My Father's House

"I suppose so, although that seems a bit cruel—as if other thrillers aren’t literary. It’s certainly a thriller. It’s tense, tense, tense. But the big thing in this novel is not just the tension, it’s the voices. Joseph O’Connor gives a masterclass in the different voices of the people gathered around the priest Hugh O’Flaherty to help him organise and run the Escape Line—the escape routes out of Italy for prisoners of war and others being pursued by the Nazis. The voices are unforgettable, their code-name ‘The Choir’ absolutely apt. So, we have the tension and the voices, and also we have Rome. If you feel you know Rome, you’ll find much to enjoy in the twists and turns of the streets, the hidden alleys, the sudden expanses and that ever-present ‘seethe of black water’, the Tiber. It’s full Rome immersion. But we also have a clever construction in this novel. Through a series of post-war interviews inserted at various points, we know who survives, and we know how the characters became involved in the Choir. So the tension is less about who will live and who will die amongst the characters we get to know, and much more about whether the Escape Line will succeed for the countless unnamed people secreted all over Rome. And of course there are deeper tensions about how human nature evolves during wartime. When faced with the complexities of war, what is courage? What’s the difference between courage and self-aggrandisement? As with all the best thrillers, I felt a bit breathless at some stages reading this book! And beware if you’re reading on the bus or the underground: it’s the kind of book that can make you miss your stop. I’m not really a genre person. I don’t terribly like labels. I find them unhelpful. Like other novels, the historical novel is, fundamentally, simply a story, as a spy story is simply a story. Even with fiction featuring real figures, as is the case with much historical fiction, fiction is, by definition, a product of the imagination. It’s just fiction. Returning to historical fiction, though, if we must use a label, at least that label is no longer pejorative, which is a good thing. People are now proud to be writers of historical fiction. Some of that pride has certainly to do with Hilary Mantel , not just what she wrote in the genre itself, but what she wrote about it, and also how she spoke about it, particularly in her Reith Lectures . If historical fiction needed its rehabilitation firmly stamped, Hilary Mantel was that stamp, moving the argument on from ‘isn’t historical fiction just a, usually misconceived, facsimile of the past?’ by showing how the writer of historical fiction actually works with the past—the nuts and bolts, as it were. It takes a lot of courage to write any kind of book, but to write historical fiction takes a different kind of courage because you are going to get a different kind of critique. As well as the usual gripes you open yourself up to the nitpicker and also the person who feels the need to say ‘I know it wasn’t like that’. If a novel isn’t labelled ‘historical fiction’ perhaps you don’t get quite so much stick for errors! Another reason, perhaps, for doing away with labels."