Tag: Joseph O’Connor

My Father’s House by Joseph O’Connor

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Joseph O’Connor’s new novel My Father’s House, published in the UK today, is based on the true story of Hugh O’Flaherty, a Catholic priest who helped thousands of Jews and Allied prisoners of war to escape from Italy during World War II. This is the third book I’ve read by O’Connor (the others are Shadowplay, about the author Bram Stoker and the actors Henry Irving and Ellen Terry, and Ghost Light, which explores the relationship between the playwright John Millington Synge and the actress Molly Allgood) and I think it’s the best of the three.

The main part of the novel is set in 1943. Born and raised in Ireland, Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty is serving in Vatican City during the war – a neutral territory within Nazi-occupied Rome. As an official Vatican visitor to Italy’s prisoner of war camps, Hugh has been trying to improve conditions for the prisoners, but his actions mark him out as an Allied sympathiser and his superiors prevent him from carrying out any more visits in case he makes the Vatican a Nazi target. However, Hugh won’t be stopped that easily and soon he has set up an Escape Line, successfully smuggling Jews and escaped prisoners out of Rome right under the eyes of the Nazis.

The biggest escape mission yet – the ‘Rendimento’ – has been arranged for Christmas Eve, 1943. In the hope that the Gestapo will be less vigilant on this particular night, Hugh and his group of courageous volunteers have put elaborate plans in place to move a large number of people out of the city under the cover of darkness. As we count down the days and hours leading up to the mission, we also get to know each member of Hugh’s team and how they came to be involved in the Escape Line.

The group use the cover of meeting for ‘choir practice’ and this is where they discuss their plans and receive their instructions – carefully coded, of course, as the Nazis have eyes and ears everywhere. One Nazi in particular is getting too close for comfort; he is Obersturmbannführer Paul Hauptmann, who already has his eye on Hugh due to the camp visits and is starting to close in on the Choir and the Rendimento. But although Hauptmann is our villain, O’Connor gives him a surprising amount of depth, describing his home life and his relationship with his wife and children. This reminder that Nazi officers were often also family men leading normal domestic lives just makes Hauptmann’s behaviour feel even more chilling and shocking.

As the clock ticks down on Christmas Eve, the suspense increases as we are kept wondering whether the mission will succeed. However, the chapters describing the build-up to the Rendimento are interspersed with other chapters in which each member of the Choir introduces themselves and their background and tells us how they met Hugh and joined his group. I wasn’t very keen on this structure as I felt that it broke the flow of the story and took away some of the tension, but it was still interesting to hear their different voices (some of which I found more convincingly written than others). They included Sir D’Arcy Osborne, the British envoy to the Holy See, and his butler John May, diplomat’s wife Delia Kiernan, and escaped soldier Sam Derry – all of whom were real people.

I had never read anything about Hugh O’Flaherty and his work until now, so I’m pleased to have had the chance to learn something new. I see he was the subject of a 1983 film, The Scarlet and the Black, starring Gregory Peck, which I’ve never come across either. Although My Father’s House is a complete novel in itself, it’s apparently the first in an Escape Line trilogy – I’ll be looking out for the next one and will be interested to see if it’s going to focus on a different member of the group this time.

Thanks to Harvill Secker for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.

This is book 3/50 read for the 2023 Historical Fiction Reading Challenge.

Shadowplay by Joseph O’Connor

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Having enjoyed one of Joseph O’Connor’s earlier novels, Ghost Light, about the relationship between the playwright John Millington Synge and the actress Molly Allgood, I was looking forward to reading his newest book, Shadowplay, which was shortlisted for this year’s Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction. Like Ghost Light, this book explores the lives of several real historical figures from the literary and theatrical worlds – in this case, the Irish author Bram Stoker and the English stage actors Henry Irving and Ellen Terry.

Bram Stoker, of course, is best known for his 1897 novel Dracula, which is written in an epistolary style and O’Connor uses a similar format in Shadowplay, telling the story through a series of imagined diary entries, letters and transcripts of recordings. Beginning with his life in Dublin and marriage to Florence Balcombe, the novel takes us through Stoker’s meeting with the great Shakespearean actor Sir Henry Irving and his move to London to become the manager of Irving’s Lyceum Theatre. Stoker’s involvement with Irving and the Lyceum leads to a friendship with Ellen Terry, the leading actress of her time, and the relationship between these three characters forms the heart of the novel.

While much of Stoker’s time is taken up with managing the theatre and trying to deal with Irving’s eccentricities, sudden rages and heavy drinking, he also continues to work on his own career as an author. Sadly he won’t achieve the fame he deserves until after his death, but in Shadowplay we see him drawing on his experiences and the people and places around him to put together the various parts of the novel that will become Dracula. I should point out, though, that this book is a work of fiction and Joseph O’Connor finds some very creative ways to weave Dracula allusions into the plot. They are not necessarily things that influenced the real Stoker, but I thought it was fascinating and cleverly done. Jonathan Harker appears, and Mina, although not quite in the way you might expect, a visit to an asylum inspires the creation of the insect-eating Renfield, and with Jack the Ripper haunting the streets of London at that time, it’s easy to see why themes of death and darkness wouldn’t be far from an aspiring author’s mind.

Despite all the interesting ideas explored in this novel, I can’t really say that I loved it. I thought the format and structure of the book made it feel slightly disjointed; a more conventional narrative would have worked better for me and would have made it easier for me to connect with the characters and become more fully asbsorbed in their stories. Still, this is an entertaining and very imaginative novel and I’m pleased to have had the opportunity to learn a little bit more about Bram Stoker, Henry Irving and Ellen Terry!

Ghost Light by Joseph O’Connor

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Ghost Light tells the story of Molly Allgood, a real-life Irish actress who performed under the stage name Maire O’Neill and was engaged to the playwright John Millington Synge at the time of his death from cancer in 1909. Molly was fourteen years younger than Synge, she was a Catholic whereas he was a Protestant, and she came from a much poorer background. It seemed that almost everyone disapproved of their relationship including their parents, families and friends.

We first meet Molly in 1952, many years after Synge’s death. She’s living in poverty in London, dependent on alcohol, alone and desperate. We follow her over the course of a day as she prepares to take part in a play which is being broadcast on BBC radio and this story is interspersed with Molly’s memories of Synge and flashbacks to the early twentieth century.

As you’ve probably guessed, Ghost Light is not a happy book at all. Molly’s story is very sad, moving and poignant. The novel is written mostly in the second person, as well as following a stream of consciousness style, which made the book a bit harder to read than it needed to be, but Joseph O’Connor’s writing is undeniably beautiful and I did get used to the second person perspective after a while. There was also a chapter written in the style of a scene from one of Synge’s plays which I thought was a nice addition.

O’Connor states in his author’s note that although Molly and Synge were real people, this is a fictional story and most of the events described in the novel never actually happened. However, even if O’Connor’s Molly and Synge don’t bear much resemblance to their real-life models, they both felt completely realistic to me. Although I didn’t find Molly very likeable, I did love her narrative voice, which was bitter one minute and amusing the next, and this helped me warm to her character.

I won this book in last October’s Readathon and would like to thank Jessica of Park Benches and Bookends for providing a copy. I wish I’d had a chance to read it sooner, but my timing was actually perfect because I was in Dublin for a few days just last week and discovered some displays on Synge and Molly Allgood in the Dublin Writers Museum which I probably wouldn’t have appreciated if I hadn’t read Ghost Light!