Colin Walsh - Kala

We used to be such a force, back then when she was still with us. What happened to her?
In the seaside town of Kinlough three old friends are thrown together for the first time in years. They – Helen, Joe and Mush – were part of an original group of six inseparable teenagers in the summer of 2003, with motherless, reckless Kala Lanann as their group’s white-hot centre. Soon after that summer’s peak, Kala disappeared without a trace.
Now it’s fifteen years later. Human remains have been discovered in the woods. Two more girls have gone missing. As past and present begin to collide, the estranged friends are forced to confront their own complicity in the events that led to Kala’s disappearance…

Comment: This is another book I was given for my birthday. Again, I had not heard of the author nor of the book before, even though I was told it was quite successful in the UK. The fact it has a mystery was probably what made me eager to try it.

In this story we meet a cast of characters that, in the west part of Ireland, is coming together for a wedding. In the meantime, the remains of a body are found and everyone believes it could be Kala, a teenager who went missing fifteen years ago. Everyone has secrets, but some surely are more dangerous to be revealed than others, and that is why that when two teenagers go missing now, the case is compared to that of the missing Kala. Could it be that there is a connection to the two situations? What happened to Kala? What are some people hiding that could lead to knowing what happened to Kala and to the missing girls now?

I will start right away by saying that this story felt to me more a character study than an actual mystery. Yes, we have a missing girl fifteen years ago, and two more now but the writing style and the the narrative choice is more indicative of the story of the three narrators - Helen, Joe and Mush - than of what should be related to the mysteries. Yes, there is something to be said about those, but I would not consider this to be a real mystery novel; it's more a literary one which happens to include a crime investigation.

The story is alternated told by three narrators, each one of them in the first person. Things begun with the upcoming wedding of Helen's father to Mush's aunt, the mother of the teenage twins who go missing throughout the story. We learn that Helen, Mush, Joe, the missing Kala and two others (Aidan and Aiofe) used to be a close group of friends when they were teenagers too, and everything in their lives changed the year Kala went missing. Now that Helen and Joe are back for the wedding - Mush never left - there's a weird vibe in the air and since Helen freelances as a journalist, she decides to investigate what happened to Kala all those years ago.

I think the idea is quite interesting and the fact this is set in western Ireland also gave a great cultural and geographical background to the events. I think I would have appreciated this a lot more if the narration had been in third person, though. Sadly to me, I've found the "voices" of the three narrators to be annoying, in the sense everything they think/say is cluttered among lots and lots of reminiscence monologues and memories. I get it; this is how we connect their teenage lives and what they were doing the year Kala went missing to who they are now. But it's still annoying.

I also disliked immensely that their thoughts also seem muddled by what I see as their character flaws: Helen always thinks she isn't as important to her family, Mush keeps himself from changing his life by making excuses, and Joe irritatingly thinks in second person! His POV is always something like this "you keep thinking, you were doing, you are this" etc, which I suppose is a way to demonstrate how outside of himself he is and why he is a alcoholic. I get it, it's innovative writing, but it's also very annoying to read.

These things mean that, for me, the story with such an intriguing mystery - it is so, deep down - gets lost in the middle of elements I feel didn't add much to what the plot should focus on. I now tell myself that perhaps the author should have written two different stories, each with a different main intention. I struggled with the writing for the most part, so much that even when some things were being shared/explained/revealed, they lost importance because I was annoyed and/or distracted by secondary stuff.

I should also say that there is some content that got on my nerves. When the main characters, as teenagers, discover a secret related to activities a bunch of people were hiding, I've found it to be distasteful. This eventually leads to Kala's disappearance and when the explanation is revealed, it's actually an interesting angle on life in a part of Ireland where economy certainly wasn't great. I must applaud the author to mix up several Irish elements so well, but at the end, when I think about my enjoyment of this story, there wasn't much to it.

I would have preferred the story to focus on Kala and why she went missing, and in the investigation of it in the present day, as well as how Helen would go from one information to the next. If all the extras were to be removed, this part of the story is quite exciting, but then all the unappealing characters, all their muddled thoughts and the disarray of how these elements were mixed up kind of diminished the power of the actual plot. This did feel average to me in the end. I've liked some things, I've disliked many others and I don't know if I'd want to read a book with the same writing style.

Grade: 5/10