Kala by Colin Walsh Review: Girlhood Friendships & Small Town Secrets
There is something about Irish literary talent, isn’t there? I’ve read so many wonderful books lately from Irish writers, many being debut novels, and Colin Walsh’s Kala is another stellar example.
Kala is the kind of book that I wish I had written; the kind of work I wish I had the ability to write. It’s a dark coming-of-age story that examines the dynamics of a friendship group that spans fifteen-years.
On the west coat of Ireland sits Kinlough, home to a tight group of six friends at the height of their adolescence, all figuring out where they fit in the small town with its dark underbelly of misogyny, criminality and potential murder.
At the center of the friendship group is Kala - bold, beguiling and in grave danger. When Kala goes missing, the group drifts away but fifteen years later her skeleton is found and three of the former friends find themselves back together to come to terms with the trauma of their childhoods.
Told through two different timelines and through the narrative voices of Helen, Joe and Mush, Kala is both sentimental and thrilling, with the intricacies of friendship laying the groundwork for all the classic crime novel conventions.
While the murder mystery narrative thread within Kala is sufficiently entertaining and the pacing is ideal, it is the friction and fancy in-between these plot points where Walsh’s talent really shines.
The almighty wildfire that is the first taste of teenage love is something so wholly overwhelming. Full of unbridled emotion and, if you’re lucky, half-decent snogging.
It’s self-conscious and crushingly vulnerable. Something fleshy and raw, pregnant and pulsing with a million different potential outcomes. It’s awful and brilliant, and should be bottled up and saved for when the complexities of adult relationships makes us feel cynical and hardened.
This experience of young love is not limited to that of a romantic kind. The same enormity of such emotions is so easily found in that of platonic love, the fierce friendships made when you’re sixteen and bonding with each other by getting shitfaced in the park.
Walsh captures the highs and lows of teenage emotion with such wonderful prose and an astute insight that is just brimming with golden nostalgia.
The group is wonderfully messy; Kala is queen-bee with Aoife by her side, but new girl Helen threatens the foundations of their little twosome and Joe, Mush and Aidan are boisterous best friends, but when Joe and Kala start falling in love, too much testosterone becomes difficult to deal with.
While the relationship between Kala and Joe brilliantly captures the ache of young love, it is the intricacies of the friendship group that reflect how love between friends can be all consuming, particularly the intensity between girlhood best friends.
During girlhood, nobody can make you feel more illuminated or so completely ignored like your best friend. I cannot speak for the friendship between boys but, when you're in your teens, there is an intensity between girl best friends that is like nothing of its kind.
Having worked in a secondary school and having once been a young girl, I've watched identical scenes play out again and again when two girls become entrenched in each others lives and the third friend feels completely left out. Their roles switch and swap at seemingly random intervals, and everyone gets their turn out in the cold.
The castaway retreats and cries in the toilets, quietly slagging the other two off while waiting for their turn back in the sun. There's no question of giving up completely, of finding other friends, because being seen by someone when you're at an age when invisibility feels unavoidable is blissful; even if you're just teaching each other how to roll cigarettes while sitting in your school uniform.
Kala, Helen and Aoife make for brilliant representations of this intense dynamic and hearing how Helen still thinks of Kala as some kind of otherworldly deity, it is clear what kind of an impact these types of relationships can have on us at an early age.
So much of Helen is still stuck in the old timeline, before Kala went missing and their friendship made her feel like she belonged somewhere, like she could really see Kala to her very core and that Kala could do the same to her.
I loved how this was written and viewed by our three narrators. It felt like seeing polaroid snapshots of being a teenager again; drinking White Lightening in back-gardens, late nights in kitchens and trying to sleep on a sofa with five other familiar bodies.
The prose felt all hazy and familiar, warm and gritty, like bare skin on warm grass, dirt stuck to pale limbs. This sense of nostalgia made the threat of finding Kala’s killer all the more intense and overall enjoyable.
Kala is a great summer read for those looking to avoid your typical sunbed books. It’s engaging, nostalgic and delivers what one would expect from your typical crime thriller.
However, for those of you in your 30s, beware any flashbacks to dodgy eyeliner, massive side-fringes and someone sticking their tongue down your throat in full view of your horrified friends.