By Joseph O'Connor, this was published in 2023. It had touched my radar via a Five Books recommendation by Katharine Grant, but it was ramped up the list when I thought we'd be visiting Rome. As Grant says, the city is a very definite character in the book: "If you feel you know Rome, you’ll find much to enjoy in the twists and turns of the streets, the hidden alleys, the sudden expanses and that ever-present 'seethe of black water', the Tiber. It’s full Rome immersion." Having belatedly heard about the Jubilee shindig, we decided that just changing trains in Rome would be quite enough... But by then I'd bought the book.

No regrets, though.


We might not be visiting Rome, but we've been in a very Catholic environment over the last couple of months

Set in 1943, My Father's House is a fictionalized version of a true story. Operating out of Vatican City (politically an independent state and a neutral party in the war), Killarney-raised Monsignor Hugh O'Flaherty (1898-1963) really did superintend an operation that hid Jews and escaped POWs in various localities in Rome, providing them with food, medicine, papers, and clothes, and smuggling them onwards to safety. It's thought that O'Flaherty and his "Choir" (this was the cover activity adopted by those operating the Rome escape line, who swapped plans, escape routes, and addresses while making music) saved over 6,500 people. Amazing.

With Rome itself under Nazi control, any movement by personnel from the Vatican City was tightly controlled. In the central narrative, we follow O'Flaherty as he's forced to circumvent all kinds of dangers in order to carry out a Christmas Eve "rendimento" (a mission to deliver money to people sheltering those in hiding).

This cat-and-mouse game, leading us through the dark and dangerous streets and secret passeways of Rome, is extraordinarily gripping... Sometimes I had to stop listening just to draw breath. (And because the book feels like a thriller, it's only fair to warn of the spoilers that follow.)



This central thrust is supplemented by accounts by the various other members of the Choir. Looking back from the perspective of the early 1960s, they all have their different stories. How they came to be in Rome; how they came to be involved in this risky business, and how they felt about it; and how they saw Monsignor Hugh. Newspaper seller Enzo Angelucci; the Irish ambassador's wife, Delia Kiernan; broken-hearted widow Giovanna Landini; escaped POW Major Sam Derry; freelance journalist Marianna de Vries; British Ambassador Sir D'Arcy Osborne; John May, D'Arcy's butler and an expert in procuring absolutely anything -- they all come alive in this novel, with individual, often very funny, voices that stand out from their corporate role.

I listened to the audio-book, and the unusually large cast (Barry Barnes, Stephen Hogan, Barnaby Edwards, Laurence Bouvard, Aoife Duffin, Gertrude Thoma, David John, Roberto Davide, and Thomas Hill) brought out this distinctiveness very effectively.

We also fill in some of O'Flaherty's life and hopes, via letters and close-third-person musings. We see an unstoppably courageous man, doing his best to skirt the rules of prisoner visitation; defying the Nazis when he can; and even defying the Pope, who accuses him, with bitter anger, of insubordination, and warns him that by making enemies of the Nazis he is endangering the whole Vatican community (true, of course, and yet it's hard to respect a man who is depicted as a fulminating prevaricator). We see in O'Flaherty a cultured man, and a humane and non-judgemental friend of ordinary human beings. We also see an interesting mixture of modesty, bravado, and self-doubt (he can't help accusing himself of hubris). He comes across as a real person, flaws and all.

And running parallel to all this is the story of Paul Hauptmann, the brutal head of the Gestapo in Rome, who conceives a very personalized hatred of O'Flaherty. Hauptmann is also under pressure from his Nazi superiors to stop this leakage of wanted persons, which is embarrassing them all. We watch him balancing his life as a family man and his life as a torturer, and we shudder.



My Father's House is fiction. O'Connor makes that clear.

Hauptmann, for example, is an invented character. The actual head of the Gestapo in Rome was Herbert Kappler, but like his fictional counterpart, he was a cruel man, and at the end of the war was given a sentence of life imprisonment. Extraordinarily, it is actually true that he was regularly visited in prison by O'Flaherty, who baptized him into the Catholic faith.

The This Is Your Life cameo at the close of the book is also real (I remember that show from childhood, hosted by Eamonn Andrews...), and the producers did indeed decide to focus on Sam Derry as the prime figure, including a recorded greeting from O'Flaherty -- and then a surprise appearance (the trademark of the show) right at the end.

In terms of the other players, we know that Sam Derry, D'Arcy Osborne, John May, and Delia Kiernan (nee Murphy) are real people, though doubtless O'Connor has added fictional characteristics.



I wondered, at first, at the way the book ends. Over the course of the narrative, we have heard many voices from the 1960s. Clearly, then, they survived. We have not heard, however, from O'Flaherty. So, as he's being hunted by increasingly rabid figures on his mad dash through Rome that Christmas Eve, we genuinely don't know (unless, of course, we know the true story) whether he's going to survive. He does. But really -- it's heart-stopping.

We then have a chapter in which many of the Choir members are forced to take refuge in Vatican City. Their mission continues, not always harmoniously, until liberation comes.

Then there's a Coda, in the voice of the Contessa Landini. She tells us about This Is Your Life, and her final encounter with O'Flaherty (quite ill by now). The story of his continued association with Hauptmann/Kappler is conveyed by means of a letter which reaches her after his death.

I wasn't sure, initially, whether this ending wasn't an anti-climax after all that searing tension. But I felt, in retrospect, that it's a very clever way to close. Moments of danger and supreme courage do, after all, give way to the prosaic and the everyday. And, in an almost haunting fashion, we get the feeling from that 1960s televised biographical tribute that the whole story was a really long time ago... Even acts of heroism pass into history. Just as we look back on much more mundane episodes in our own lives, and have the feeling that we're peering down a long, long tunnel, so it is the case here too. Thousands saved. But a long time ago. And bravery and compassion are no shield against ill health, and approaching death, and changed times.

I came to the conclusion that there couldn't have been a more poignant way to wind things up.

I couldn't help feeling, as I listened, that it's all more relevant than ever... In an interview in 2023, O'Connor comments on the broader significance of the story: "It’s about courage in a dark time. Standing up for what’s right. Refusing to get pushed around by bullies. Or your friends. Knowing how to live in a world where too many political leaders are braggers and election deniers. Refusing to accept the lies of people who constantly insist on the differences between people, rather than the similarities. So, the more I break the story down into its elements, the more oddly familiar its world starts to feel."

Keep pumping out the stories, Mr O'Connor. After this week's inauguration, we need them more than ever.