‘A Private Man’ by Stephanie Sy-Quia

This is a debut novel that was recently published and was positively reviewed. The premise intrigued me, so I decided to splash out and buy a copy of the hardback. My reaction to it has been mixed.

It is essentially the story of a marriage, and is heavily inspired according to the afterforward by that of the author’s own grandparents. The central protagonists are David, a catholic priest, and Margaret and school teacher with whom he falls in love. In order to marry he must leave the priesthood, which is a huge step, and is one that takes him time to resolve. Their courtship unfolds in the aftermath of the Vatican II council of the early 1960s and so fair amount of theological discussion is also included.

The story is presented, for the most part, in two timelines with an early section on David’s training an ordination included by way of a prologue. We are told about the couple's meeting and courtship in the 1960s, and then about Margaret’s dotage later in 2018 and 2019 being cared for by her grandson and later in a nursing home in France. The two narratives intertwine as is very common in contemporary fiction.

The problem with this novel is that this premise and the denouement are signalled very clearly right from the get-go, leaving little of real significance to be revealed as you read on. There are no twists, so the narrative drive for me, was rather limited. This is no page turner. I also found that the characters were nothing like so compelling as the situation they were in. I found it hard to identify with them or root for them emotionally.

On the positive side, the quality of the writing is excellent. Stephanie Sy-Quia may not win any literary awards for this, but clearly has huge potential to become a major novelist in time. Here she ruminates on the expression ’had a fall’ which we all use all the time instead of ‘fell’ when old people topple over:

He had heard stories of his friends’ grandparents, lying in their hallways for three days with broken hips and no one to find them, or falling down the stairs and – bang, they said. That was that. Or strokes which smote them and three days later: they’d be dead. Or lesser strokes which left them watching The Sound of Music on loop for twelve years, while they lay in enormous padded armchairs. ‘Had a fall’ was the punctum, the turn twenty minutes before the end of the film, the warning shot. It began the priming process. ‘Had another fall’ was worse, because it was not the finite trope that some secretly prayed it would be.

Stephanie Sy-Quia also writes splendidly about food, and particularly encounters by British people, used to bland 1960s cuisine, with Italian food:

Garlic was the other thing: a key part of that initial rapture, she now knew. The symphonic warmth of that first mouthful of sauce, like an orchestra warming its strings.

And she is pretty effective when writing about intimacy too:

After the sex, better than the sex, was the talking. He allowed himself to lie in her arms and they spoke of all the things upon which their minds alighted. Kissing like punctuation. Some part of the other under their hands. Moving their fingers idly. – Mmm she said, more of that please (his hands on her back). Her fingers at his temples. Her lips at his ear. His head on her belly. They spoke of many things, their talk breaking off and resuming, rising and falling, sleep and sex.

So there is plenty to enjoy in this novel; I just wish that the characters were stronger and that there was some decent plotting to accompany the lovely prose.