Mystery and Complicity: A Conversation with Colin Walsh

1 Jul

“The most horrific things that are in the book, many people in Ireland will be able to point to and be like ‘But of course.’”

For people who might not have read the book yet, would you be able to give a general overview of what it’s about, and also maybe a bit more about how it came about from your perspective as a writer?

Kala tells the story of a group of friends who we follow as teenagers and as adults. As teenagers, we’re following them over the course of the summer of their lives – it’s this heightened period full of these thresholds they’re passing through: their first love, their first kiss, their first time getting drunk – all that kind of feverish, magic, hormonal stuff. And at the centre of this group is Kala Lanann, a 15-year-old girl who is the leader of the group, really, their emotional core, their heartbeat. But beneath every smiling surface in this tourist town, there’s a broiling darkness that’s constantly threatening to swallow the characters. And over the course of this summer, these characters are getting closer and closer to that darkness. By the end of the summer, Kala goes missing, and 15 years later, three of the surviving members of this original group of teenagers are thrown back together in this small West Coast of Ireland town, when human remains have been found in the woods, and the past and the present begin to collide dramatically and violently.

The story follows these characters as adults and teenagers, the narrative pinballs back and forth between their younger and adult selves. It’s narrated by three of the gang: there’s Helen Laughlin, who was Kala’s best friend and confidant as a teenager, and is returning home from Canada; there’s Mush who has never left the town and who is working in his mother’s cafe; and then there’s Joe Brennan, who was Kala’s boyfriend at the time of her disappearance, and is now a successful musician who’s come back home to do a residency in the town.

You mentioned the dark underbelly of the book and the haunting feeling that pervades through the story, so I wanted to ask about the writing process itself, and about whether that darkness affected you? How was the experience of writing quite a chilling narrative?

I remember listening to an interview where Anne Enright was talking about writing The Gathering and, at one point, she came down to the kitchen and she was annoyed with her husband and was being really snappy towards him, and then she realised that she hadn’t left the narrator, Veronica, in the room; she’d taken all of this volcanic anger that the character had, and was just putting it out to her husband. I don’t know if I have anything that matches point for point with that, but I definitely tried to write from very deep in the characters, and so you do kind of have to ‘go there’, but I don’t want to romanticise or fetishize that too much either.

I remember once talking to an actor friend who was saying that he doesn’t necessarily feel emotionally wrung out by doing emotional things in a play night after night. But then, he said that your body is still doing the thing night after night, so even if mentally you’re not implicated, your body is still undergoing whatever emotion the character is undergoing. And obviously it doesn’t match one for one with what it is to write because you’re not physiologically going through something but, on some level, you do have to, at least for me, be ‘in there’ with the character; even though you’re on the outside orchestrating things, you do have to go to some dark places, and the book definitely does go to quite dark places.

I think there are some novels where you’re reading and it’s almost like a pornographic tour through the trauma catalogue, and it’s just such a Baroque, operatic, vulgarisation of how multifaceted an experience it is to just be a human being. Although Kala does have real horror, I think it’s only because there’s a lot of light in there too – there’s a warmth. On some level, it’s a book that likes people, that likes its characters. I don’t ever want readers to feel that, as an author, I’m treating characters like ants under a magnifying glass, and am getting this sadistic pleasure inflicting horror on them, you know? I don’t need to name names, but I think everyone knows, probably, the sort of writers I’m talking about.

That’s so interesting because our theme for this issue is Light, and one of the things we’re looking at is how so many books tend to be equally heart-breaking and heart-warming, and how narratives tend to be at their best when those two sides work together.

That’s interesting; I mean that’s really something that I would look for in a lot of work. I don’t know if you saw that TV show, The Bear, about chefs in a restaurant; it felt like a show that likes people, it likes its characters, and it just likes humanity in general. There is darkness in there, but there’s also this warmth and palpable feeling we get that you’d love to hang out with these people.

Which you definitely get in your book, so I know exactly what you mean. My next question follows on from this idea because I wanted to talk about your thoughts on genre. It seems as though Kala crosses a bridge between literary fiction and thriller, so I wanted to ask whether genre is something you’d considered before writing? And what you thought the effect would be, to have this thrilling plot, but with a focus on characterization and a more literary style?

