read by Matt Bates
A Guardian Book of
the Year; a Financial Times Book of
the Year; a TLS Book of the Year; an Observer Book of the Year; a Daily Telegraph Book of the Year; winner
of the 2017 Costa Novel Award; longlisted for the Man Booker Prize; shortlisted
for the Goldsmiths Prize.
This story of the lives haunted by one family’s tragic loss
of a teenaged child in a rural English village has been praised to the skies by
literary critics, popular critics and the general reader. The books is
structured so that each paragraph is a month, each chapter a year, with one
extra paragraph at year’s end. For thirteen years. It is slow, thoughtful,
poetic. And anyone seeking a resolution to the disappearance will be
disappointed. There is none. Which is, perhaps, the point of the whole
exercise: often life just goes on. Things might fall apart for a few, but for
everyone else life carries on in its infinite sameness.
Perhaps this is Beckett without the humour, Joyce without
the wit. Perhaps there is a touch of the emperor’s new clothes: how can the
cognoscenti be wrong, with their metropolitan nostalgia for a piece of Albion
idyll? Have any critics given less than fulsome praise?
Narrator Matt Bates produces a great performance, but the
nuances are better appreciated on the page. It is rather a flat read:
uneventful, unremarkable. Impressed by all the acclaim, I am sure many readers
and listeners will come away from Reservoir
13 thinking: ‘what is it I missed?’ Many a Christmas present will be left
half read and forgotten.
Make up your own mind.
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