While it’s filled with authenticity born of comprehensive research, layered with narrative craft and flowing with the energy that real empathy requires, there is something indefinable that seems to rise up from ‘My Father’s House’ like a glorious ghost. Riveting, immersive, synesthetic, linguistically dazzling, funny and dark, this novel is blessed with a kind of magical grace. Sprezzatura springs from every page. Reading it flung me to a time and place beyond my own life and experience. I sweltered as the heat of an old Italian summer crept through the soles of my shoes. I felt the cold stone of the Vatican in winter, the rain on my face, saw the enchanting bleary distortions of sunshine through stained glass, smelled the Tiber, was gripped with the ambient, gut-wrenching fear of the real danger that prowled through the secret passageways of wartime Rome.
The insights that arise from the story feel as important now as they’ve ever been: the hellishness and indignities of surveillance, the fragility of privacy and freedom, the travesties of power, the delusions of righteousness, the banality of evil (scenes of SS officer Hauptmann clowning with his children and worrying about what gift to buy his wife seem somehow especially chilling).
But with all that, I think the real message of this wonderful novel is a hopeful one. More than anything, the story of Hugh O’Flaherty and his brave band of friends reminds us that people are also capable of clear-eyed, clever decency. With all our flaws, fears, vanities, uglinesses and addictions – and even in the most dangerous of times – we humans can still be impeccable. We can be beautiful and courageous. We can be sublime.