Joseph O'Connor: "I did not think that I’d have to explain to my children what fascism is, or what extreme racism is"

Inspired by the true story of Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty – the ‘Scarlet Pimpernel of the Vatican’, who saved 6,500 allied soldiers and Jewish refugees during World War 2 – Joseph O’Connor’s Escape Line trilogy continues with its second instalment, The Ghosts Of Rome.

At the centre of the action is Contessa Giovanna Landini, a member of a group of Escape Line activists known as ‘The Choir’, who smuggle refugees to safety and help allied soldiers, all under the nose of Gestapo boss Paul Hauptmann. As Hauptmann’s focus on Landini grows, a mysterious parachutist lands in Rome and disappears into the back streets, and his true identity – ally or imposter – will have profound consequences for the Escape Line.

It’s a gripping read, and likely to attract more of the acclaim O’Connor has continually enjoyed since his 2002 breakthrough novel, the historical epic Star Of The Sea. Did he always imagine the story would end up as a trilogy?

“Not from the very beginning,” says the urbane and affable author. “But from about a third of the way in, it seemed that was the way to go. With the first one, My Father’s House, I could see it would really have to be a novel about Hugh O’Flaherty, since he’s the main guy and the person who put the Escape Line together.

“But I could see pretty quickly that the character of the Contessa was an interesting person to write about, and that the women involved in the story generally were very interesting. And while I would try and get them into the first book, there would be enough to say about them for there to be a second book.”

O’Connor elaborates on the main strands of the narrative.

“There are really three things,” he notes. “There are the women involved in the story; there’s the role of the ordinary Italian people, who were so heroic; and then the men, the escapees themselves. I thought it would be interesting to have more of a texture including their voices. Because of course, most of them were not professional soldiers.

“They were people who’d been drafted, or who’d volunteered. They were often very young. With the two main Americans in the book, one of them is a smalltown lawyer who has volunteered out of a sense of honour and duty. But really, he’s never seen a war and doesn’t know at all what it’s going to be like. Researching the first book, I spent a lot of time in the Imperial War Museum in London, reading memoirs by escapees.

“There’s almost like an entire sub-genre of these little books, which were often put together for 20, 30 or 100 people.”

As O’Connor notes, those books had a remarkable power.

“Sometimes, it was for the man’s family,” he explains. “There’s one very powerful one, it’s in the acknowledgments of The Ghosts Of Rome. A young man who escaped went back to the States, and simply sat up with a tape recorder for two nights, just recording his experiences. They weren’t meant for publication, but like a lot of documents that weren’t meant for publication, they’re often more interesting than the ones that were.

“The additional element is that time has moved on. In the first book, it’s Christmas 1943 and the Nazis have just taken over. In this book, it’s a few months later and the war is at a crossroads – we don’t really know how it’s going to turn out. So I thought yeah, there could actually be three books.”

As O’Connor observes, the story also has uncomfortable resonance in the modern political landscape.

CONTEMPORARY RESONANCE

“Unfortunately, we’re living in a world where you saw, recently, the wealthiest man in the world on the stage at the inauguration of a president, who has previously refused to accept the results of elections,” he says. “And here is this man making what he termed a Roman salute – and what other people use different language about. We’re living in a world where unfortunately these things have not gone away.

“Like, I’m 61 and my two sons are in their early twenties. I’m not exaggerating when I say that, when they were born, the world seemed a much happier place. I did not think that I’d have to explain to my children what fascism is, or what extreme racism is. So it’s a book that I hope has contemporary resonance.”

Indeed, growing up in the ’90s and learning about the Second World War, it was difficult to understand how politics could veer into such a repugnant place. It’s only in the last decade, with the international rise of the far right, that I can see how extreme political movements often end up in power via a gradual slide.

“That’s how it happens,” nods Joseph. “We see examples now every day. I’m not calling the current US government a fascist government, but you can see how things happen. At the inauguration ceremony, a bishop issues what she calls a plea for mercy, and there’s a big pile-on of all the supporters, demanding that she apologise. You see how fear and self-censorship works. You even look at some of the people now surrounding Trump, whom he has ridiculed and insulted in the most grotesque ways.

“But they came onboard in the end, out of fear. I saw remarkable things when I was researching these books – little things that didn’t make it into the second book, but they might appear in the third. For example, I did some research at a photographic archive in Rome, which is mentioned in the acknowledgments.

