That Beautiful Atlantic Waltz by Malachy Tallack review: 'an evocative portrayal of Shetland life'

The task is made a bit easier by the novel’s setting; in Shetland. Scotland’s Northern Isles are good territory for poets and storytellers. There are a few echoes of the Orcadian George Mackay Brown in this novel.

His hero Jack Paton is well on in his sixties and, most would think, quite fairly, has never done much with his life. His father Sonny was very different, in early days a whaler in the South Atlantic, then an energetic crofter when he married. Jack was an only child, a shy boy, no drive about him. He inherited the croft but, no eager worker, sold the land to a neighbour. He has had jobs of course, but not very demanding ones. For some years he delivered the post; this suited him – he met people but didn’t have to engage with them. Now he works an hour or two four evenings as week as an office janitor and cleaner when all the staff have gone home. It’s solitary life that suits him. Jack reads a lot in the evening, but his real interest – his sole passion – is for Country and Western music. His knowledge of this is encyclopaedic, and there is a great deal about this music and its stars, too much perhaps for those uninterested in it, but a delight, I would guess, for enthusiasts.

You could say that Jack is selfish, certainly in his modest, hesitant way, even self-indulgent; a man who has chosen or fallen into a habit of life which makes few demands on him. He has made a satisfactory life for himself by keeping others at arm’s-length, even the few with whom he has pleasant enough relations, though he will sometimes look to one or two of them for advice if anything puzzles him.

When his way of life meets a challenge – not on the face of it a very testing one – the question is how he meets it, whether he will allow others into his protected space. It is all done by Tallack with courteous sympathy. He likes his Jack and I should think it probable that readers will like him too, even while occasionally muttering “get on with it” – evidence of course of how far and tenderly Tallack has drawn them into his world.

In short Tallack has successfully met the test which Maugham set himself. Portraying a character like Jack, bringing him convincingly to life. Writing about good people who seem to lead quiet, undramatic lives and retaining the reader’s interest requires more of a novelist’s skill than devising and developing an all-action plot.

That said, this novel also has its fair share of action and drama in the interpolated flashback chapters which take us to Sonny’s experiences on the whaling ship in Antarctica, his courtship and marriage to the girl who will become Jack’s mother and his work on the croft shared with his wife’s uncle. There is tragedy too, as in almost all stories of island life; the sea gives and the sea takes away.

There is of course an awareness of changing times. Sonny resents the consequences of the discovery of oil in the sea off Shetland; whatever the rewards, it is for islanders an unwelcome and unsettling change. Yet in the midst of social and economic change Jack seems a fixed point, a convincing and ultimately very likeable character.

This is a beautifully written novel, imaginative, understanding and sympathetic. The Northern Isles have a rich literary heritage. Malachy Tallack takes his place in a line of excellence, a worthy heir to Eric Linklater (whose masterpiece is set in Shetland, not his own Orkney), Edwin Muir and George Mackay Brown. Matching such writers is no mean feat.

That Beautiful Atlantic Waltz, by Malachy Tallack, Canongate, £18.99