"Kala" by Colin Walsh

Fundamentally a crime thriller. A teenage gang broke up after one of them, Kala, disappeared. Fifteen years later, four of them reunite in the Irish town. Then Kala's remains are discovered. 

 It is told in multiple first-person using the present tense. The characterisations are strong, elevating the narrators from what might otherwise be stereotypes (a rock star, a journalist, a cafe worker) into believable characters with whom I developed rapport. This meant that I was concerned to know what happened to them, especially since no punches were pulled I didn't know, when they faced life-threatening jeopardy, whether they would survive. The mysteries of the past (Kala's disappearance, Mush's scars etc) were solved in a nicely drip-feed fashion which kept me turning the pages nearly all the way to the end, the final few pages kept me going because I wanted to know whether at least one of the characters would make it. If you add in the beautifully written prose, this novel is elevated from just another crime thriller.

My only caveat is the plot. Mystery piles upon mystery but the solution requires two of the villains to make more or less unprompted confessions. While the first of these is by means of hints, the second revelation which basically solves the mystery is all a bit 'deus ex machina' and therefore slightly unsatisfactory.

Otherwise this is a hugely enjoyable read.

Selected quotes:

• “There's a turning melt of sky above us.” (Summer 2003)
• “Our group’s like a murmuration of birds, turning telepathically into ever new shapes.” (Summer 2003)
• “Kinlough is a sudden sea foaming up around me, and I am islanded in the grinning churn of Hogan's Square.” (Friday: Helen)
• “I am old enough to stop being afraid of many things. I will never stop being afraid of teenage girls.” (Friday: Helen)
• “Time archived in the lines of his skin.” (Saturday: Helen)
• “Quiet’s not peaceful, man. Quiet is when the monsters come out.” (Saturday: Mush)
• “People are like trees; live long enough, and your life becomes a tangle of trajectories, a crooked monument to its own mutilations.” (Saturday: Helen)
• “Life is like this: immense when you are inside it, but manageable from the outside.” (Sunday: Helen)
• “Every bedroom, a laboratory of the self.” (Sunday: Joe)
• “Organs squelching. All that blood. The things that keep us alive happen in the dark, because they're fucking ugly.” (Sunday: Joe)
• “She is acting like she is just another bloody adult. Talking constantly and saying nothing.” (Sunday: Helen)
• “The things that make life comfortable are always unacceptable, if you look at them square on. Someone, somewhere, is always suffering so you can be happy.” (Sunday: Mush)
• “Feels like my body’s made of fucking bumblebees.” (Monday: Mush)
• “The moments when you can say something are just that - moments - and once they're gone, they're gone, and you've added another brick to the wall.” (Monday: Mush)
• “You pretend you're cool but ... you need to read the instructions before doing anything.” (Monday: Joe)

Note:

Apollonia, the name Joe sometimes uses for Kala is either a female name meaning 'belong to Apollo', a god linked to poetry and music, which seems appropriate but unlikely, suggesting a higher degree of classical education than teenage Joe probably had, or the first name of an actress who was the lead singer of the girl group Apollonia Six (which might reference the six members of the teenage gang) and co-starred with the musician Prince in the movie 'Purple Rain'.

April 2026; 406 pages

Published in 2023 by Atlantic Books

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God