Published in Great Britain by Canongate Books in 2018; paperback edition published on April 7, 2020
Life in an isolated rural area, the choices people make to embrace or abandon such a life, and whether they have the power to make choices at all, are the animating themes of The Valley at the Center of the World. The novel explores the complexity of people who live simple lives, reminding the reader that no life is ever simple. A character in the novel, reflecting on how things are changing in the valley, thinks about how things have become complicated and how she wants them to be simple again, but the changes she sees involve people, not landscapes, and people are never simple.
Two primary characters, David and Sandy, are a study in contrast. David has the serenity of certainty. He is the only remaining resident who has a long history in the valley. He knows his place in the world and that place makes him happy. Unlike his wife Mary, who viewed home as the place from which she would escape when she became an adult, David has never wanted to leave the valley. Mary admires and depends upon the stability that her husband brings, but she can’t help wondering whether she might have lived a different life, one that was not so fixed by her husband’s contentment.
David’s greatest fear is that the valley’s few remaining residents will move away, as did their daughters, Kate and Emma. Kate, like David, figured out what made her happy. She moved away, but not far, dropped out of college, got married, had kids, and causes no worries. Emma, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to know what she wants.
In that respect, Emma is like Sandy. They met in Edinburgh but Emma wanted to come home to the valley, feeling “we’re tied to the islands by elastic.” Sandy didn’t feel the pull but he went with her, moving into the house next to David’s, a house that David and Mary owned, and lived there for three years. Then Emma decided she had to go away, leaving Sandy to wonder whether he wants to stay, whether he even has a choice. Unlike David, Sandy is not certain of anything. He doesn’t know whether tending sheep offers the promise of a satisfying life. An inevitable conflict between David, who wants to bind people to the valley, and Sandy, who doesn’t want David to control his life, is the initial source of the story’s dramatic power.
Other characters, the only other residents of the valley, add to the novel’s understated drama. Terry drinks too much, sometimes with Sandy, and feels sorry for himself, bringing everyone down with his bitterness. Alice, a mystery writer whose husband died, moves to the valley as a means of escaping into the past, to a place where she used to vacation with her husband. Alice is working on a book about the valley but she can’t quite decide what she wants to say, what she wants the book to be. She’s trying to understand Maggie, who lived a long life in the valley, but the letters Maggie wrote are all about work and weather. According to David, “wark and wadder”sums up her life. Perhaps thinking of her own life, Alice wonders whether that is enough.
Sandy’s confusion heightens when, after he moves into Maggie's old house, a young couple moves into the house he formerly occupied with Emma. His attraction to Jo, Ryan’s wife, is mutual and uncomfortable. He feels torn when Liz, his mother, suddenly reappears after a four-year absence from his life. He resents her presence as much as he craves it. Liz’s backstory explains why she found it impossible for her to stay with Sandy’s father or to be a proper mother to Sandy. She loves Sandy, “just not in the way that was required of her.”
Characters who grew up in the valley have their own way of speaking. When Alice asks David what kind of stories Maggie told, he replies: “Well, du kens, juist stories aboot fok. Aboot da valley. My parents, her parents, idder fok at used to bide around here.” Malachy Tallack provides a glossary of Scottish dialect, but it’s not really necessary. If you can hear the voices in your head, you’ll understand what they’re saying. Hearing those voices is one of the pleasures of reading the novel.
Much like the book Alice is writing, The Valley at the Centre of the World is as much about the place as the people who inhabit it. The valley sees little change. It is a place that will endure, as it always has, untroubled by urban bustle, until its few sheep farmers finally die or move away. Yet it is the depth of characterization that makes the novel special.
The novel is quiet but eventful. The story encourages readers to get inside the skin of each character, to wonder what will finally become of them. Mary might wonder about alternative lives, but she knows she is fundamentally happy with what she has. Terry is passive, “as though his whole movement through life had been guided by decisions were not his own,” and unlikely to change. Sandy and Alice have the strongest temptations to leave, but will they? “I’m no sure what I want, exactly,” Sandy tells Jo. “I used to ken, but now I don’t.” Alice’s family wants her to come home. She isn't sure she has any reason to stay, but the more she works on her book about the valley, the more it feels like home.
The valley never changes, but people do. Some people fear change, others see no need for it. Whether the characters will find ways to be content with their lives, by embracing or rejecting change, is the fascinating question that invites the reader to imagine how the characters' lives might turn out.
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