A.N. Wilson writes consistently interesting, thoughtful non-fiction, but his more recent novels have all seemed rather dull compared to those he wrote at the beginning of his career, some thirty years ago now. This seems to be the most interesting one for a while, but it's still heavy going in parts.

The premise is interesting, and as usual, Wilson has picked a subject that is almost bound to get him into trouble. His strategy for dealing with it is one straight out of Sir Walter Scott: nested levels of dull, pedantic narrators. Wilson's probably the first person to do this in anger since Old Mortality, and it's a risky approach: the voice of the lowest-level narrator, N____, is so dull and uninspired in the early part of the book that I nearly gave up. Fortunately Wilson cheats a bit and sneaks in his own voice when he moves out of the 1930s story of Hitler and Winifred Wagner into the back-stories of Richard Wagner and of Hitler's youth.

The "surprising" plot twist that we would expect to be the key to the whole book is not a surprise at all, as Wilson has his second-level narrator give it away in his "translator's preface". We're already warned at this point that we shouldn't necessarily believe N___'s story, and it soon becomes clear that it doesn't really matter: what's important is not the presumed parentage of the lady in Seattle, but the excuse it gives to look at the whole relationship between Hitler and the Wagner family in a new way.
I liked the non-chronological presentation that tied the story to the themes of Wagner's main operas. The central questions the book attacks are the obvious ones: Why were Germans attracted to Hitler and his policies? Can Wagner's artistic genius be disentangled from its political baggage? But they were treated in a reasonably fresh way.

I felt Wilson did a little better with Hitler than with Wagner. His treatment seems to ignore almost entirely that Wagner wrote music, and considers the operas on a purely literary level, as though they were plays or novels. Obviously that's partly a limitation imposed by the need to communicate to general readers, but there are ways of talking about music without getting too Thomas Mann about it. Cutting out the music altogether is just weird, especially in a book that seems to take it for granted that readers are reasonably familiar with the stories and characters of the operas. To be fair, he mentions the music of Tristan — how could he not? — but doesn't really say anything about it.

The treatment of Hitler looks at him from an unexpected viewpoint too — from behind! — but Wilson gives us the information we need to fit that unorthodox view into the more conventional picture of him. The Flounder metaphor is overworked a bit, though.

This being A.N. Wilson, his real interest isn't in anything as mundane as Wagner or Hitler: the book gives him a wonderful chance to have yet another go at the 19th century crisis of religious faith. Where the Wagner/Hitler story is paradoxically full of British figures (even the Ring is a reworking of Shakespeare, we're told), at this more abstract level everything is thoroughly German, and Wilson is able to wheel out all the big guns from Schopenhauer and Nietzsche to Heidegger and Wittgenstein. Fun for all the family.

Probably better as a slightly off-beat non-fiction study of Wagner-and-the-Nazis than it is as an historical novel, but not bad, for all that. ( )

If you're interested in Wagner's operas -- and especially if you're troubled by their association with Nazism and anti-semitism -- this is a fascinating book. I won't claim any expertise concerning the historical realities behind the story, but I will say that as a fiction this book is absorbing and hard to put down. The central character (the narrator) is sympathetic, despite his Nazi allegiances, and in reflecting on his past, on the Wagner family, and on the operas themselves, he offers a great deal of insight. ( )

A rather disjointed but moving story of the Wagner family. It was hard to understand the background without constant reference to both a dictionary and an encyclopedia.

I thought that this book was an outstanding historical novel. It lead me to watch several of the Wagner operas beginning with Lohengrin. This book was worth every effort to understand and appreciate the time between the World Wars. Excellent writing! ( )

Absolutely horrible. Impossible to get through. I got through 50 pages and gave up. I really had no clue what Wilson was trying to do with this book but he fails miserably. ( )

I found this “story of the extraordinary friendship between Winifred Wagner and Adolf Hitler” both frustrating and in the end not too bad. Part of my frustration, I know, stems from the fact that I know just about zippo about opera of all types and this book revolves, more than anything around the operas of Richard Wagner. (In fact, there were times when it seemed to be about Wagner, his work and family more than it was about Hitler and Winnie.) Finally, in order to finish the book I had to just accept that there was a good deal of the story that I was not going to ‘get’ and that made it much easier to finish .

Supposedly the book is written by a man whose name is never revealed to be more than N – a particularly annoying choice on Wilson’s part. He is also very cutsey about Hitler, calling him either Wolf (the Wagner family’s pet name for him) or H. I think there is a point where N tells the reader that he is doing this as it is the custom to do so, but I found it irritating

Anyway, N has written this book for his adopted daughter who he believes is the natural child of Winnie Wagner (Richard’s daughter-in-law) and Hitler. N and his wife, Helga, adopted her at the behest of Winnie, rescuing her from the orphanage where Winnie sent her to live (rather a rotten thing for her to do as she had a horrible childhood in an English orphanage). Senta, the daughter has escaped from East Germany and in the waning days of N’s life he feels the need to explain everything to her via the medium of this book – how things were in Germany before the war, Hitler’s involvement with the Wagners, his love for them and for Wagner’s operas, how no one thought turning the country over to the National Socialists would lead to the horrific things that happened and how Winnie used her ‘friendship’ with Hitler to help various people. It is, in the end, more memoir-esque in tone – N’s story about his life among the Wagners in Bayreuth, working for the Festival Theatre and his marriage to Helga, the Communist horn-player, whom he eventually marries and the long slow slide into WWII (which gets pretty short shrift in this book).

I don’t know enough about the various Nazis Wilson writes about, but I was able to discover that in one instance he completely made up stuff; Hitler executes Ernst Rohm after the Night of the Long Knives and that did not happen. It seems quite possible that more of Wilson’s history here has been deliberately messed with, but I do not know enough about the era to pinpoint other instances.

I do know that as for N, the man is a wishy-washy weakling and I cannot like him. His father and brother, ministers both, who oppose what is happening to Germany as best they can, come across in a much better light.

Toward the end, I came to like this book a little better than I liked it at the beginning. I give it a qualified recommendation. ( )