It’s arguably unfashionable to write about priests doing good things, but that’s exactly what Irish writer Joseph O’Connor has done in his latest novel, My Father’s House.

The story is based on a real-life Irish Catholic priest, Hugh O’Flaherty (1898-1963), regarded as one of the unsung heroes of the Second World War. Based in Vatican City, he was part of the resistance movement against the Nazis and was so clever at evading the Gestapo he earned the nickname “the scarlet pimpernel”.

Wikipedia (entry here) tells me that he was responsible for saving 6,500 Allied soldiers and Jews. He did this by finding them places to hide in houses, farms and convents and by setting up a clandestine “escape line” to get escaped British POWs back home.

Of course, O’Flaherty didn’t work alone. He was aided by a small team of covert operators, including Delia Murphy, a famous balladeer married to the Irish ambassador; British Major Sam Derry, an escaped POW; Sir D’Arcy Osborne, British Ambassador to the Holy See; and John May, who was Sir D’Arcy’s butler. Together they created a vast underground network that fed and housed and aided thousands trying to evade the Nazi’s stranglehold on Italy after the occupation of Rome and the fall of Fascist leader Mussolini.

O’Connor makes it clear in his acknowledgements that My Father’s House is a work of fiction and that he has taken liberties with facts, chronologies and so on.

Yet, the story feels authentic. It reads like a literary thriller, but it’s packed with exuberant detail to create scenes that are so vivid as to be cinematic. It would make an excellent movie.

But as ever with O’Connor’s work, his fictionalised account of this man and his daring exploits is almost as ambitious as O’Flaherty’s self-appointed mission. He adopts a “high literary” style to tell the priest’s story from multiple viewpoints using imagined BBC interview transcripts, for instance, made about 17 years after the war, interspersing these with a straightforward narrative that moves forward from 19 December 1943 to Christmas Eve, 1943.

The 1943 narrative thread, told in alternate chapters, counts down to a mission known as the “Renimento”, which O’Flaherty carries out on Christmas Eve. The design of this storyline builds suspense and momentum. Even the second narrative thread, which is told from the perspective of key characters looking back on O’Flaherty’s exploits almost 20 years after the fact, continues to build that momentum.

Yet My Father’s House isn’t a bonafide page-turner because the pacing is slightly too uneven and sometimes gets bogged down in detail and literary flourishes. But I liked the pitting of the good priest against the bad Nazi — Paul Hauptmann, the Gestapo commander in Rome — and the cunning both men have to employ to get by, which adds a frisson to the story.

For a more detailed review, please visit my blog.

Wow. An amazing audio production. Story telling at its most wonderful