nteresting book and premise – an Irish priest holes up in the Vatican as the Germans invade the city, take over with their usual ruthlessness, and besiege them. Hugh O’Flaherty is our Monsignor-on-the-Ground, running a ring of saboteurs and  spies to get as many escaped prisoners out of Rome. And for this, he’ll need money.

I would like to know what the true story was here – how close did the actual story follow the book. One thing I know – if you are an American and fine with dictators and secret police, Hugh’s opposite, Gestapo Head Hauptmann might change your mind. The things the man does are horrifying, and the fact that people are fine sliding into this sort of governance is frightening, to say the least. But O’Flaherty and Hauptmann play a cat and mouse game on Christmas Eve, 1943, with the priest out to make a sweeping series of money drops across the bleak midnight city.

If you’ve ever seen that ten-minute series of images from Catch-22, where Yossarian wanders  through a dark, corrupt Rome, you’ll get the idea of the setting of this book. And I will say this – some of the scenes were a little overdrawn (in my opinion). While author Joseph O’Connor spooled through background after background, finding new ways to describe ice, broken stone and the River Tiber, I found myself wishing that we could get on to the next scene, the next development.

But yes, an interesting book about what people have to do to endure and counter the forces of fascism. Worth a flip-though.

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