A polyphonic retelling of how an Irish priest set out to rescue resistance fighters, PoWs and Jews from Nazi-occupied Rome
oseph O’Connor’s earlier work was instrumental in demonstrating that modern historical fiction can mean novels of ideas and the state of the nation rather than works of populist nostalgia. Writing about second world war espionage and resistance is brave in this context – there are so many gold-lettered tales of homosocial derring-do sold to men in airports – but anyone buying My Father’s House with this expectation will find themselves expected to think as well as fantasise.
O’Connor achieves this balance partly through characterisation and voices strong enough that we eagerly follow them through uncertainty, mundanity and disappointment as well as high-stakes jeopardy. The novel is built out of the present-tense close third-person narrative of the priest, Hugh O’Flaherty, the technique historical fiction owes to, interspersed with fictional interviews conducted for a radio programme in 1963 with the seven people running the escape line under Hugh’s direction.
O’Flaherty’s movements around Vatican City and Rome in the hours before the “Rendimento”, the movement of a large number of hidden refugees and resistance fighters out of the Nazi-held city, are precisely choreographed. On Christmas Eve and under the particular surveillance of Gestapo leader Paul Hauptmann, O’Flaherty needs to distribute large sums of money to people in hiding and organise their escape from the city.
This novel also has other work and broader interests. It’s a choral book in two senses: the group meets as a choir and rehearses chamber music to provide aural cover for whispered plans and communications, and the structure of the novel uses the idea of part-singing, each character having a voice and a tune, the sum more than the parts.
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