Reservoir 13

This book almost feels like it's written by a non-human intelligence. It's the story of a village as a whole, with nearly as much attention paid to the landscape and nature as to the people. It's as much concerned with patterns and continuity as it is with discrete events. And yet at the same time it's full of humanity: the good, the bad and the bland.

When I was reading this I kept thinking of that line from He Died With a Felafel in His Hand where a writer needs a roll of paper because pages “placed an artificial construct on my stream of consciousness”.

Limited punctuation and not stopping for air, I didn't immediately slip into the cadence of the book: 13 chapter-years made up of long-paragraph-months, with the same start (new years fireworks) and repeating lines forming a kind of framework to hang things on, but once immersed in this rhythm started to feel like I was constantly in threat of falling under the waves, getting caught up in some subtle drama, always a feeling of my vision being obscured or some slight of hand trick being played for the time when it will finally be revealed what happened to the missing girl that was introduced in the first paragraph.

The whole time the characters are on some slow moving merry-go-round of life, with slight shifting in their story each rotation, sprinklings of revelations about one of its characters each turn that catches the eye. Kids growing up the only thing that marks the time over a decade.

Every time something mundane happenstance – construction near the reservoirs or divers are brought in or some character turns out to be dodgy as f – your ears prick up for “so this is where we find out”, but you are left blue balled. Another story about what it is like to live in a small town where everyone knows everyones business (or do they), how everyone is wary of gossip and judgement from every soul in town. And like an Australian bush police drama, it has a surprisingly high crime rate.

I suspect one could draw out many metaphors for the writing style and the role of seasons and events on the calendar and what it might mean for life, the universe and everything; to me it was just about life goes on but it doesn't. So much past in present.