocks of bog grass.

The summer before her disappearance, Becky went swimming with a group of local kids; sneaking through a safety fence (and perhaps provoking a young man to later seek revenge against her):

People talked about how deep the water was, and how cold. People said it would be impossible to find your body if you drowned. People said a lot of things.

In one character's story of a long ago quarry accident, we not only see the obvious physical danger but learn more about some of the relationships between the villagers:

There's always a pressure to get the job done. And then some small thing goes wrong. Something geological. The temperature changes, the ground shifts, and all of a sudden you're a man lying in the dirt with a ton of rocks stacked up upon him.

Not only is the setting fraught with these hidden dangers, but one would do well to be wary of the villagers themselves: We meet a man with a shotgun who acts creepy around children; a squatter in the woods who makes grown men quake with fear; a woman who knows all too well that sometimes children simply walk away. In one section, a developmentally challenged young man assures his mother that Becky was fine, “He knew a few things and he knew she'd come to no harm”. And in the final, moving, chapter we meet Becky's mother and father; finally learning their names and why they were on this holiday.

I remain delighted to have had this opportunity to revisit McGregor's world, and while I would reiterate that this slim volume (it only takes a couple of hours to read) might not make complete sense on its own, it was an intriguing companion piece to Reservoir 13.

[Katie Lumsden · Rating 4 out of 5]

As amazing and moving as Jon McGregor always is.

[Roman Clodia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Comprising 15 short character studies, this is both prequel and complement to Reservoir 13, filling out backstories and details of people in the first book. Read as a standalone, it feels like a literary exercise: all the characters and tales are deft and full of possibilities but they don't come to fruition in this volume.

An interesting idea to back-fill an existing text.

Thanks to the publisher for an ARC via NetGalley.

[Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reservoir 13 was without doubt, one of the standout books of 2017.

A book which was shortlisted for two prizes at either extreme of the Book prize spectrum: the Goldsmith Prize (designed to reward fiction that breaks the mould or extends the possibilities of the novel form) and the Costa Prize (which focuses on recognising the most enjoyable book of the year) – a book both mould breaking and hugely enjoyable and which was inexplicably omitted from the disappointing Booker shortlist (despite making the much stronger longlist).

My review of that book (which I read twice in 2017) can be found here:

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

I particularly enjoyed reading a recent profile of Jon McGregor and his work by James Wood in the New Yorker.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/20...

This article draws out the common themes in what seems like a very disparate set of novels that McGregor has written in his career (4 novels – one of which won the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the other three of which were Booker longlisted) and identified that one of these is a sense of McGregor capturing an entire community, but that in Reservoir 13 with its innovative style “There is little direct dialogue. There are no moments set aside for privileged epiphany or revelation”.

Another key part of Reservoir 13 is that it starts with the disappearance of a young girl – Becky Shaw – staying at a holiday cottage in the village, but the impact of that disappearance fades over the 13 years in which the book is set.

The Reservoir Tapes is very much a companion piece to Reservoir 13 – one that explores more the community of that novel, but in this case in a much more conventional way and with little other than individual reflection and with more space for privileged epiphany or revelation. Further Becky’s disappearance, the events leading up to it and those immediately following it are much more central to this book.

The Reservoir Tapes is a series of 15, 15 minute radio episodes (Mc Gregor had hoped for 13 episodes of 13 minutes each, as the number 13 plays more than just a role in the title of the previous book) which are being broadcast on Radio 4. Each episode is named after a character and written from their point of view – some are familiar characters from Reservoir 13, some characters unnamed but present in that book, and others new characters but with strong links to the village. This book is the script of those broadcasts.

To say too much more would be to dampen the pleasure of the book itself.

If you have read Reservoir 13 and loved it then this book is a must buy (I can only equate it to finding that Jane Austen had actually written a Pride and Prejudice companion), if you have not read it then but that first but then this.

And if you have read Reservoir 13 and did not love it .......... then well I really have nothing to say to you.

My thanks to 4th Estate for an ARC provided via NetGalley.

[Paula Bardell-Hedley · Rating 4 out of 5]

First there was Reservoir 13, Jon McGregor's highly acclaimed 2017 novel in which a teenage girl on holiday with her family goes missing. Eight months later we have The Reservoir Tapes, a companion piece, offering insights into the events leading up to Becky Shaw's perplexing disappearance.