I wasn’t necessarily thinking about this in the initial gestation of the book, but the closer that the world of writing comes to the world of publishing, the more you begin to become aware of those concerns. I mean, the shortest answer I could give will be that questions about literary fiction and genre are valid, but they’re also mainly questions for publishing, as opposed to writing. Often, I think concerns about those categories probably inhibit a lot of writing. Not even the writing being done, but the writing that gets published.

For example, when I read Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, I felt like it was doing something that I hadn’t really come across in many books, because, in my own reading, I do tend to primarily read literary fiction; I wouldn’t be reading a lot of genre fiction, even though I do think that, in recent years, you can see this kind of cross-pollination of genre and literary fiction. I think part of the reason for this is that you just have a whole generation of writers, probably, who don’t carry that kind of traditional snobbery, who have just come through a cultural upbringing where people aren’t divided neatly into camps of like, ‘That’s where the Goths sit, and that’s where the popular kids sit’ – the internet has scrambled all of those codes up so that people are more able to match these things in interesting and artistically fertile ways.

For me, I think my literary influence would have been coming more from literary fiction, but I’m also a huge fan of cinema and prestige TV, or whatever you want to call it, so I guess the more propulsive, compelling elements probably came from that. And trying to combine the two was really what I wanted to do in the book, but it was always a question of, can I do this? Not do I have permission to do it? But more like, can I pull this off? Because on some level, you’re almost doing two things that seem to be pulling in opposite directions. From the literary fiction side, generally speaking, you’re writing from the inside of the characters outwards towards the story or the plot, but because Kala has a mystery, and because there’s this kind of thriller element, you need to really know what the plot is before you’re even creating the characters. It’s all about the control of information: when you’re revealing certain things, when you’re opening up certain questions, and when certain turns in the narrative take place, so that was a very back and forth process.

The way I would describe it is the process of writing the novel was like trying to hack my way through a really knotted jungle – that’s what the writing on the ground was like, but then plotting and structure was like another part of me was in a helicopter above the jungle, screaming instructions down at the guy who was hacking through the jungle, saying, ‘No, you need to go that way.’ And then, sometimes you thought you’d solved a problem structurally, but you would get to a point where the characters were just like, ‘No, that is just not what we’re doing’. It reminded me of something Flannery O’Connor said – that a writer can choose what they want to write, but they cannot choose what they’re able to make live on the page. And that’s kind of like what it was for me – there were certain times where my conscious brain would have thought, ‘Okay, this is what I should do’, and then the story just kind of resisted, it would just push back. On one level, obviously, that’s extremely frustrating and can undermine your confidence, but on another level, it’s kind of telling you that there’s something here that has its own kind of trajectory, it wants to do something, and that’s when you know you’re dealing with something that, hopefully, has a heartbeat.

I can’t even begin to imagine the process of constructing that plot! You mentioned The Secret History, which I actually wanted to bring it up as well because Kala really reminded me of it, both for all the reasons you said, but also, because of its ending. I specifically remember loving the ending of The Secret History, and I was so happy it ended the way it did and didn’t fizzle out. So, I guess almost going back to the kind of literary/page turning duality, I wanted to ask what endings you prefer when you read yourself and, also, how you approached the ending of Kala?

In general, I can actually be very forgiving with how certain things end because just as a reader or a viewer, I tend to approach these things as a ‘going through.’ That, for me, is what’s compelling. I think a lot of things don’t end well – they just either stop, or there’s a really artificial tying up of loose ends which cheapens everything that’s comes before – but it doesn’t always diminish my love for the thing itself.

With Kala, I did want the ending to be doing many things at once. I mean, I wanted the whole book to be doing many things at once, I guess, but the ending is a difficult balance to strike, particularly if you think about ‘endings’ in the terms of thrillers or literary fiction, which would often seem to have opposing requirements. But what I feel about it is that, if you were to approach the book purely as a thriller, you might be thinking: what are the questions that are opened at the beginning of the book? And are they answered by the end of the book? And they are. But, over the course of the book, in the ‘going through’ of the book, there are many more questions opened on the level of character more than anything else. The orientations of the characters to one another and to their world and just towards life itself; I think these are left, not necessarily in a state of tension, but there’s an opening there. And that would probably be a more literary way of approaching how you make an ending.

