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Mark Vella: X’Seta’ Ġralu Kevin Cacciattolo? Merlin, 2014.

X’Seta’ Ġralu Kevin Cacciattolo? had much hype backing up its release last year.

The novel was the winner of the first #abbozz competition, a contest in which writers pitched their manuscripts to Merlin, who enlisted a panel of judges to choose the winning draft.

Apart from creating a buzz and giving the public an insight into some serious tearing-apart of the works, this worked doubly well for the publisher – before it could even find its way to the printing press, let alone bookstands, the book already had a prize under its belt.

It was, therefore, with a heightened sense of anticipation that I started reading the first page of what seemed like it would be Vella’s take on the whodunit genre.

Vella starts off the novel with a blitzkrieg-as-description, leaving us fumbling around through the narrative swarm to find what is actually going on, much like our main character as he fumbles around to find his spectacles after being hit in the head by a ball – which is what I gathered from that first verbal assault.

Within a few pages, the prose clears up to allow Vella to give us what turns out to be the first part of three in the book – the life of the book’s namesake, Kevin Cacciattolo.

Cacciattolo is a school-age adolescent misfit who, more often than not, seems to wander inside his strange interior world, and whose eventual disappearance gives rise to the question asked by the book’s title.

Vella manages to create a world that is rich in detail, at times describing step-by-step Cacciattolo’s actions in detail.

This is not without its problems: while some descriptions are so spot-on, so natural you accept them without question, so little happens in the Kevin part of the book that what I felt could have been said in 20 pages took a 100 to say.

Although Vella paints a clear – if dense – picture of Cacciattolo, this painting feels like it repeated more than once.

Cacciattolo’s interior world is not easy to understand, but that is probably more due to our inability to fully comprehend the interior mental experiences of others, rather than due to a fault in the prose.

Creates and depicts dinstinct, memorable worlds

Indeed, in the three parts that make up the book, what the author manages to have done impressively well is create three distinct characters and portraying their inner – and to an extent, outer – lives.

Projecting too much of oneself is an easy trap to fall into, but Vella seems to have sidestepped this particular snare.

That said, spending most of time inside someone else’s head can induce claustrophobia and the occasions in which the book ventures out into dialogue and the outside world are welcome reprieves.

In the second part of the story, where Vella, a fledgling, struggling journalist at a radio station, takes an interest in Cacciattolo’s story, the read becomes much easier and accessible; situations become more familiar and the reader’s curiosity starts getting piqued.

Here again, the story becomes clearly about Vella more than Cacciattolo, with Vella’s interest in Cacciattolo’s story being the sole thread holding the two parts together.

The ‘Vella’ segment of the book leaves us none the wiser on what the answer to the question as to what could have happened to Cacciattolo.

At this point – which is roughly equivalent to the point in the book where you realise this – it is imperative to point out that, despite the quizzical title, the book does not really seek to answer the question. Indeed, once you come to the back cover, you’ll end up asking the question – what could have happened to poor Cacciattolo – yourself.

Instead, the book circumscribes what might have happened, with the narrative swirling around a possible explanation without outright ever telling us, or pointing us towards an answer.

In doing so, what we end up with is a vivid character study of a misfit in a 1980s Church school (which seems to be modelled closely on St Aloysius) and an uncanny, accurate stream of consciousness of a man who still hasn’t found his feet.

A book which is already not an easy read – the consistency of Vella’s prose is pretty much what you’d expect in a Christmas log – is not helped at all by a lack of signposting and clarity.

Although the book tape player controls (play, ffwd, rewind) signal a shift in time, I found this did not make navigating the book any easier, particularly as I was starting out.

Most of the cultural references made in Cacciattolo’s period could very well be lost on anyone born in that decade or later (as is this reviewer’s case).

In sacrificing clarity at the altar of economy (a justified choice, had the context been shared more widely with the readers), the author has made what was an already involved world unnecessarily more opaque.

All told, in X’Seta Ġralu Kevin Cacciattolo? Vella has succeeded in creating and depicting distinct, memorable worlds at the interface between individual and external experience, with a dollop of reminiscence for those who were around in the last two decades of 20th-century Malta.