THE Irish writer Joseph O’Connor has a surprising Bible-reading habit. “I read some of the scriptures for five minutes every morning randomly,” he says. “I loved the bit this morning which made me laugh out loud and punch the air — Isaiah 52.15: ‘Kings shall shut their mouths because of him.’ I want to have that on a T-shirt.”
O’Connor’s work over the past four decades has encompassed short stories, journalism, and plays, alongside 20 books covering a broad range of subjects. He has won awards, including the Irish PEN Award in 2012. While his work has often been historical and reflected on personal agency and people living courageously under intense challenge, his recent work has developed a clearer engagement with faith, beginning with My Father’s House, his 2023 title which was based on the true story of Father Hugh O’Flaherty (Book Club, 1 June 2023).
An Irish Catholic priest in the Vatican, O’Flaherty ran an escape line of Allied POWs and other escapees in the Second World War. It has sparked a planned trilogy, a new development for O’Connor. The main character of his latest novel, The Ghosts of Rome (Books, 28 March), emerged during the writing of My Father’s House.
O’Connor first heard about O’Flaherty when he was a young author who had published just one short story, and his appeal grew. “Hugh just refused to go away. It was like loving a piece of music.” Over decades, reading about O’Flaherty led him to Major Sam Derry, an escaped POW, and from Derry to Hugh D’Arcy Osborne, the British Ambassador to the Vatican, whose papers are in the British Museum, and from Osborne to the Irish singer Delia Murphy.
He was thrilled to discover that this was not only one man’s story, but that of “a brave group of disparate people from very different backgrounds, of good faith, all deciding we could get together and do this. That just sent a kind of electricity through the idea for me.”
He has clearly become very fond of all of them: “It was like being at a party with very modest people, each of them saying, ‘No, I did very little: you really want to talk to the next person.’”
Together, O’Flaherty and his escape line saved an estimated 7000 lives. O’Connor described an “epiphany” that he had while writing My Father’s House: “‘There is a presence in this book who is so strong that I think she’s going to need a book of her own,’ and that was Contessa Giovanna Landini.”
She is a contrast to O’Flaherty: “She has been married. She has been in love. She has lost,” O’Connor says, and notes her strong faith. “I was brought up a Catholic but not in a particularly religious family — to have to enter her world-view which combines absolute reverence for the traditions and teachings of her faith with her passion and temper. . . ”
FAITH and unbelief are important elements in the stories, as are the parallels between Bible stories and events that befall his characters. “I’m interested in the journey of the magi as a kind of metaphor of faith,” he says. “‘They returned to their own country by another way’ is a great sentence about faith. It changes perspective.
“The scenes in My Father’s House when Hugh is being led through Rome on his mission and he’s blindfolded are like the faith journey. He doesn’t know who he’s going to meet — he doesn’t know if the person waiting for him is one of his own people or an enemy.”
He created the idea of “the Choir” as a powerful way of getting readers to see eight people working together but also being individual and distinct. One of the climactic scenes in My Father’s House is their choir practice in an abandoned Vatican building. O’Connor describes the scene through what they are each thinking and hoping, even as they sing and receive their potentially fatal part in the mission to deliver vital money all over the city to people in hiding.
“The greatest things that we do are the things we do together,” he says. “Trying to think of a way of dramatising that rather than just describing it kept bringing me back to music, because the only way that a choir can work is for you to do your bit. I think of the members of the Choir as eight kinds of music. There must be agreement and collaboration and acceptance.
“It’s true even of solo music — a great blues singer or a great folk singer is in collaboration with the tradition of people who came before them, who handed on these songs, some of whose authors we will never know.” And so it is of the instruments on which music is made: “A great church organist collaborates with the people who designed and built and maintained it.”
The courage and determination of the Choir are offset by what O’Connor calls “a sense of the acceptance of imperfection”.
He says: “There are many days in these books when the Choir can’t save everyone, and some days when they can’t save anyone, but they don’t allow that to be a reason to do nothing.
“That is most powerfully expressed in the person of Hugh. Through the graciousness and generosity of his family, I have read all of his surviving papers. And the man who emerges is an obedient, somewhat conservative priest — but when the Pope and the Irish government said to him ‘You need to stop’ he disagreed. I sometimes think that if God Almighty had made himself manifest and said ‘Hugh O’Flaherty, I’m telling you to stop doing what you’re doing,’ he just wouldn’t have been able to.”
Part of the attraction of the trilogy is that the reader is in the company of courageous people who are deeply human: “These people are frail, they’re frightened and irritable, and they’re hungry and tired, they’re living together in a couple of rooms, and they don’t agree about a lot — except the importance of what they’re doing. The great thing about people is the heroic and wonderful things they do despite being human.”
THE forces that they are opposing are personified in an entirely fictional character, Paul Hauptmann, of the Gestapo, who duels with Hugh in the first book and Giovanna in the second, even moving into her palazzo after her need to act means that she moves into the Vatican. “It must be the most appalling personal invasion, that this man is living in your house,” O’Connor says. “He’s touching your stuff. He’s taking your books off the shelf. He’s having a shower in your shower. He’s taking your dead husband’s shirt out of the wardrobe and putting it on. And she loathes him for it.”
Rome itself is a key character in the trilogy, both grand and dingy. “If you were Hugh O’Flaherty from a little village in rural Ireland in the 1920s, and you became a priest and you went to Rome, the sense of what it must have been like to get off the train and feel the sunshine in the place where you mattered the most, the mother ship,” he says.
O’Connor began to visit Rome six years ago to research the books, and says that he was “just smitten. . . I find it an absolutely fascinating city, the co-presence of beauty and the extraordinary history of violence.”
The first book in the trilogy focuses on O’Flaherty himself. The second has at its heart Giovanna Landini. The main character of part three is Johnny May: “He is the factotum to D’Arcy Osborne, the British Ambassador to the Vatican.” O’Connor describes him as a “slightly sardonic, East End Soho, non-religious Jewish saxophone player. . . He has a bit of chipped ice in his gin and tonic. He is very up-front about his own frailties and those of others.
“All I have of him is one photograph. I have invented his life for him. If you need someone to go out and nick a German motorcycle, then Johnny May is the guy. Every group of high-minded friends needs someone like that, otherwise nothing happens.”
The prospect of producing a trilogy induces some qualms. “You have to defeat the awful sequel syndrome,” O’Connor says. “You have to aspire to be like the Godfather movies, in making the second better than the first, and then avoid what happened to Godfather 3, where it nearly ruined the first two.”
He is unsure whether the faith undertones of the first two books will make it prominently into the next title. “The first book is set over Christmas, and the second one starts on Ash Wednesday. I so want to call the third one ‘Pentecost’, but I just don’t think my publishers will allow me.”
And after the third book of the trilogy is complete? “I’m never going to write about Nazis or Rome again. I’m just going to think of a nice short love story where people overcome their difficulties and it all works out.”
The Ghosts Of Rome by Joseph O’Connor is published by Harvill Secker at £20 (Church Times Bookshop £18); 978-1-78730-387-4.