Someone who is expecting 100% closure on everything who might be frustrated by such an ending. But I don’t see an ending like that as a ‘frustration’ of readers’ expectations. For me, when a writer does that, it’s an act of generosity from the writer towards me, as a reader, because it’s leaving space for me to participate in making what the meaning of the work is. All of the books I love the most are books where the writer respects the reader enough to leave spaces for them to enter and be a participant in the creation of what the work is for them. So, I wanted to honour that; I’m not in the business of wanting to frustrate the reader, I want to be as generous with the book as I can be, but for me, I felt like the way that the book does end – without going into any details – what I wanted to do was to try to accomplish both; there’s resolution, but there’s also an opening. I hope that though the story has ended, the world of the book doesn’t stop for the reader. I want it to continue to echo with the reader long after they close the cover – I mean, every writer would say the same I’m sure.

Yes, and I love talking about endings because, as you said, there are some books you remember because of the endings, and some where you have to forgive their endings. Danielle Evans, the short story writer, told us what she thought about the literal, final sentence of a book and the resolution of a narrative as two different things, which I think is true for Kala…

Absolutely. I mean, that’s the thing, you always have the surface story and then you have the subterranean story; you come for the former, but you stay for the latter. And both levels are operating according to different logics, but in the best works of art they’re resonating with one another, mutually reinforcing one another. I remember I once saw Max Porter speak, around the time Lanny came out. He was talking about poetry, but I think it applies to what you were saying about endings, especially in short stories. He was talking about how reading a poem feels like you’re entering a dark room, and you’re fumbling your way around the room, and you’re trying to get a sense of where everything is and, at the very end, someone throws on the light switch, and you suddenly see everything in total brightness, and then it’s gone. I think with short stories, that’s definitely the best stuff – you’ve got an ending that sort of ripples backwards throughout the whole thing and completely reframes everything, and you’re left a quivering wreck.

My next question is about writing about Ireland and writing about it. I recently talked to Caroline O’Donoghue, who’s just released a new book, and I spoke to her about this as well because she now lives in London, and you live in Belgium, so I wanted to ask if you think living away from Ireland gives you a distance that is advantageous position for a writer? The idea of whether you’re able to look at a place clearly if you’re slightly removed from it, as opposed to being within it?

Yeah, it’s definitely one of the underlying things within the book that I wasn’t consciously doing. On some level, just being an emigrant, it does change your relationship to where you’re from and, on some level, you almost become more ‘Irish’ when you leave, or that’s how it feels. But I think for me as a writer, being outside of Ireland enables me to kind of impose some sort of contours on experience, within which I can articulate a story. Whereas I think if I was in Ireland, it would be too all-engulfing.

And I think that happens a lot! The more I think about it, a lot of authors who write about their homeland from afar do so with some kind of distance that maybe gives them a clearer view – it’s just a different viewpoint, perhaps?

Yeah, I mean, just from reading interviews with other writers, I get the sense that, for writers, there is always this sense of displacement from whatever environment or milieu you’re within; you’re always experiencing it in this double way where you’re never fully immersed in where you are – there is always a part of you that is held back and is observing, and noticing things. It is a way of orienting yourself within a flow of ordinary moments, but I do also think that, on some level, it’s kind of a protection device, a control device, where you’re controlling experience by somehow stepping outside and orchestrating.

I think the act of writing itself is doing that – you’re imposing a sort of structure on that which does not have a structure; you’re imposing a shape on something that is fundamentally open ended and formless; you’re making meaning out of something. So, a lot of the time, in terms of living outside of Ireland, I think that it’s easy for me to write about Ireland, or easier, because I live abroad. I think if I lived within Ireland, I don’t know if I would be able to write full stop because, on some level, it was only by leaving that I was able to give myself permission to go in certain directions in terms of decisions I’ve made in my life, or things I’ve done, or things that I’ve given my energy to, or even the act of writing itself – these are all these things that I think I would have been too inhibited to do If I had stayed at home, I needed to break out in some kind of way. That is not to say that I was in any way ‘restricted’ by Ireland, but the way my thought patterns worked when I was within Ireland, I would have probably just been like travelling down the same cerebral arteries forever, and I needed to get out and have things that kicked doors open in my mind, and just to be challenged by real otherness in order to actually have something to say.

