Heroes and villains in the eternal city

Nazi-occupied Rome, 1943. Kerryman Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty has been orchestrating the escape of thousands of prisoners-of-war from within the Vatican under the noses of the fascisti. He calls his team “The Choir” and their performances rendimenti, clandestine operations which facilitate these getaways or support them monetarily. But this act of defiance has not gone unnoticed. Obersturmbannfuhrer Paul Hauptmann, the head of the Gestapo in Rome, vows to crush the resistance he suspects is taking root in the heart of the city he so ruthlessly controls. O’Flaherty has planned his biggest rendimento yet for Christmas Morning, but with his lead man out of action and Hauptmann closing in, he must make a call which could mean life or death for his dearest friends – and many more besides.

This is where we kick off. Despite affecting the illusion of being a historical document, make no mistake: My Father’s House is a thriller, and it’s paced like one. The plot is shaped like a heist which starts at the climax and then works backwards. Some characters speak to us directly from occupied Rome, while others reflect on those last years of the war in radio interviews recorded decades later, or through reports communicated to Nazi superiors, or through a last will and testament penned before an act of great danger. Much of the exposition deals directly with the Monsignor as seen through the eyes of his compatriots, and although the rendimento is the main event, it is the priest that the reader will most vividly remember.

The tall, broad-shouldered Monsignor is a home-run. Anxious and charming, brave and neurotic, he is a complete man on the page. O’Connor resists the temptation to give him a clandestine romance or dark secret, or even the suggestion of one, despite taking historical liberties elsewhere. This is for the best and it speaks to the peculiar intimacy of the character-writing process. It sometimes feels as though the writer has fallen for their hero during the writing of them and this is particularly true of the historical novel, Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell immediately coming to mind. O’Flaherty will join those ranks of characters crafted with a deep devotion and who reveal great depths to the reader as a result.

Together with the Monsignor, Hauptmann lingers once the book is closed. He is the perfect Nazi villain: charming and unpredictable, father and torturer, a small man in large jackboots with a penchant for violence and a fear of the bully bigger than him: the terrifying Himmler. He is obsessed with the Monsignor (though in a sense all of the characters are). Hauptmann is one of the cast neither named for their real-life counterparts nor based directly on them, but he is an inspired and terrible creation, a perfect counterpart to the leading man with whom he’s so preoccupied. A couple of the other voices who tell the story are somewhat less interesting than Hauptmann and O’Flaherty; perhaps O’Connor was less interested in his crafting them, or perhaps it is simply that they share the pages with two such strong leads.

What of the writing? The fictional Rome is a special place to be invited into as a fiction-tourist, notwithstanding all the swastikas and fascists. There is a real love for the city at the centre of the descriptions here. O’Connor names streets and piazzas indulgently, lending them a kind of authenticity even to those unfamiliar with them. The writing generally speaking is elegant, oftentimes beautiful, and yet now and again fails to convince. Heavy, clunking descriptions such as the “tornado of cadaverous dogs” on the opening page may pull the reader out, and the voices of the novel’s cast, its choir, do not always sing in perfect pitch.

It’s a funny thing with a novelist as adept as O’Connor: the exceptionally high standard of the prose casts long shadows over the dodgy bits, the self-conscious imitations of an Irish brogue or a slightly awkward Swiss-English. It isn’t really a problem of prose to begin with so much as a slight issue of style and consistency. The Irish brogue, for instance, carries the musical qualities of the real thing, and would convince the listener sat across a crowded room, or the reader whose first language was not English. It accentuates the distinguishing qualities in a manner which is highly descriptive but is somewhat at odds with the literary nature of much of the book, the proximity to caricature causing a slight dissonance. We’re hearing baroque until for a split-second it’s the Beatles. For sure, both have their place – just typically not right beside each other.

For a book about a priest, the novel has a strange relationship with religion. There’s no getting away from the faith of its protagonist, and even its title references God. But there is a suggestion that O’Flaherty is a hero despite his allegiance to the Catholic faith rather than because of it. He is described as a rebel, a man not big on rules, a priest who must defy his tyrannical Pope so as to do the right thing. This of course is entirely ahistorical: by all accounts, the Monsignor had the Pope’s full support, and this deliberate aberration is frustrating. There is plenty of dramatic impetus in the story, with its Nazis, curfews and secret identities, without misrepresenting the Pope. What’s more, O’Connor’s portrayal of O’Flaherty as a Catholic and man of God is genuine and uncompromising, making the decision to pit the Church against him doubly puzzling.

All that said, I don’t mean to be too hard on My Father’s House. It is a well-crafted testament to the bravery and deep charity of a great man. It does not adhere strictly to history, but as a novel, perhaps we shouldn’t ask it to. It does something more important where a novel is concerned: it entertains and inspires thought, and by times is deeply funny. My sleep suffered while reading it, and this is high praise for any novel. It’s just a shame that the historical discrepancies seem to be at the discretion of the author’s prejudices, and not the needs of the tale at hand.