That Beautiful Atlantic Waltz

Malachy Tallack

(Canongate, £18.99)

Many times during That Beautiful Atlantic Waltz, Jack Paton will stop to ponder why country music means so much to him, and what makes a man living in windswept Shetland feel that it belongs to him just as much as to the people of Tennessee or Texas.

With the exception of a few weeks in Glasgow, visited on a youthful impulse, Jack has lived all of his 63 years in Hamar, the house he inherited from his parents. Shy and solitary, he’s never married or had any kind of intimate relationship. He gets on with his neighbours but has no real close friends. Always a drifter, never one to take life by the horns, he takes part-time jobs, currently working an hour or two each evening cleaning the premises of a salmon farm company three miles from his front door.

Largely untroubled by his lack of dynamism and the absence of a social life, he’s aged into his easy-going lifestyle quite agreeably and feels he’s been right to value time over money all these years, suffering only the occasional pangs of regret for the life he could have led.

His greatest solace comes from country music. If he ever really conversed with people, he could discourse on country for hours. The meaning of life is to be found there: “It was a kind of instability ... a present that was constantly undermined, by yearning, by nostalgia, by remorse.”

Jack may never have been in love, but he feels he has come to understand love through music. He even writes and records his own songs, saving them on his computer – though, in keeping with his natural reticence, he never lets anyone hear them and never plays his guitar in company.

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One day, without warning, his orderly routine is thrown into disarray when he comes home to find someone has left a kitten in a box on his doorstep. At first, he thinks it’s a prank, but when no one comes forward to take responsibility he realises he’s stuck with it, names it Loretta and before long can’t remember what life was like before his new furry friend came into his life.

Loretta, in turn, attracts the attention of Vaila, a little girl from a neighbouring house, who asks to come and play with it. The arrival of both Loretta and Vaila brings a welcome burst of energy both to Jack’s life and a novel that’s so far been very introspective.

It’s a tale that’s been told many times: the heart of an unsociable, solitary old man thawed by an inquisitive, friendly young girl. But, as touching and gracefully written as that is, Tallack is telling a wider story. A parallel narrative follows Jack’s father, Sonny, who we first see as a young deckhand on a whaler in the 1950s before quitting to settle down with his sweetheart Kathleen in Shetland.

These chapters put Jack in context, filling the void around him with the connections he’s lost, as they recount how Kathleen’s grand-uncle Tom lived with the young couple and took on the role of a live-in grandad – an odd arrangement that worked well until Tom’s death, followed by the loss of Sonny and Kathleen at sea, leaving 20-year-old Jack with a house, memories and his parents’ love of music.

Though Tallack is dealing with themes of loss, loneliness and guilt, he does it with a lightness and humour that can’t help but evoke frequent smiles, but never gets overly sentimental. That the novel comes with an ironic sting in its tail makes it no less life-affirming.