You’ve gotta call it when you see it, so here it is: Tessa Hadley’s review of Jon McGregor’s Reservoir 13 is a model of what broadsheet criticism can accomplish. In only 1,300 words we’re treated to a thoughtful consideration of the narrative setup, the invocation of genre tropes and the expectations associated with them, the imagery, the prose style, the affect it generates, the tone of the whole when you apply that affect to the narrative action, and much more besides. Here’s a sample:
[E]verything [in Reservoir 13] is charged by our expectation as readers: everything ordinary has its undertow of significance. … And then as our expectations are strained to the limit, we begin to realise that the writer is deflecting them into something else, taking us into another kind of novel altogether. What actually fills up the pages, fills up narrative time while we wait to find the girl, is an omniscient narration moving easily around and inside a whole collective of protagonists in the village and following them through their daily lives, none of them dominating the story space. … The characters we watch are all warm enough, sentient human beings, prone to needing and wanting and mostly failing one another. But the eye of the story keeps its remote omniscient distance; it’s a cold camera-eye, or the eye of a hawk circling above the village, assembling everything impartially, not taking sides.
Read the rest and savour it. This quality of criticism is far too rare in the broadsheet press these days.
Infinite Patience 