The Irish novelist Joseph O’Connor is best known for “Star of the Sea” (2002) and its loose sequel, “Redemption Falls” (2007). These historical novels were strung between Ireland and America, their sweeping narratives conveyed by a range of different voices and confected documents: letters, diaries, interviews and newspaper articles. The success of those books lay in the way O’Connor’s collages cohered into something grander and more unified than its myriad parts. They were also profoundly, peculiarly readable — delivering the punch of genre fiction while offering more subtle literary pleasures.
That same alchemy drives O’Connor’s Escape Line Trilogy, set in Nazi-occupied Rome. The first novel, “My Father’s House” (2023), fictionalizes the true story of Msgr. Hugh O’Flaherty, an Irish priest who led a resistance network operating out of the Vatican. Now, in “The Ghosts of Rome,” the focus shifts to one of O’Flaherty’s (fictional) collaborators: Contessa Giovanna Landini.
Landini is an elegant widow who is part mother figure, part mastermind of the Choir, the Vatican resistance organization that meets under the guise of music practice: “While singing, under cover of whatever music we were able to make, we exchanged notes, diagrams, instructions, details, on the missions we had approaching.”
These missions — code-named Rendimenti — largely involve smuggling escaped prisoners of war to safety, taking them on “darkwalks” through the nighttime streets of Rome and hiding them in crumbling safe houses while evading the sinister Gestapo boss, Paul Hauptmann. Hauptmann is a complex and fascinating character based on the real-life Herbert Kappler. He’s a monster who is increasingly desperate to apprehend the admirable Landini (even requisitioning her palazzo as his private residence). He’s also under terrible pressure from Berlin to get a grip on the “well-funded and ruthlessly organized Escape Line.” Hauptmann’s beloved wife and children have been taken back to Germany and will pay with their lives for any backsliding.
As with O’Connor’s earlier novels, the power of “The Ghosts of Rome” comes from the dazzling variety of voices employed, the sense of a world constructed in multiple dimensions. The contemporaneous narratives are related in an urgent present tense, with breathless sentences, single-line paragraphs. These are augmented with memoirs, transcripts, Gestapo briefings and other found documents.
Cycling through perspectives as we move toward the novel’s denouement permits O’Connor to display all of his polyphonic talents. We have the garrulous Delia Murphy-Kiernan, the hard-drinking wife of the Irish ambassador; Enzo Angelucci, a crafty and heroic member of the Roman underworld; Sir Frank D’Arcy Osborne, a jovial British diplomat; John May, a Cockney jazz trumpeter. Then there’s Bruno, a downed Polish airman desperately fleeing through a hostile and hazardous Rome.
O’Connor has often been likened to the great Irish modernists for the lyricism of his voice-driven novels. But “The Ghosts of Rome” — which despite being the second in the trilogy can be read as a stand-alone novel — also situates him within a broader European tradition of memory and moral reckoning, one that returns again and again to World War II.
O’Connor embraces this legacy while transcending its clichés. His Rome is not merely a setting but a crucible, a city where the sacred and the profane collide, where resilience is forged in the shadow of ruins. By crafting a chorus of voices, he ensures that no single narrative dominates, reflecting the messy, multifaceted truths of history — both the way it is lived and how it is constructed in retrospect. What emerges is not just a wartime thriller, though it is that, but a meditation on how we remember, how we resist and how, even in the darkest times, humanity endures.
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