Set in a rural village in England's Peak District - an upland area at the southern end of the Pennines - The Reservoir Tapes was first aired on BBC Radio 4 as a specially commissioned short fiction series (read by Neil Dudgeon), and has now been published as a volume of fifteen 'prequel' stories.

McGregor is a Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Nottingham, where he also edits the in-house literary journal, The Letters Page . Born in Bermuda in 1976, he grew up in Norfolk before moving to Nottingham, where, in 2002, he wrote the first of his four novels, If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things, while living on a narrowboat. Since then he has won the IMPAC Dublin Literature Prize, Betty Trask Prize, and Somerset Maugham Award, and has twice been longlisted for the Man Booker Prize.

He now gives us the opportunity to scrutinize the thoughts and actions of individual villagers associated with the Reservoir 13 investigation, looking back at events in their lives and focusing on their precise memories of the girl. He is a perspicacious observer of ordinary folk – in this case an old quarry worker, a cleaner, a young wife, park rangers, the local butcher, a newspaper delivery lad, an adolescent boy, a journalist, a prostitute and several others - giving us a tantalizing coup d'œil of a community with its own tale to tell.

McGregor is equally attentive of the surrounding wildlife and writes with exactitude of a deep, unstable quarry reclaimed by the natural world. A quarry at the very centre of this mystery. He leaves us wanting more.

Many thanks to 4th Estate for supplying an advance copy of this title.

[Emma · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just as wonderful, if not even more so than Reservoir 13. McGregor writes so lyrically and beautifully that it is a joy to read the words on the page. I particularly liked Ginny's chapter. This is best read after Reservoir 13, and probably would benefit reading fairly quickly after it, as it has been a while since I read the first book, and had to remember all the characters.
McGregor has an uncanny knack of always leaving readers wanting more, and this book is no exception. There are more questions than answers in the book, and I've had to learn to go with that rather than be frustrated by it.
He is my favourite contemporary writer by far...

[Alice-Elizabeth (Prolific Reader Alice) · Rating 2 out of 5]

The Reservoir Tapes is written as a side novel to Reservoir 13 by the same author. At the time of writing this review, I have not read Reservoir 13 and as of right now, do not have the desire to do so!

Told in an interview format, an interviewer visits the community that has been rocked by the disappearance of a 13-year-old girl. I thought that all of the interviews that were conducted would be around this but sadly not. Instead, each person reveals a hidden secret about themselves that hasn't been shared before. There was some adult content, a few parts I found a little uncomfortable to read. The pacing is OK, I liked the community setting and the written format. Just not most of the characters or the slightly misleading story.

[Ends of the Word · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jon McGregor’s Reservoir 13 was longlisted for the Booker, and appeared on several “end of year” lists as one of “the books of 2017”. It deals with the disappearance of a teenager holidaying in a fictional village in the Peak District and its chapters spread over the 13 years following the incident. Following the novel’s success, BBC Radio 4 commissioned a set of fifteen short stories which are currently being broadcast and will be published in one volume. “The Reservoir Tapes” has been described as a “prequel” to the novel since it is set in the same community, with each of the chapters introducing us to a particular character with some link to the events described in the main novel.

Most of the reviews I read seem to be written by readers who enjoyed Reservoir 13 and were eager to revisit the world of the novel. Generally, the comments seem to be positive but raise doubts as to whether this collection of stories can be fully appreciated as a free-standing work. In my case, I have yet to read the novel but, in the meantime, I have greatly enjoyed this collection. Perhaps, rather than short stories, the pieces within The Reservoir Tapes are best considered as character vignettes – significantly, each chapter title gives us the name of the its protagonist. McGregor deftly differentiates between the characters through subtle changes in narrative voice and approach and yet, the more we read, the more we become aware of a web of connections between these disparate (and some desperate) characters.

Most of the chapters evoke a sense of danger and menace, and yet there is often also an underlying streak of dark humour. The stories are also minimalist in the best sense of the word – one gets the sense that no word is out of place, and no incident, however minor it may seem, is mere padding. In other words, this volume might be slim, but hardly slight.

[LA · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh, the writing! These interconnected anecdotes and memories are far more widely spaced, plot-wise, than those in The Tsar of Love and Techno, but the feel is the same.

This follow up to the outstanding Reservoir 13 does not leave the readers with a solution to the disappearance of 13 year old Rebecca, or Becky, but deepened my suspicions, sprouted new ones, and also gave me hope. Im also awarding brownie points for the introduction of a baby alpaca into a story line and a shrewd act of heroism by a boy with special needs.

