Joseph O’Connor’s wartime novel My Father’s House will make your heart sing

Book review

Joseph O'Connor's plot has the urgency and tension of a wartime thriller. Photo: Mark Condren

Joseph O'Connor's plot has the urgency and tension of a wartime thriller. Photo: Mark Condren

My Father's House by Joseph O'Connor

Joseph O'Connor's plot has the urgency and tension of a wartime thriller. Photo: Mark Condren

Henrietta McKervey

January 29 2023 02:30 AM

It is 1943, and occupied Rome is controlled by Gestapo boss Obersturmbannführer Paul Hauptmann (“I do not suffer consequences, I inflict them”).

The Vatican City is a neutral, independent country within Rome where, to Hauptmann’s fury, he has no authority. Under the guise of setting up a choir, Irishman Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty and a network of conspirators establish the Escape Line to rescue victims of the Nazis.

My Father’s House opens at Christmas. Hauptmann’s net is closing in, yet O’Flaherty decides a daring and long-planned mission must proceed, despite the obvious dangers.

As with any choir, we hear many voices: Delia Kiernan (the Irish singer married to the Irish Ambassador in Rome, who notes: “I was singing in Belfast the night the Luftwaffe firebombed the theatre. That’s what you call a mixed review”); journalist Marianna de Vries; widow Contessa Giovanna ‘Jo’ Landini; British diplomat Sir D’Arcy Osborne; his servant John May; newspaper vendor Enzo Angelucci; Major Sam Derry; and the conductor, O’Flaherty himself.

It includes chapters focused on Hauptmann, and one of this brilliant novel’s many successes is how distinctly memorable each character is.

O’Flaherty’s complex personality is revealed through the others. Delia thinks, “his mind was like a lawnmower blade”, yet to Enzo, O’Flaherty is: “Crazy. Type of guy wouldn’t listen to reason.”

My Father's House by Joseph O'Connor

To expert scrounger John, O’Flaherty is “secretive and mysterious… I’ve given him the nickname ‘Hughdini’”, whereas Hauptmann believes him “drunk on false virtue”.

O’Flaherty adores music. To him, the sound of an orchestra tuning up “says Reason may be left at the door”. At the opera, he describes hearing “the seethe of impatient violins. A crescendo of harp arpeggios arising like wavelets and the answering foghorn of a bassoon. God, to be alive at such moments.”

When the novel moves to 1963, Jo brings him – unwell and using a wheelchair – to Covent Garden to see Tosca. She expects him to be enthralled by Act Two, his “favourite forty minutes in the history of music”, but he falls asleep. Darkness is descending. It is as if his very soul has begun to fade.

O’Connor’s 2019 novel Shadowplay focused on the relationship between Bram Stoker, Henry Irving and Ellen Terry, and this too explores friendship, loss, and the cost of loyalty. Fans of Shadowplay will enjoy the nod when O’Flaherty passes the Lyceum and thinks he sees a “white-faced adolescent girl staring out” through a dirty window – presumably Mina, the ghost haunting the theatre.

O’Flaherty and his comrades saved 6,500 Allied soldiers and Jews

The novel’s title has an oblique relevance for Hauptmann, who moves his adored family from Berlin to a secluded lakeside estate outside “hot, filthy” Rome.

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But this historic house is his only through brutality and force. O’Flaherty’s is constructed through faith and humanity, which is what endures; whereas when Hauptmann’s children visit him in prison after the war, neither are “able to look at him”.

O’Flaherty and his comrades saved 6,500 Allied soldiers and Jews, and their story has been told many times. The intention of My Father’s House isn’t to add to his biography and O’Connor clearly states he has taken the liberties fiction requires.

From the high-stakes first scene, his plot has the urgency and tension of a wartime thriller such as Philip Kerr’s Bernie Gunther novels, yet the descriptions are so beautifully imaginative and visual, the pages unspool as vividly as a movie. It is testament to O’Connor’s immense talent as a writer that the language pauses to dance even as the story powers on.

This is the first in O’Connor’s Rome Escape Line trilogy, and I finished it eager for the next.

‘My Father’s House’ by Joseph O’Connor, Harvill Secker, €17