The traumatic effects of schoolgirl Kala’s murder ripple from the event in 2003. Nobody was ever convicted. The case went cold. But fifteen years later, her friends return to their hometown on the West Coast of Ireland to find history repeating itself, as more girls disappear.
Colin Walsh’s debut Kala is part literary fiction, part whodunnit thriller, and it’s all the more enjoyable for this hybridity. It’s astonishingly well executed. By turns both haunting and compulsively addictive, this novel marks the arrival of an exciting new voice in Irish fiction.
Walsh’s Kala is the latest in a burgeoning new trend: literary 'true crime’. Kala is a welcome addition to this growing genre, alongside Eliza Clark’s Penance and Megan Nolan’s Ordinary Human Failings. Like Clark and Nolan’s novels, Kala’s portrayal of violence brings to the fore what this genre can achieve. It humanises the crime genre, putting the spotlight on the victim, by carefully centring interpersonal relationships in the aftermath of grief.
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Listen: Kala - Colin Walsh talks to Oliver Callan about his debut novel
This stunning debut asks the reader: how can we go on after such a seismic rupture? And the answer is unflinching, as shame, addiction, and class prejudices all rise to the surface.
It’s more than this though: Kala is a breath of fresh air. On the one hand it has the frenetic energy of being a teenager in 2003: disposable cameras at parties, the excitement of first (second, third…) kisses, sneaking out of the house to see the world at night. In contrast, the wreck left by trauma brings the story into sharp relief, as the friends live with grief and try to solve the case. To me, it’s these elements which best summarise Kala: love and heartache.
Colin Walsh's debut Kala is part literary fiction, part whodunnit thriller, and it’s all the more enjoyable for this hybridity.
Grief is like falling in love; it is always narcissistic. Some catastrophe cuts through your life and immediately you reshape the world to make this disaster the secret heartbeat of all things, the buried truth of the universe.
Walsh weaves these two strands perfectly, tying together through language a platonic love that stretches far beyond teenage formative years, far beyond Kala’s life. I daresay that this novel will live on in the reader’s mind long after the final page is read.
Kala is published by Atlantic
