I didn’t know quite what to expect when I picked up Irish writer Ciaran Collins’ first novel, The Gamal. To start with, the name sounded interesting — what on earth is a gamal? And when I turned to the blurb on the back cover, things seemed even more intriguing.

“If someone was describing me, they’d say — He’s a bit of a God help us,” the blurb quotes the narrator of the book. “A God help us is another way of saying gamal. My name is Charlie, but people call me the gam or the gamal. It’s from an Irish word. Gamalog. Gamallogue in English. Don’t even know what exactly it means but I’ve a fair idea.”
So I gathered this was a book about teenage angst, which meant it could go any way. There’s a fair number of books on teenage angst out there — almost every young adult novel brims with it — and in tone they range from rage to shattered idealism to immense bitterness to despair to resignation to… well, try and recall your own teenage angst, and you’ll definitely find a young adult novel that describes it perfectly.
So I was prepared for anything when I began reading The Gamal — but oh my! By the time I finished the book, I realised I had not been prepared for this. I couldn’t possibly have been prepared for this. I had not expected to be shattered, exhilarated, distressed, elated… so completely alive when I read it. I had not expected to remember so clearly the intensity of youth, the over-the-topness that possessed every kind of emotion, even ennui. I was not prepared for the way my skin tingled as I read certain parts of the story, the way my blood surged when I read other parts of it, the way I bit my lower lip till it nearly bled when it seemed the dreadful truth was finally about to be revealed. In short, I was not prepared at all to be a full participant, at age 43, in the lives of three fictional characters in their late teens. But that is what happened to me.
A dispassionate one-line description of The Gamal that avoids spoilers would go something like this: a young man, diagnosed since childhood with Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD), a condition that makes him pathologically opposed to authority, writes a book on the advice of his psychiatrist on the events in his life that brought him to the point where he needed a psychiatrist to help him get through Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).
But the story is not really about the young man — Charlie, better known in his village as the gamal. The story is really about two exceptionally bright, happy, talented and compassionate young people who Charlie, against all odds (and ODD), cares for deeply, and who care for him, too.
As you might expect from a young man with a condition that keeps him opposed to authority, you’re not getting a smooth story out of Charlie. He’s writing this book because he’s being forced to do it, not because he wants to, so there’s much defiance. Charlie must write 1,000 words a day on what happened to him to help him get past his PTSD, but he sees no reason why his narrative should be coherent while he’s at it, or even why it should be a narrative at all. Along the way of course, the story does emerge, but it’s always start and stop, start and stop, digress, move forward, move back, move sideways, stop altogether, sulk a bit, want to smash things up a bit, start again.
And this is what makes the book so brilliant, because the story emerges in oddly shaped fragments, small, medium and large. It’s like a jigsaw puzzle made out of an intricate stained glass window. You know something is terribly, terribly wrong and that it involves Sinead and James, but for the life of you, you can’t imagine what it is. So you have to live with them to find out. Live with Sinead and James and their larger community of school friends, and all the people in the village, as seen through the eyes of a gamal who is brutally honest because his authority-defying condition means he has no need to dissemble. But then, his authority-defying condition means he has no need to speak out either, so maybe he could have stopped what eventually happened, but didn’t?
It’s hard to go on about the story of The Gamal, because you shouldn’t know what exactly it is, you have to let the details emerge to really get it. But I could go on and on and on about the writing — though I won’t. I’ll just leave you with this: rarely has a book had this kind of effect on me before. It made my blood sing, it put music in my soul, it made me young and intensely alive again. How many books can you say that about? Read it.

Kushalrani Gulab dreams of being a sanyasi by the sea with a huge library of books to read and write about. She blogs at tomeofmylife.blogspot.in