The Sunday Times offered a review on a new book by Joseph O’Connor: The Ghosts of Rome and then Daunt’s bookshop advertised a talk with the author. I couldn’t go to that but I was interested enough to look it all up. My holiday to Florence and Rome last summer still gives me a heightened awareness of anything Italian.
I found out that this was the second book by this Irish writer in a trilogy called ‘The Rome Escape Line.’ I decided I should retreat a little and read ‘ My Father’s House,’ the first story of the 3.
This is really a wartime religious thriller. I read it soon after watching the film ‘Conclave’ based closely on the book by Robert Harris. I have therefore been spending much time in the Vatican City. I hadn’t fully realised that this tiny but powerful city state was totally neutral during the Second World War. They didn’t comment on Nazi atrocities, did nothing to help the plight of the Jews and provided absolutely no moral authority at all. The situation however did mean that within this tiny, walled and secure area, in the middle of Rome, the Nazis held no sway whatsoever.
Hugh O’Flaherty, the Irish priest working in the Vatican, is at the centre of this story. Paul Hauptmann, the Gestapo commandant responsible for Nazi controlled Rome is charged with stopping the continual escape of prisoners out of the city. He has an instinct that the person he needs to arrest is this confident, disrespectful Catholic, but he can find no evidence at all.
In this beautifully crafted novel Joseph O’Connor skillfully employs numerous narrative voices and plays with our grasp of time, sometimes putting the reader firmly in the middle of the action, whilst at others looking back through interviews in an historical fashion. He explores moral choices and shows us clearly that neutrality, in the case of the Vatican, was the strongest case of extremism.
I found this book incredibly visual. Much of the time as I was reading, I felt as if I was watching a movie. The evocation of Rome in the early 1940s is powerful and is, in my mind, shown to us as a black and white film. The extravagant riches of the Vatican and the flashes of cardinal red would have to be shown in colour I suppose!
Joseph O’Connor’s novel is at once both literary and popular. A state that few writers manage to achieve, but for me this makes an immensely satisfying read. I will definitely follow through with the rest of the trilogy and I will also research the story upon which it was based; a true story.