“The Nazis marched into that archive, and the woman who ran it was opposed to them. One of the things she did as a photo-journalist, was to go around rural Italy and take very idealised pictures of the Italian peasantry, with cows in fields and looking very wholesome and so on. One of the photos was taken without permission by a pro-Nazi publication and put on the cover.”

It was the beginning of a chilling saga.

“So she complains,” Joseph continues, “and the Nazis go, ‘Well, do you really want to complain? Because then your husband might disappear, or your children might be taken away. Fill out the complaint form if you like, but this is what happens.’ So she decides not to. Then they come back and say, ‘Next month, we’d like three of your pictures. And the month after, we’d like to do a full issue.’

“And they go, ‘It’s up to you – we can burn your house down if you like.’ So it’s the gentle art of looking the other way, and that’s how fascism thrives. Of course, we all have that in us. Most normal people have the impulse to go, ‘We don’t want trouble. We’re sorry for the state of the world, but don’t bring it to my door.’ I think fascism is extremely skilled at weaponising those very human impulses. Unfortunately, we do glimpse that in the world today.

“Even in Ireland, if you take the issue of abuse in the Catholic Church, there were lots of people who knew, and who said, ‘Look, I don’t want to get involved.’ We know there were parents who disbelieved their own children, so there is a great impulse in us to say nothing, and fascism understands that very well.”

In terms of researching the book, O’Connor had an eight-month stay in Rome over two trips – not a bad prospect as work projects go.

“I’m prepared to suffer for my art!” he quips. “The city is all history. I mean, Joyce lived in Rome around 1905/06. Improbably enough, he worked as a bank teller, and he hated Rome. He said it gave him nightmares, being surrounded by all these crumbling old temples. He wrote to Brother Stanislaus, saying he just wished the Romans would let the ruins rot. But yeah, it hasn’t changed much – there’s still that very palpable sense of the past.

“I mean, it’s the headquarters of the Catholic Church, which thinks of time in terms of millennia. When the Pope accepts Darcy Osbourne in this book, he says, ‘When god made time, he made a lot of it. And we store most of it in the basement of St Peter’s.’ The Christmas before last, we went to midnight mass there, which was an amazing experience, whatever one’s beliefs. It was like Catholic Electric Picnic.”

It was certainly quite the evening.

“You turn up in St. Peter’s Square around 8, and it’s dark with candles and piped music,” O’Connor continues. “The guys in Swiss guard uniform are marshalling you into queues. The Blue Nuns of Rome – the very heroic women who look after the poorest of the poor – were shuffling up to us in the queue, saying, ‘Have you got spare tickets?’ My son James was going, ‘How come we’re allowed go?!

REMARKABLE ACCESS

“Then you go in, and there’s incense and stained glass, and the Sistine Chapel choir are singing. It’s incredible theatre. You’re very struck by the fact that, if you went to midnight mass in Rome a thousand years ago, it would probably look pretty similar. And some of these cardinals were probably there!”

The trip also saw the author getting some remarkable access, which even included a visit to the Vatican library. Undoubtedly, though, the Vatican’s bureaucracy, secrecy and obsession with power puts it starkly at odds with the stated beliefs of Christianity.

“I can’t speak to the rest of Italy, but you wander into mass in Rome on a Sunday, and it’ll be full,” says O’Connor. “You see people get so much from it. Ten minutes from where we were staying, there was the Church of the French, and in at the back, there are two Caravaggios. It’s stunning beauty. I felt nothing at all visiting St. Peter’s. To me, it was like visiting the Kremlin – it’s the headquarters of an international empire. It has factions, splits and all of that.

“Funnily enough, I didn’t meet a lot of people who liked the current Pope! In and around the Vatican, I met people who weren’t mad about him. Whereas to me as an outsider, he seems likeable enough. A lot of them loved the previous Pope, who I probably wouldn’t want to go for a pint with. I was in the Labour Party as a kid, and it’s a bit like that – there’s the militant tendency.

“It’s not very much to do with religion or spirituality. There’s the massive wealth for a start. When last I checked, it was easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to get into heaven. But I guess there’s an asterisk attached to that!”

The Ghosts Of Rome is out now.