My Father’s House by Joseph O’Connor starts with great tension. Nazi-occupied Rome in 1943. A diplomat’s wife, a priest, an injured man are driving madly through the empty city streets. It is ‘119 hours and 11 minutes before the mission.’ This is the story of five days in the life of the resistance members of The Choir, including a priest based in the neutral Vatican City and in neighbouring Rome a collection of Italian and foreign partisans. Hundreds of Allied soldiers are hidden around the city, awaiting movement to safety, risking daily capture. Gestapo boss Paul Hauptmann is obsessed with arresting and torturing the leader, Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty, who ‘had three doctorates and was fluent in seven languages, his mind was like a lawnmower blade, he’d shear through any knot and see a solution.’
Based on a true story, the author’s caveat at the end emphasizes that real incidents have been condensed, characters amalgamated and invented. Terror comes to the holy city. Barriers are erected across St Peter’s Square in Vatican City and the special Vatican troops are issued with sub-machine guns.
The premise is fascinating, its an area of World War Two history I haven’t read about before; a great premise that takes detours away from the main storyline. Tension ebbs and flows because the objective of the ‘rendimento,’ the mission, is never really clear. The story is told in a combination of voices featuring retrospective post-war interviews with some of the Choir and the 1943 narratives of O’Flaherty, Hauptmann and D’Arcy Osborne, UK ambassador to the Holy See and in refuge in the holy city.
There is some beautiful description of the grandiose settings, sometimes too much if I’m honest. It is a difficult balance to strike, maintaining the tension, the threat and the danger, while enriching the atmosphere and setting. Get it wrong, and it distracts from the main thrust of the story. One example of beautiful description which adds to the story is O’Flaherty in the scriptorium, his workplace. From the darkest corner he removes a hefty book, ‘Illuminated grinning evangelists, scarlet dragons, silver gryphons, the rook-black of the text, the black of burned coal. Then a carnival of ornamented capitals wound in eagles and serpents, the haloes of archangels forming ivory O’s, to the hollow where the middle quires have been patiently razored out in which eleven folded pieces of architectural paper are hidden… Names, contacts, hiding places, dates.’
This is a hybrid literary thriller about a fascinating subject. I wanted slightly less of the architecture, art and memories of times past, and more about The Choir and the individuals involved. This is the first of the Rome Escape Line series. Book two, The Ghosts of Rome is next.

If you like this, try:-
‘The Garden of Angels ‘ by David Hewson
‘While Paris Slept’ by Ruth Druart
‘A Hero in France’ by Alan Furst

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COMING SOON… THE NEXT BOOK I REVIEW WILL BE:-