Review by Annabel
Kala was the literary thriller to be seen reading last summer when first published. A high-profile debut from a young Irish author, I saw many favourable reviews all over the place. A year later it’s out in paperback and I finally got to discover what it was all about.
Galway-born Walsh now lives in Belgium, but his novel is set back on Ireland’s west coast in the seaside tourist village of Kinlough, and he uses his experience of now living elsewhere to tell his story of those who went and those who stayed, in a group of friends after the disappearance of one of them back in 2003. He uses a dual-timeline narrative with sections from back then and later in 2018. It begins with a short prologue which introduces us to the six friends, Kala, Aoife and Helen, Aidan, Joe and Mush, followed by the missing persons report after Kala went missing.
We move to fifteen years later, and our three narrators, Mush, Helen and Joe take over the story in turns. Mush is the one who stayed, a beautiful, sensitive and artistic young man, he was scarred (we’ll find out how later), and now mostly hides, working in his mum’s cafe. Helen has returned from abroad for her widowed father’s forthcoming wedding to Pauline, who was Aidan’s mum – was – for Aidan died (we’ll find out how later). Mush and Joe were best friends, and Joe was Kala’s boyfriend. Joe, a musician, became the ‘Famous Joe Brennan’ and he’s returned to do some gigs in his home town and to reconnect with life.
Joe and Helen’s happy-ish returns coincide with something less savoury. Human remains are found at a nearby building site, and they’re confirmed as Kala’s, which brings the past back to collide with the present. The trio, Aiofe having long escaped, will be forced to confront the events of 2003 that led to Kala’s disappearance and search for closure in the novel’s present, which will lead in rather dark, and violent directions, for the past will out…
Kala is one of those slowburn thrillers that gives up its secrets gradually, cleverly. Once I got to the end, I could see some seeds that were planted earlier in the book, but I never got close to working out what happened though, including how Mush got his scars. There is some terrible violence at key points, which was quite shocking given the more cerebral build-up which is more psychological. In the sections set when the friends were all teenagers, Walsh captures the changing loyalties and jealousies between the group – once Helen becomes Kala’s confidante for instance, Aoife is left out completely, and Kala is good at playing the boys off each other too, although Mush is just too lovely to hate in any way.
The writing is assured, and reminded me slightly of Tana French’s debut In the Woods, in that although narrated throughout by the three friends, there is the slightest air of detachment at times which lulls you into a false sense of security. Occasionally, I got mixed up with who was narrating a section and had to refer back to the name at the beginning of the chapter, but this is a small quibble. Kala is a distinctly literary thriller, one that is trying not to be a thriller almost, pretending to be a drama about friends. It is that, but given that there are so many secrets in Kinlough relating to Kala’s disappearance, some of which are more open than others, a thriller it is, but it is the rest too. This is a fantastic page-turning and immersive (I hate that word, but it is!) debut from an emerging Irish talent and I’ll be looking forward to his next book.
Annabel is a co-founder and editor of Shiny New Books. Her personal book blog is here.
Colin Walsh, Kala (Atlantic, 2023) Paperback 2024, ISBN 9781838958626, 455 pages.
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