Without giving anything away about the plot, readers might read Kala and make certain conclusions about Ireland or and the kind of things that go on under the surface and the way that institutions are run. Did you ever feel cautious about approaching that?

I don’t think anybody in Ireland would read the book and say, ‘No, that couldn’t happen’, or, ‘That didn’t happen’, or, ‘That hasn’t happened’. Everybody was either directly implicated in things like what happens in this book or knows someone who was directly implicated. Within my lifetime, the country has changed so dramatically, there’s been an enormous reckoning in the last 10-15 years – a public reckoning – with the past. And a huge amount of that is because of the diminishment of the power of the church and the expansion of education, so you’re getting a much more cosmopolitan public who are willing to look at things that would have always been kept in silence and in the shadows. There’s something I think I can only appreciate by living abroad and having lived in many different countries – and that’s the degree to which even someone from my generation has internalized an enormous amount of shame and silence. The most horrific things that are in the book, many people in Ireland will be able to point to and be like ‘But of course.’

What was important to me, though, is that the book is not taking a ‘holier than thou’ stance of wagging its finger at society and saying, aren’t you terrible? I don’t like books that do that, and I don’t think that’s a valid standpoint for any art to really hold because you’re immediately setting up this condescending relationship to the material and the audience and positioning yourself as some kind of authority who is going to teach people what’s right and what’s wrong, and who needs that? There are other sources to get that from. Which is partially why all of the characters, even the most beloved, or easy-to-love characters, are all in some way implicated in the dark things that happen, even if it’s purely by their passivity in the face of such things. That is the way that these things functioned in Ireland. Yes, there were enormous structural pressures that made it so, but such structures only work because there’s a tacit agreement among whole communities that we will tolerate them because, if we don’t, it’s going to bring an absolute nightmare of trouble for us. And that’s how terrible events get perpetuated, for years and years.

Did you feel hesitant about directly addressing those darker elements?

No, no, not at all, because my responsibility is to the story; my responsibility is to the material that’s coming at me. I’m not trying to write tourist board literature, which can happen with Irish books, where you sometimes get this twinkly eyed nostalgia literature engineered for the American diaspora, but that writing just isn’t true. In Kala just as much light as there is shade, so the book is not any kind of declarative condemnatory screed about the country. I mean, who am I to be in a position to judge anybody? It’s not that at all. It comes back to what I said before: any Irish person who isn’t lying to themselves would look at the darkness in this book and think, ‘Yeah, that is the sort of thing that happened’, and the legacies of those things are still with us now. So no, I don’t have any kind of qualms about that.

Our last question is one that we ask everyone and it’s not a trick question! Do you judge a book by its cover?

I mean, I definitely judge covers themselves, if not the books inside them. There are books I love whose covers I hate. An example of that, and I don’t think it’s controversial to say because it has been discussed a lot, are the original English translations for the Ferrante novels. I know the cover designer has gone on record at length about it, with this very articulate and ornate intellectual explanation of how they were trying to set up this kind of pastel, kitsch, domestic aesthetic because the novel completely subverts those tropes. But those covers simply do not represent those books. And I think there are so many great designers, so it would be a disservice to those great designers to say that the cover doesn’t matter. I mean, the best covers are real works of art because you’re really seeing someone digest a whole 100,000 words and distilling all of the different threads and feelings within that book into an image, which is so difficult to do. So, when a book cover has really managed to do that, it’s extraordinary. There are books that I love that I don’t like the covers of, but those covers haven’t diminished my enjoyment of the book. But there are definitely books that I haven’t picked up in the shop because I didn’t like the cover, and then I had a word-of-mouth recommendation, so I did read the book, and loved the book, and then just thought to myself, ‘Geez, what a shite cover.’

Totally, and you definitely got lucky with yours!

Oh, my God, yeah. The UK cover design – it’s by Helen Crawford White - and it’s just such a gorgeous cover. I love it.

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