There are far harder ways to earn a living than writing, of course there are, but that doesn’t mean the journey from blank page to publication isn’t a long, lonely slog. New authors particularly often talk about fitting their writing around the realities of daily life: getting up at dark o’clock to redraft, editing during work breaks, making notes while waiting to collect the kids.
So it surprises me that it’s quite late in our conversation when Colin Walsh mentions the huge decision he made to upend a very defined path to “go from scratch, learning how to write”. Originally from Galway, he travelled for a few years before moving to Belgium to do a master’s in philosophy. In 2016 he had been accepted for a PhD in the United States, and was getting ready to move, when he became convinced he was doing the wrong thing, that, for him, the irresolvable contradictions and ambivalences that make life what is it weren’t reflected in philosophy. Goodbye fully funded PhD, goodbye new life in the US.
He describes this as “one of those few moments that you have in your life where you’re very conscious at the time you’re making a decision that is changing your future completely ... There were friends and relationships that could have been made if I went to America. Who knows what the path would mean? You know that by saying, ‘No, it’s over,’ you’re opening to another possibility, but you don’t know what it is.”
He was clear about the scale of the risk but was up for it. He stayed in Belgium and began to write short stories, funding himself initially by working for an NGO campaigning for renewable energy in Europe. (“I think I got the job purely by dint of being a native English speaker living in Belgium,” he says). Later, supported by savings and an Arts Council bursary, he was able to write full time.
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Success came quickly. In 2017 he won RTÉ’s Francis MacManus Short Story Competition, of which he says, “That was a big moment, because I was, like, ‘Okay, you’re not completely deluded – you might actually have something.’” Two years later he was named Hennessy New Irish Writer of the Year, for his story Between the Waves, which The Irish Times had published in 2018. He wasn’t writing short stories as if they were some sort of apprenticeship, yet a novel was already floating around his head. Fast-forward a couple of years – and a six-way publishing auction – and his debut, Kala, is hitting the shelves.
A literary thriller, Kala is set in the fictional seaside town of Kinlough, which has the transient, restless quality common to many places that swell and deflate with the tourist season. Combining the classic themes of unsolved murder and the messy, eager abandon of teenage summers, the novel begins in 2018 as three old friends meet for the first time in years. Fifteen year earlier, Helen, Joe and Mush were part of a gang of six. The glue binding them all was Katherine “Kala” Lanann, who vanished later that same year.
The novel moves fluidly between Joe, Helen and Mush’s perspectives.
Joe, a selfish narcissist, is a famous musician who has lived in Los Angeles for five years, snatching visits back to Ireland every six months or so. He was raised by his father, Dudley, to believe he was better than Kinlough.
In 2018 they are adults trapped ‘in the amber of their teenage selves’
Helen works as a journalist in Canada, but it’s a hardscrabble existence. For years she preferred to relegate her contact with her fractured family to the illusion of communication conveyed by liking their social-media posts. Her sister tells her, “You care about humanity. The idea of people. You just can’t stand actual flesh-and-blood human beings.” Helen measures everything since in relation to Kala, and the older she gets the more incandescent her lost friend becomes to her.
And then there is Mush, good-hearted, broken Mush, the unwitting conscience of the novel. He works in his mother’s cafe, his former easy-going calm all but shattered by an incident that disfigured him. Mush believes he was the last person to see Kala alive, and remains haunted by her absence. As the three reunite, two more girls vanish, and the mystery about Kala’s disappearance is suddenly back in the headlines.
Dudley, the local guard, describes the last sighting of Kala in practical terms. “She was still in her school uniform. She had her bag with the Rage Against the Machine logo on it. She was caught on CCTV walking over Toner’s Bridge, out of town. There were several sightings of her talking to someone in a Hyundai. She never came home. A long search, everywhere. No body, or evidence of foul play, is found. The investigation slowly winds down.”
But to her friends she can never be an investigation that slowly winds down. She is a loss that has continued to expand, a crater into which they each throw their pain and confusion. Central to the story is the relationship between truth and facts, and the gaps that open, or can be forced open, between the two.
Walsh excels in allowing each character to be revealed through the eyes of others, while still leaving enough breathing room for the reader to come to their own conclusions. Kala was a different person to each of them: she was Joe’s girlfriend, Helen’s best friend, Mush’s confidante. Adult Mush remembers the last time he saw her, telling Helen, “All the feelings in there, all them Kalas, on the surface of her face, changing by the second. Flows. Soft. Fierce. Lovely. Afraid. She was a person. She was me friend. And I didn’t even hug her.’”
‘It’s almost like you’re approaching an animal quietly from the side and hoping that you’re not going to startle it’
In 2018 they are, Walsh writes, adults trapped “in the amber of their teenage selves”. Friendship and the past are intricately linked in Kala, an irresolution that is crucial to the essence of the book. “The past is not something that kind of can be parcelled up and packaged and put away. It perpetuates itself every day. It’s always there with you – if anything, it’s the shadow that gives light.” In one particularly lovely passage, Helen recalls reading her troubled mother’s diary, and coming across a six-page-long sentence about time. Her mother believed there was no past or future, that when we think of the past our memories occur in the present; when we imagine the future we do so only from the standpoint of the present. “Each one of us is a churning surface of the infinite ocean”.
Walsh gave himself an ambitious journey: three narrators, two timelines. Writing a book set in 2003 and 2018 means managing “what the future knows about the past” and constructing a story that had to go in two directions at once. “I tend to write from the insides of the characters out to the world, but the fact that there’s a mystery means you as a writer need to know everything beforehand, because you’re layering all the information and revealing things in a very deliberate way.”
As is often the case with debuts, Walsh says that writing the first 100 pages took years but that once he hit his stride he finished the first full draft in a couple of months. “It’s almost like you’re approaching an animal quietly from the side and hoping that you’re not going to startle it.” Kala has been optioned for screen by Company Pictures, which adapted Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, and Walsh will be working on the script.
In 2016 the producer and singer Pharrell Williams hosted a masterclass for music students at the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music, at New York University. YouTube footage shows him sitting at the top of the room while, one by one, students join him as their work is played. He’s kind in his feedback, but it’s pretty excruciating to watch – and, judging by the look that flits across his face from time to time, Williams feels that too. Then a young woman with long blond hair sits down and introduces herself as Maggie Rogers, a singer-songwriter who grew up playing folk music.
As her song starts she glances over at Williams, nervously trying to suss out his reaction. He is visibly moved, his expression shifting from incredulous to admiring before settling on joyous. He has zero notes to give her, he tells her afterwards. All of us possess that ability to be singular, Williams says, but you have to be willing to seek, to be frank in your creative choices – guidance that sounds simple yet is far from easy. Talking to Walsh about Kala reminds me of that advice. Walsh chose the quest, chose to relinquish the familiar for the unknown. Perhaps you can never be found unless you’re the one willing to seek.
Kala is published by Atlantic Books