Please, sir. I want some more!

[Veronica · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have two strong recommendations: 1) read Reservoir 13 first and 2) listen to this as a podcast (available from the BBC), rather than reading it as a book, and preferably spin out the pleasure in small doses. The voices with their northern accents add so much to these multi-faceted stories around the disappearance of Becky and the quality of reading in every single episode is superb. Special mention to the technical excellence of episode 1, in which you hear just one side of a conversation and yet it fully conveys the feelings and reactions of the unheard person.

Each story in itself is beautifully done, so finely observed and characterised, and as a whole they are more than a sum of the parts. Instead of the broad bird's eye view in Reservoir 13, you get piercing insights into each character's head. Again, there's no solution to Becky's disappearance, but McGregor repeatedly raises uneasy suspicions in the listener's mind. While at the same time you have a broader sense of how every community hides male violence against women (physical and psychological); that people both know and refuse to know that it happens.

I'm just so impressed with both these works. My best reading and listening of the year so far.

[SueLucie · Rating 4 out of 5]

If I had come to this fresh, without having read Reservoir 13 first, I might have considered it a mystery. I would probably have thought I was invited to guess what happened to Becky from clues in each of the stories and character studies. Certainly it does fill in some of the gaps in Reservoir 13 and sheds light on some characters’ motivations so I feel I could take an educated guess to Becky’s fate now. But that wasn’t my main consideration when I read Reservoir 13 and still isn’t. The Reservoir Tapes complements my reading of Reservoir 13 but lacks some of the aspects I so loved in the first book - the cycle and rhythm of nature in particular. I very much enjoyed the variety of voices and styles of reporting/narration, my favourites being the Ginny, Irene and Charlotte chapters. An original concept that I’d recommend highly, but it will certainly have most impact for those who have already enjoyed Reservoir 13.

With thanks to Harper Collins 4th Estate via NetGalley for the opportunity to read this.

[Kasa Cotugno · Rating 5 out of 5]

In 2017 Reservoir 13 was my favorite read -- a standout, a truly original book that haunts me even now, almost a year later. This much slimmer book has been called a "companion piece," but I think of it more as outtakes that didn't make the first cut. That doesn't make it any less powerful, but it is completely different in style and approach. In the original, the town where Becky Shaw disappears is the central character, advancing yearly with each chapter. It is almost flat in its descriptions of the natural world as well as the the lives of its inhabitants. It was unsentimental, unsensational and beautiful. However, here the people are the focus, mostly before the events of New Years Eve, and they are fleshed out in broad, clear strokes. Even Becky herself is given a deeper identity. It would be possible to read this on its own, but for a truly enriching experience, it needs to be read after the original.

Many thanks to Catapult Publishers for providing me with an advance copy for review.

[Jaclyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

He’s definitely one of the best contemporary writers and if you’re not reading McGregor you’re missing some of the most considered and precise writing. This is a truly excellent companion to RESERVOIR 13 but be sure to read that book first.

[Sarah · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was advertised as being 15 mini "prequel" stories to Reservoir 13, and I was intrigued that it was being serialised as a podcast on BBC radio 4 so decided to give it a go. I had been meaning to read Reservoir 13 but had seen really mixed reviews of it, and this seemed an easy way to see if I would like it without actually having to do any reading (yes, I'm lazy).

I have to admit I found this kind of disjointed - each story was pretty stand alone and seemed barely linked to the others, besides the fact that they took place in the same area and a couple mentioned the missing girl. This is a personal quibble but I don't think listening to this in audio form helped with my disconnect from the characters. It was good that each episode/chapter was recorded by a different actor, but I have to admit to zoning out when listening to some of the stories. I’d be interested to hear from people who read Reservoir 13 before they read/listened to this... does it make more sense as a prequel read after, knowing what happens in Reservoir 13?

Not sure what else to say other than I don't think the format worked, I didn't feel very engaged in the story or that I had enough time to get to know any of the characters to feel attached to them or invested in what happened. I mentioned while I was listening that I would have DNF-ed if it hadn't been in podcast form (which does sound like a bit of a contradiction given that I said in the previous paragraph that I didn't like the format but hear me out), but it is super easy to put on a podcast for 15 minutes once a week and just listen! Not sure if I'll bother with Reservoir 13 now as it sounds like it might be more of the same. Just a general feeling of ambivalence with this one unfortunately.

