My Father’s House by Joseph O’Connor — rebel with a cause

Since the international success of Star of the Sea (2002), Joseph O’Connor has written mostly historical fiction. His last novel Shadowplay imagined the relationship between Bram Stoker and famous actors Henry Irving and Ellen Terry when they worked together in the Lyceum theatre in 19th-century London. With his 10th novel he continues to structure his fiction around real events and people: its protagonist Hugh O’Flaherty is an Irish priest who worked for the Vatican when the Nazis occupied Rome in September 1943.

O’Flaherty’s soutane, “three doctorates”, and fluency in seven languages don’t prevent him from being every inch the action hero in O’Connor’s portrayal: a motorcycle-riding rebel whom we first meet threatening to knock out the teeth of a Roman orderly who refuses to treat an escaped British prisoner of war disguised as a Nazi. A day later he marks 90 end-of-term essays in a single day while wracked with flu, which this lecturer with one doctorate found superheroic bordering on supernatural.

In wartime, the fifth of a square mile that makes up Vatican city was recognised as a neutral nation within Rome, and this led various people to take sanctuary there, openly and secretly, during the occupation. It is also “like all kremlins, a hive of whispers and envies”.

As O’Flaherty renews his resistance, O’Connor provides for him a villainous antagonist in Paul Hauptmann, the Nazi commander of Rome

We witness O’Flaherty choose sides when he is made an official Vatican visitor to Italian concentration camps for British prisoners of war in 1942. He has been in favour of both the Vatican and Ireland’s neutrality, reluctant to take the commission because of British brutality back home, where “hatred of England was deep as the graves, hatred of her armies, deeper”. But at the camp he is shocked by “four thousand frightened prisoners crammed like abused beasts, half starved, into a couple of barbed-wired stony fields”, and he uses his power as an emissary of the Pope to frighten the camp commander into giving his prisoners a decent water ration.

From then on he is emboldened into helping the people whose “dignity has been systematically stripped from them”, both those in the camps and the Jewish population in Rome, distributing food and books in defiance of the regulations. He is stopped from doing this openly after a dramatic confrontation with Pope Pius XII, who accuses him of vanity, of risking through his actions the destruction of the Vatican “in smogs of flame and poison gas”.

As O’Flaherty renews his resistance in secret, O’Connor provides for him a villainous antagonist in Paul Hauptmann, the Nazi commander of Rome, who enters O’Flaherty’s confessional to accuse him of “false virtue”, taunting him that his actions have made things much worse for the prisoners. The plot development takes place in the days leading up to Christmas Eve 1943 when Hauptmann is closing in and an urgent mission to move the prisoners of war (codenamed “books”) stashed in various “libraries” must take place.

Hauptmann is clearly modelled on his historical counterpart, Herbert Kappler, who like Hauptmann was correctly convinced that O’Flaherty was running an escape line for Jews and prisoners of war. O’Connor may have changed the name to allow the demands of the thriller to supersede the demands of the records, and to be freer in imagining interactions between the two men. Confrontational dialogue is one of O’Connor’s great strengths, and the scenes in which O’Flaherty and Hauptmann give battle crackle: Hauptmann drunk on his power, O’Flaherty convinced of the spiritual superiority of the oppressed.

My Father’s House begins with a list of people in a choir: the network who gathered with O’Flaherty under the guise of rehearsing, and one of the most impressive and pleasurable aspects of the novel is the way it inhabits every member of this disparate gang. Characters taken from life include Sir D’Arcy Osborne, an arch and flamboyant British ambassador to the Vatican; John May, his wideboy fixer from London’s East End; Delia Kiernan, a popular singer and wife to the Irish ambassador; and the Contessa Giovanna Landini. Some tell their stories in imagined transcripts given to the BBC in the 1960s for what was a real episode of This Is Your Life. It’s a pleasing device though it dissipates some tension in letting us know certain characters survived the grave danger of their mission.

We are not, however, given reassurance about O’Flaherty. O’Connor builds the sense throughout the novel that he is destined for Hauptmann’s torture chamber, with chapters ending in cinematic portents: a burning motorbike, the sound of machine guns, hail rattling a window.

EM Forster thought that “all novels go off at the end”, with plot trampling character, and certain readers will miss the sprezzatura evocation of Rome through a polyphony of characters as the narrative sharpens to the point of its climax. Just as other readers will thrill to the jeopardy: this is the delicate balancing act of the literary thriller. I wondered if the extended denouement that follows the fate of the characters into later life was a sign of the author’s anxiety to compensate for a Hollywood-style climax.

Yet O’Flaherty the action hero resists deep characterisation, to the reader and his friends, to whom he refuses angrily to explain the mystery of his celibate vocation. He is not “afraid of life”, as Hauptmann accuses all Catholic priests, and the diverse ventriloquism of O’Connor’s novel evokes a city in peril with wonderful vitality.

My Father’s House by Joseph O’Connor Harvill Secker £20, 288 pages/Europa Editions $27, 440 pages

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