Book Review: My Father's House

My Father’s House by Joseph O’Connor (Europa Editions, 2023).

Every once in a while, it pays to give an author a second try.

I had a hard time getting into Joseph O’Connor’s 2019 novel Shadowplay, a fictionalized tale of Dracula author Bram Stoker. I recorded on Goodreads at the time that I found the Irish novelist’s writing beautiful but most of his characters extremely hard to like. And while I understand that you can have a perfectly entertaining story all about people being unlikable (I’m a big fan of The Lion in Winter, after all), in this case it just didn’t work for me.

Maybe it didn’t work for O’Connor either, because in his new novel, My Father’s House, he’s done something very different. His protagonists here are a small group calling themselves “the Choir,” dedicated to helping Jews, escaped POWs, and other refugees get away from the Nazis in occupied World War II Italy. Again, the story is based on real people, but this bunch—a British ambassador and his Cockney manservant, an Irish diplomat’s wife and daughter, a widowed Italian countess, and more, led by Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty—couldn’t be more unlike the people in O’Connor’s last book. Their characters and personalities are wildly divergent, but they’re united in one goal: to save as many lives as possible.

The story is structured around a Rendimento, or mission, that’s set for Christmas Eve 1943. We see the Choir members preparing for and then carrying out this mission, intercut with flashbacks and flash-forwards, reminiscences, carefully timed revelations, and the parallel story of their Nazi nemesis, all of it creating a mood of unrelenting suspense and dread. Obersturmbannführer Paul Hauptmann pursues the group, particularly O’Flaherty, with grim and relentless determination.

(Incidentally, O’Connor seems to have taken some liberties with this character, whose name in real life was Herbert Kappler, making him a devoted family man as well as a Nazi torturer. I can only surmise that it was more interesting to have an antagonist who mulls over what to buy his wife for Christmas while he’s washing the blood of his victims off his hands.)

This story can really wear a reader down. You’re never for a moment unaware of the sky-high stakes, the day-to-day fear and tension, the long hard grind of smuggling and hiding refugees and getting money and supplies to them. The sheer amount of detail involved, the endless maneuverings and manipulations the operations took, was mind-boggling. If you’ve ever fantasized about being a heroic rescuer of victims during World War II, you may catch yourself uneasily wondering if you really would have had the mental and physical stamina for it. It was an emotionally exhausting read, and yet I couldn’t get enough of it.

O’Connor’s writing is as beautiful as ever, and I found it much more enjoyable when it was portraying characters I could actually like. We shift between third person and first person, among various narrators, each with his or her own distinctive voice. I especially enjoyed Delia Kiernan’s colorful but no-nonsense Irish brogue. But my favorite character was unquestionably the Monsignor himself—a man deeply committed to his faith yet skirting the orders of his Pope, a man with a gift for humor and friendship, yet shaken by the strain and difficulty of his secret work. One operative’s description of him at choir practice—the group really did function as a literal choir, as a cover for their secret activities—lingers in my mind:

Presently [he] would call the group to order and play the keynote on a harmonica. As the singing began, which usually happened ten or fifteen minutes after the last of us had arrived, sometimes white-faced and breathless, up the haunted steps, his practice was to systematically make his way around the table, from one of us to another, talking in whispers or showing scribbled notes on lavatory paper, which we would tear up and burn in the stove when we had memorised them. … Some consolation of the spirit, some release happens when human beings sing in a group, wherever and however that occurs. In a place of worship, on the terraces of a football stadium, in a cramped and draughty attic, bombers droning overhead.

Under the endless strain of their work, the group members sometimes bicker or even come close to breaking, but the beauty and harmony of the music they practice draws them together, reminds them of the shared humanity that is, after all, the reason for what they’re doing. As another Choir member remarks, it “reminds one why one’s alive.”

O’Connor has said that My Father’s House is the first book in a planned trilogy. This book seems so complete in itself that I can’t imagine what he’s going to put in the next two books, but I’m eager to find out. And I’m so glad I gave him a second try.

Book Links:

My Father’s House on Amazon
My Father’s House on Bookshop