Book Review of My Father’s House by Joseph O’Connor

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Historical novel in which an Irish Priest seeks to outwit a senior NAZI official with a fascination for the Roman Emperor Caligula.

 

(This review is based on a free review copy from the publisher via Net Galley UK.)

This sort of thing, which fictionalises real events and real people, using their real names, needs to be done with care and in this novel it is. The subject matter has been covered before, but not as well, and most treatments keep well away from the way that the NAZI official, Paul Hauptmann, placed in charge of Rome when the NAZI’s occupied it in late summer 1943, turned a museum dedicated to archaeological discoveries connected to the Roman Emperor Caligula into his own private palace, guarded by crack troops and indeed minefields. The author of this novel does not give the issue undue prominence, but he doesn’t let the reader escape knowing that there were two important mirrors in the story:

Hauptmann and the Pope both had private enclaves guarded by private armies, which they tried to hold inviolable. And the struggle between the Irish priest, Hugh O’Flaherty and Hauptmann in Rome and the Vatican City in the modern age could be read as a re-enactment of the relationship between the early Christian Church and Caligula, who wasn’t the only Roman Emperor to resemble the Antichrist but he could have won handsome prizes for doing so, were any to be handed out.

This isn’t prominent enough in the plot to trouble the atheistic reader in the slightest and it enhances, rather than distracts from the adventure inherent in a good man and his loyal friends taking on a very powerful man who isn’t even friends with his own wife and children and is friends with his Fuhrer only in his dreams. This is an adversary who personifies evil by standing alone, but O’Flaherty and his friends simply serve good and certainly don’t presume to personify it.

The author is well equipped to put a lot of interesting language in the mouths of his Irish characters: “rats you could saddle” and “drunk as a boiled owl” do tend to stick in the memory, but his English characters are as good and the Italian ones nearly so.

It is all about an escape line for prisoners of war who managed to slip out of their prison camps, but this only comes about because O’Flaherty is forbidden, by the Pope himself, from interfering in the inhuman way those prisons were run. That prohibition stems from the Pope’s fear that, if provoked, the NAZIs will indeed return Rome and the Vatican: the heart of Christianity as the Pope sees it, to the days of Caligula or Nero and the reign of the beast. The rift between the Pope and O’Flaherty, who recognises the Pope’s authority and understands his reasoning, comes about because O’Flaherty realises, especially after his first personal encounter with Hauptmann, that the man does not need to be provoked before he will commit the most appalling crimes!

The title comes from the promise which Jesus made to his disciples “in my Father’s house, there are many rooms” (in some translations it is “mansions” rather than rooms). The Vatican City, where O’Flaherty hides his escapees and his own activities, is a vast, crumbling and untidy collection of forgotten rooms and passages crammed into a very small geographical space. Hauptmann’s own private Arcadia is tidy, uncluttered and expansive. Order prevails, on pain of death. O’Flaherty, living and operating in his Father’s house, simply tries to muddle through and live. Their methodologies are as opposed as their beliefs.

 

My Father’s House by Joseph O’Connor is published by Random House on the 26^th of January 2024.