Author interview: ‘The greatest things that we do in life are always about a group’

While working on The Ghosts of Rome, the second novel in ‘The Escape Line’ trilogy, O’Connor dog-eared pages, underlined paragraphs, and got “physically involved with his books”.

“I have very fond memories of my grandparents, who were working class and they didn’t have a lot of books in the house, but they were very proud of the ones that they had,” he said. 

“They loved books and they thought it was a shame to just dog-ear the pages of the book.

“There are lovely little signs of reverence and affection for books, but I don’t have it myself for the physical objects.”

I write on them, scribble and underline and I get physically involved with my books and it’s become an important part of my reading, to re-read.

Set six months into the occupation of Rome in 1944, The Ghosts of Rome tells the story of a group of unlikely friends, including Contessa Giovanna, who want to help those seeking refuge. 

Their mission? Smuggle refugees and help allied soldiers under the nose of Gestapo boss, Paul Hauptmann. How? By using a choir as a cover.

During an air raid, a parachutist lands in Rome, then quickly disappears, and his fate will put the whole Escape Line at risk. 

Meanwhile, Hauptmann’s attention is on the widowed Contessa. As his fascination grows, she is pulled into a dangerous game.

In this second novel, the women play an important part of the story. 

While researching the story of Monsignor Hugh Flaherty, a Kerry priest who risked his life to save thousands of others, O’Connor was taken by the warmth of the priest’s relationships with women — an affection he didn’t “associate with Catholic priests of that time”.

“When you read his personal papers, he’s so admiring and affectionate towards women. He just loves his women friends, in a way that I thought was kind of touching.”

You could see that actually this escape line couldn’t have worked without the women who were involved.

“The people who actually do it are the women who are able to figure out how to get from one part of the city to another, and who are, as we all know, better at solving problems.

“I thought that there would have to be a novel in which the amazing women involved in this story were brought into the light,” O’Connor explains.

“My sense of the real Hugh O’Flaherty, and I wouldn’t mean to be impertinent or disrespectful to his memory, is that he would have been a lovely father.”

O’Connor has always showed interest in writing about groups of people, as after all, “the greatest things that we do in life are always about a group”.

In the trilogy, he writes about tyranny and chilling events — ones similar to those we have recently witnessed across the world. According to him, we can all stand up to bullies, although he does not write the “kind of books that preach”.

“There are things in the news this year that would not have been in the news five years ago, so I don’t think you can think about it too much. Hugh wasn’t a very good sermoniser in real life, and neither am I.

“I think a novel is there to be beautiful, but if it has meanings to me, they’re more private. We can all stand up to tyranny.

“There’ll always be somebody who’s fucking throwing their weight around. To me, these characters were standing up.

“They’re not better than anyone else, they know they can’t save everyone, but they decided to stand up.

“They decided to say, we’re not going to save the world, but we’re going to do this, and I think that’s a good way to live,” O’Connor said.

By now, it’s no secret that the Dubliner has an eternal love for the Italian capital.

He had first spent time in Italy with his family, while his son Marcus was in transition year. But after a couple of weeks, the pandemic hit — and not even the Pope could keep it at bay.

We thought on a tourism level, let’s go down to St Peter’s Square. We’d see the Pope and we’d go home. He appears at 11am at the window, it’s like a bit of theatre.

“He said ‘this awful illness is coming to Italy, let’s all get together and make it go away’. Sorry to break the bad news, but this prayer led by the Pope didn’t work,” he laughs.

As they rushed back home, the author left behind notes and photographs in his Airbnb.

Two years later, he was surprised to find them all intact when he got back to the Eternal City — as if he had stepped into a time capsule.

“The family who own the Airbnb had never been back. We opened the door and on the table were my notebooks and guidebooks to Rome,” he recalls.

What surprised him most throughout his research was a period in Ireland’s history that he points out is still contested.

“Neutrality in the Second World War, despite the fact that tens of thousands of Irish men joined the armed forces of the old enemy.

“I had an uncle who had been in the IRA in the 1920s and ended up in the Canadian wing of the British Army.

“Ireland’s history is always more nuanced than it seems, there’s always been stuff going on beneath the level of official Ireland.”

He might be writing about and researching religion and priests, but O’Connor does not consider himself a Catholic. 

The last straw for him was learning about what occurred in Blackrock College, where he used to be a student.

“I now know that some of the priests were predatory sex abusers. We have an image of paedophiles as kind of grubby alphas in raincoats, hanging around the playground.

“But they’re not like that, they’re skilled at creating these very plausible, almost likeable, versions of themselves.

“I had decided long before that I was not a practising Catholic, but that made me reevaluate the very warm memories that I had about priests.

“Priests shouldn’t be seen as different from anyone else, they should be subject to the same rules and laws. But somehow the notion came about in Ireland that if you’re a very special person indeed, you don’t have to answer to anyone.”

If there is one thing O’Connor does believe in, it’s the arts.

To me, the arts and the great religions come from the same place, the realisation that we are something more than a body.

“If we have an operation and somebody removes our arm, we’re not actually less of a person, there’s some person-ness about us that remains.

“Most of the people who I know are looking for something that will answer those questions that all of us have. It’s why we have religions, why we have art, why we have music. I can’t be a creative person and believe in nothing.

“To write a novel, it’s hard work. There’s no point in doing it if there isn’t a point in doing it that’s beyond making a living. I’m very happy to have readers. But if I had no readers tomorrow, I’d still write.”

• The Ghosts of Rome by Joseph O’Connor, published by Harvill Secker, is available now. See the review on the link below