Subtlety is a difficult thing to write about when it comes to novels. But while airport bookshop shelves are groaning with big, in-your-face thrillers and high-stakes romantic dramas, I always find it more interesting to examine the understated prose to be found in the hinterlands of literature’s giant ecosystem.
That Beautiful Atlantic Waltz by Malachy Tallack is the Scottish author’s fifth book, at the head of a very varied backlist of innovative fiction and non-fiction. This short and precise novel is a beautiful and moving testament to connection and the power of music, set mostly in Shetland and revolving around Jack, an old man living alone in the isolated cottage where he grew up. Set in his ways and resentful of his local community, he is mysteriously gifted a kitten on his front doorstep one day, an incident that slowly but surely transforms his life.
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Jack was once a talented country musician, but one who never properly tried to escape his home and make something of himself in the wider music world. That regret haunts him, but as his life begins to change new horizons appear before him.
It’s hard to properly express the concise power of Tallack’s writing. This is a book that finds remarkable things to say about everyday life, about the purpose of living at all, and it does so for the most part in between the lines on the page. With a clear eye and using deceptively simple prose, the narrative very slowly gets under the skin of its main character, and therefore the reader too, delving deep into profound themes of society and interconnectedness along the way. The mysterious force of music is evoked in an almost transcendental way, in a book that has real hidden depths in its universal story.
Doug Johnstone is an author and journalist.
That Beautiful Atlantic Waltz by Malachy Tallack is out on 24 October (Canongate, £18.99). You can buy it from The Big Issue shop on Bookshop.org, which helps to support The Big Issue and independent bookshops.
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