[Jane · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jon McGregor is such a great writer. This book is relates to Reservoir 13, but I’m not sure how. It was a little like reading a group of short stories, but I finished it curious why McGregor wrote it. No matter, I enjoyed it but didn’t find it as compelling as either of the author’s two novels that I’ve read.

[MisterHobgoblin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jon McGregor’s Reservoir 13 stepped out life in a small town, year by year, over the 13 years since a teenage visitor, Becky Shaw, went missing. One of the most powerful aspects of the novel was the lack of sensationalism about the disappearance; it was mentioned in the first year or two, but faded into the backstory. Occasionally a piece of clothing would turn up or a memory would be stirred, but it was merely incidental.

So the Reservoir Tapes is a companion piece. In that first year, we have 15 narratives from 15 different people regarding Becky’s disappearance. Bookended by the two parents, there is puzzlement, sadness and a great deal of indifference demonstrated by the town’s residents.

I believe this was first conceived as a series of short radio broadcasts, so each narrative is roughly the same length and self-contained in terms of telling a story with a beginning, a middle and an end. Each narrator has a quite different voice, each has an agenda…

Just like Reservoir 13, the pitch is gentle, subtle and beguiling. There is as much told through reading between the lines, spotting what is not being said, as by the words themselves. This is a perfect companion piece that adds significantly to Reservoir 13 without taking anything away.

[Roos · Rating 4 out of 5]

Zie dit als een heerlijk dessertje voor diegenen die maar moeilijk afscheid kunnen nemen van Jon McGregor's 'Reservoir 13'. 'The Reservoir Tapes' zijn een spinoff van zijn voorganger, in de vorm van een prequel, geschreven in opdracht van BBC Radio 4, in vijftien delen, bedoeld om op radio voorgelezen te worden, maar de verhalen plakken zeer goed op papier. Ieder deel zoomt in op een van de respectievelijke personages uit 'Reservoir 13' (uitgezonderd van Donna en Ginny, twee nieuwe personages). Deze keer geen getijden van het leven en de natuur, maar een humaan snapshot uit het leven van de personages (voorafgaand aan het begin van 'Reservoir 13'), die veel aan het licht brengen, maar toch ook weer niet. Het mag dan een prequel zijn, toch dient het gelezen te worden als tweede boek.

[Stephanie Sharp · Rating 4 out of 5]

Earlier this year I reviewed Reservoir 13, and although on reflection I realise I may have been a bit harsh, it still fell short of the mark for me. I now realise it was a far more nuanced and subtle novel than I realised at the time I was reading it. But, I still found two major flaws that dampened my enthusiasm considerably: (1) that although there was a lot of breadth, the novel was lacking in depth and (2) there was never anything told from a single character’s point of view, but instead there was an all seeing, all knowing objective narrator throughout.

The Reservoir Tapes is a companion piece prequel to Reservoir 13 developed as a series of short stories first broadcast on BBC Radio 4 (and readers in the UK can listen to these on the BBC iPlayer). The idea was to explore a little more in depth some of the characters from the main novel and to go back in time to the events preceding the disappearance of Becky Shaw (the central focal point in Reservoir 13) and going back in time as well, to even a further generation back. Jon McGregor’s character studies make for engaging radio plays. Indeed, after reading Reservoir 13 I came to the conclusion that novel would make for a far better dramatic series, as I think part of the magic of that book lies in how the words are expressed, as opposed to the actual words being said.

I chose to read the Kindle edition of The Reservoir Tapes, and I’m glad I did, as it negates any flaws I found with Reservoir 13. First of all, it is meant to be a series of “talking head” narratives from different character’s perspectives, so instead of an all seeing objective narrator, the focus is on each individual and their unique perceptions. And second of all, it goes into far more depth with so fewer words than the original novel! I think it is essential that one reads Reservoir 13 before reading (or listening to) The Reservoir Tapes, as the insights into each character will carry a lot more meaning. As an example, it certainly made me have more understanding for the character of village lothario, Gordon Jackson! I won’t spoil that one, but that is one of the more telling scenes. That’s just a small example. More relationships are explored with such a brilliant economy of words. I think this does a really good job of filling in some missing blanks.

I won’t make this a longer review than it has to be. This is an extremely short read, but I do wish that some of this had ended up in Reservoir 13, as it would have made my read of that book far more meaningful and enjoyable. I will definitely be reading more books by Jon McGregor.