This excellent debut novel, published last year by Canongate, is set almost entirely in one valley in Shetland, containing just a handful of houses. Its assured and consistent prose is an examination of community life, tradition, relationships and different types of loss.
Loss is a key theme and comes in various forms. The loss, partial or total, of a person, caused by death, separation, abandonment, distance; the loss of traditions; the loss of memories. We see how sometimes a person’s presence can be felt all the more for their absence.
The dialogue in the book gives a flavour of Shetlandic dialect while not hindering comprehension. A glossary of terms at the beginning may concern some readers, but I found that I almost never consulted it. It also allows us to note and ponder which characters use dialect more or less and when.
The third-person narrator gives us the perspective of most of the valley’s inhabitants but it is Sandy who is the principal character. His girlfriend Emma has just left him and moved to Edinburgh, with Sandy remaining in the property rented from her parents, David and Mary, who live in the closest house.
For Sandy, a sense of abandonment is nothing new and while his failure to deal with his past may have contributed to this latest incident, it doesn’t make him immune to it. For David and Mary, no longer having their daughter close by is also difficult.
The three, as if united in a kind of grief, continue to have a close relationship, particularly Sandy and David who spend a lot of time together working the croft. They must negotiate the changed dynamic of their situation, but, as close neighbours in a small community, avoiding each other was never going to be an option. The practicalities of the valley insist that life goes on, a reminder of our relative insignificance in our ancient surroundings.
In the valley, the residents leave their doors unlocked and enter each other’s houses without waiting for a reply. They have a knowledge of each other’s business and habits that is born from trust and necessity rather than gossip. We see, too, how the community reacts to both departures and arrivals, how it comes together in adversity, how supporting each other seems more like an unquestioned fact woven into their daily lives than favours consciously exchanged as such.
In a place that seems as if it were from another time, it is natural that we also see differences – perhaps broadly generational – in how it is viewed. There are characters who would take advantage of it with short-term opportunism and others who wish to protect it, feeling responsibility as guardians of something bigger than themselves.
This novel is deeply rooted in the land and its immediate environment, but also questions the very possibility of writing about place. It examines our ability to hold on to something, to feel control and have a sense of manageability over somewhere. This is embodied best in the character of Alice, an English writer who moved to the valley after the death of her husband. In her quest to write the definitive book on the valley and everything in it, in a bid to exercise some control when life has taken so much away from her, we see the enormity and near impossibility of trying to contain and understand even such a small piece of land. For the valley, like all places and all people, is its own world.
A community such as the one in this novel may be considered to be sheltered from many things, but not from the weather, which, together with the land, is evoked in such a way that the reader is always aware of and can almost feel its presence.
Neither is the valley, for all its history and its traditions, stuck in the past. Like David, it seems be in a constant present, it just keeps going. It offers different things to different people. It can be an escape, a change, a life, a fresh start, somewhere to evolve or somewhere to stay the same. It is also a place full of stories, some old, some new, some forgotten, some yet to be written and waiting to be told.
In this setting – unique yet universal in its humanity – the story is driven by the interactions between the valley’s residents. Though there is never really a sense of claustrophobia – perhaps the remoteness and exposure to the elements prevent that – it is true that when tensions arise, the neighbours cannot avoid each other for long. News travels fast and secrets are few. Character development, too, is key, particularly seen in Sandy, trying to figure out what his next step in life is, and Alice, persevering in a project as much personal as it is professional.
Tallack’s writing is a pleasure to read and spending a while in The Valley at the Centre of the World is an enjoyable, poignant, meditative and invigorating experience.