Review of My Father's House (2024)

Review of My Father’s House by Joseph O’Connor (Vintage, 2024)

It is great to take a break from the deeper and heavier types of books I have been reviewing in these pages.  My brother, Patrick, keeps reminding me that I should read more novels and collections of short stories, and indeed, I know that this sage advice is just what the doctor orders for good mental well-being.  I have read this novel by Joseph O’Connor over the past weekend.  It is a magnetic book that keeps the reader so engaged that he cannot wait to conclude the chapter and begin the next to find out where the story will lead.  What thoroughfare or street or wonderful palazzo or ancient church or even miasmic sewer or dusty attic will we find ourselves in next?  What is the fate of this or that character?  Will he or she complete the mission? I mention these details because the novel is set in Rome in 1943 and the reader is brought on a journey through such mesmeric and wondrous, and oftentimes, harrowing and terrifying terrain. 

The title of the novel is a phrase taken from John’s Gospel, chapter 14, verse 2, which reads in full: “In my Father’s house are many mansions.”  The author takes this as referring to the many houses, lodgings or hideouts where fugitives can lodge safely in a city with a plenitude of such places.  We also associate welcome with “My Father’s House,” a promise of a better life and freedom for those who suffer, and eternal life for those who believe in a personal God. However, Monsignor Hugh O'Flaherty (1898–1963), the "Vatican Pimpernel" who saved over 6,500 Allied soldiers and Jews during WWII, would view the expression “My Father’s House” as offering refuge to all whose lives are in danger. He was best known for his courageous and humanitarian perspective on all. His most famous quote is "God has no country", reflecting his belief that compassion should transcend national borders and political allegiance.  I believe the title of this novel reflects its inspirer’s vision for humanity.

As the novel opens, the Nazi forces have just occupied Rome after the first fall and imprisonment of Benito Mussolini in July 1943.   Germany has felt compelled to take over and occupy major parts of Italy. While the country had previously been an ally, the Nazis viewed its attempt to exit the war as a betrayal and subsequently invaded the northern and central parts of the country.  This meant that there were many hundreds of escaped POWs from former Italian prison camps on the run.  There were also many hundreds of Jews seeking refuge and deliverance from inevitable death in the infamous concentration camps.  In short, this is the background against which this riveting, tension-filled novel comes alive like a mesmerising film in which we are at once not alone viewers but willing participants in the action. It is a story based on the true escapades of an Irish priest, Monsignor Hugh O'Flaherty, who dedicates himself to helping those escaping from the Nazis. His home is Vatican City, a neutral, independent country of just one quarter square mile in area within Rome, where the occupiers hold no sway. He gathers a team about him to set up an Escape Line. 

O’Flaherty calls his team the choir, and O’Connor introduces each of the choristers to the reader: Delia Kiernan (a professional singer, wife of Dr Thomas Kiernan, Irish ambassador to The Holy See), Sir D’Arcy Osborne (English Ambassador), Major Sam Derry (British Army) and John May (manservant to the English Ambassador).  These characters all did exist in history.  However, the novelist adds several other fictitious choristers to fill out the plot: Marianna de Vries (a Dutch journalist), Contessa Giovanna Landini (a recently bereaved lady) and Enzo Angelucci (a local Roman stall owner).  Some of these fictitious characters share qualities ascribed to real participants, and could also be compound characters.  O’Connor adds a caveat, a bibliography and acknowledgements as an addendum to this pacy novel.  The caveat is worth repeating here: “While real people and real events inspired the work of fiction that is My Father’s House, it is first and last a novel… This novel is not intended to be a source for students of wartime Rome or the Nazi occupation of Italy.” (p. 397) That needs to be said clearly, because often with historical novels or films based on historical events, one sometimes hears or reads the criticism that X or Y or Z simply did not happen or that important events were omitted.  We must remember that historical fictions, like films based on historical events, are creative and dramatic works that explore history from an imaginative perspective, and that such a perspective has its own imaginative truth beyond the factual.  For most readers or film buffs, this need not be emphasised, but for those coming to such work from an unenlightened or neophyte background, it does need to be stressed, and O’Connor is correct in doing so.

As a reader of any novel by Joseph O’Connor would be aware, the author does his research exceptionally well.  He shows consummate knowledge of Rome and has researched the history and geography of the Eternal City to the nth degree.  This amazing and exceptionally courageous story is told in a wonderfully fluent, simple and clear style that owes much to our Joycean heritage as novel writers.  Every character portrayed gives his or her account of their contribution to The Escape Line in their own accent, Italian, Cockney, educated Oxbridge, Dutch, West of Ireland, including Mayo and Kerry and so on.  O’Connor’s ear is sharp, and his matching style is natural.  Furthermore, he weaves into his rich and clear text an intimate knowledge of Italy, its people, language and culture.  There are wonderful passages on the cultural history and the beautiful palazzi of Rome as well as rich paragraphs showing an acquaintance with things ecclesiastical of the era.  I was especially impressed by the author’s knowledge of classical religious music, hymns and prayers with which an ecclesiastic like Monsignor O’Flaherty would be acquainted. O’Connor’s story tells us that the monsignor’s choir met regularly for practice in “a tumbledown, long-abandoned annex” of the Collegio Teutonico, “a stark Gothic edifice” (p.174).  There, they sang musical pieces as a cover for their clandestine activities.  O’Connor delighted this reader with many lyrical passages, such as the following one on the value of choral singing:

Some consolation of the spirit, some release happens when human beings sing in a group, wherever and however that occurs.  In a place of worship, on the terraces of a football stadium, in a cramped and drafty attic, bombers droning overhead.  Nearly all music has beauty, but when it includes the marriage of baritone and soprano, of bass and alto, chorus and soloist, it becomes something more than merely the upliftingly beautiful.  Harmony is an everyday, achievable miracle.  Imagine having been the first person to think of it, to attempt it with another.  I shall sing this.  You sing that.  Something greater than you or I will result.  And as everyone who has ever heard singing in a classroom knows well, when we are not wonderful singers, are in fact not musically gifted, singing has a special sort of sacredness that is impossibly moving.  When we sing, we cease to be scum. (p. 180)

Passages of such beauty and depth enrich this novel at intervals but never detract from the onward thrust and thrill of this story of courage.

To bring this review to a close, the Gestapo boss, SS-Obersturmbannführer Paul Hauptmann, who ruled Rome with terror and ruthlessly put many to death, is the pseudonym O’Connor uses for the Nazi officer, Lieutenant Colonel Herbert Kappler.  This psychopath was in charge of the police and security services in Rome during the 1943–1944 occupation. As head of the Gestapo and Security Service (SD) at Via Tasso, he oversaw the deportation of Rome's Jews, the roundup of political prisoners, and the Ardeatine Caves massacre. This horrific massacre was a mass killing of 335 civilians and political prisoners carried out in Rome on 24 March 1944 by German occupation troops as a reprisal for the deaths of 33 German soldiers and the wounding of 110 others the previous day.  This then was the lethal opposition against which Monsignor O’Flaherty’s noble and courageous band of choristers operated their secret Line of Escape for both Gentile and Jew, soldier and civilian.  Again, it is an understandable position that O’Connor recounts that he so much loathed the actions and character of Kappler that he elected to use a pseudonym with which he felt somewhat more comfortable in writing on paper. 

I highly recommend this novel as a gripping thriller with a text that borders on that of a literary masterpiece.  To acquaint oneself with a little more knowledge about “The Scarlet Pimpernel of the Vatican,” or Monsignor Hugh O'Flaherty, one could do worse than referring to the following dedicated website:  Hugh O'Flaherty