Rating: 2/5
Review:
Not for me
I couldn’t get on with Reservoir 13 in the end, I’m afraid.
There are things about it I like, but overall it just didn’t engage
me.
The story is driven
by the disappearance of a 13-year-old girl on the moor in an English
village. Each chapter begins with the words “At midnight when the
year turned...” and we get a sequence of almost snapshot images of
events and people through each of the following thirteen years. It’s
a curious but clever device, with a strange mixture of a sequence
flat, sometimes almost staccato statements but of glimpses of strong
emotion through them. There are long, long paragraphs which flit
from one event and character to another without warning and for a
while I thought it admirable that McGregor conveyed a lot while
giving us so little description. The almost hypnotic effect is
designed to draw us in, I suspect, but for me it began to pall after
100 pages or so. I found myself slogging through a lot of stuff with
which I wasn’t engaged at all, so I gave up.
Plainly a lot of
people have found this profound and affecting and I can sort of see
why. It didn;t do it for me, though, and personally I can’t
recommend it.
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