The arrival of this novel is a welcome beginning to a new year in fiction and a welcome return of characters he drew together in My Father’s House. The Ghosts of Rome follows a group of assorted clergy, diplomats, Allied soldiers in hiding, Romans of every variety and others who use the Vatican’s precarious neutrality to help people escape the Germans in Nazi-occupied Rome.
They call themselves the Choir. They are led by an Irish priest, Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty. They rescue and secrete escaped Allied POWs, Italian anti-fascists, Jews on the run. They smuggle fugitives across Rome, in and out of the Vatican and its properties around the city. As numbers expand, they are forced into areas that have no immunity from Gestapo searches. In My Father’s House, the core of the story is O’Flaherty himself, though his Choir is already remarkable, but while the monsignor plays his part in the Ghosts of Rome, it is the Contessa Landini, Jo, who drives the narrative and action and is its moral heart.
Like O’Flaherty, Jo is wanted by the Nazis. When she steps beyond the painted line that marks the border of the Vatican in St Peter’s Square, she risks her life. The animosity felt for the Choir by Rome’s Gestapo chief, Paul Hauptmann, is personal when it comes to the contessa. The escape line is running rings round the Nazis. It is not only an irritation, it’s embarrassing, and one great weakness of tyranny is how threatening it finds that.
While Allied forces fight their way to Rome, while the Italian Resistance grows, and with Allied spies already in the city, Hauptmann is obsessed with O’Flaherty’s “amateurs”, who have little going for them but the blind eye the Vatican turns – mostly – to their activities. His fury is especially directed at the contessa. He lives in her abandoned palazzo as an act of futile spite and takes his anger out on her possessions while she still eludes him.
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Hauptmann’s pursuit of the escape line is what gives The Ghosts of Rome its shape and pace, though it is always character that provides the power. Contessa Landini; Delia Murphy and her daughter Bron (the family of Tom Kiernan, the Irish Minister to the Vatican); D’Arcy Osborne, the deceptively Wooster-ish British ambassador; Sam Derry, an artillery sergeant who more than anyone understands the soldiers using the escape line; and Monsignor O’Flaherty himself – these are only some of the rich cast. I have a soft spot for the patient, put-upon Kiernan, forced to don his diplomatic top hat and tails and pretend his wife isn’t risking her life. But we might remember Kiernan had his own extracurricular activity, passing information from a Japanese Vatican source to US intelligence.
An underestimated element of any novel is something we don’t really have a word for. We might try “atmosphere” or “the world” an author creates that we are compelled to inhabit, even when it’s a world of darkness. The fantasy novel gives that great attention, but it matters in all fiction, never more than historical fiction. O’Connor’s prose creates an extraordinary picture of Rome under Nazi control; brutal, chaotic, treacherous, decaying, wrecked and crumbling, and yet sometimes still bathed in glorious and unexpected light, literally and metaphorically.
The Ghosts of Rome is described as a sequel to My Father’s House. The term is inadequate. Each can be read without reference to the other, but together they make a whole greater than the parts. An epic of war. And they work together because the narrowness of O’Connor’s focus belies his breadth of vision. Writers of historical fiction often choose too broad a canvas and become lesser historians. But historical novels should show us what academic history rarely reveals. We may find endless riches in the great histories of Greece and Rome, but only when we watch Hector and Andromache in The Iliad, laughing to calm their frightened baby on the walls of Troy, do we touch two people entirely like us. People we know.
O’Connor’s theme is not the world war in its widest sense, nor even the moral discomfort that is Vatican neutrality. Yet The Ghosts of Rome makes its own statement about these things. Focusing on people whose response to evil is only to act, he opens us to a humanity too urgent for debate and analysis. Morally, even spiritually, his characters are what they do. In a letter written by Jo’s dead husband, read by Hauptmann, we hear it: “We can resist. That is the meaning of grace.”
The Ghosts of Rome ends 20 years on at O’Flaherty’s anniversary Mass in Cahersiveen. The elegiac tone contrasts with previous action. There is room for a quiet grace. I don’t know if the monsignor knew the Talmud, but its words could be written for O’Connor’s novel: “Whoever saves one life, saves the whole world.”
Michael Russell’s stories of an Irish detective caught up in the second World War include The City of God, set in Rome; and The City in Year Zero, set in Germany in 1945
