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 s 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.favorite-authors favorite-books literary-fiction ...more111 s Cecily1,180 4,504

“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.”bildungsroman crime-detective-mystery landscape-location-protagonist ...more79 s3 comments Jaline444 1,743

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, 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.xx2018-completed74 s Elyse Walters4,010 11.2k

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 d 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 d ‘all’ 15 stories ...each were intimate... filled with insights - yet leaving our and minds heats wide open with questions. Jenny (Reading Envy)3,876 3,482

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 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.around-the-world location-uk own ...more53 s Hugh1,274 49

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 disd 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 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.modern-lit read-201837 s PattyMacDotComma1,559 925

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, Becky’s family. Small towns are fascinating.

“One thing Vicky had learnt when she moved up here was that people d 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.


aa aa-ce favourites-adult ...more35 s Paul FulcherAuthor 2 books1,453

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 unly 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.2017 net-galley32 s Cheri1,873 2,729

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
2019 british-author fiction-contemporary ...more28 s TeresaAuthor 8 books946

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 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 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.23 s JimZ1,119 563

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.
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