Fiction:It's a risky thing for a novelist to make Hitler a character. To have to live with him and to trust there will be readers willing to live with him too . . . it's like having to sup with the devil, writes Anne Haverty.
Cleverly - and unsurprisingly since this is the 20th of his clever novels - AN Wilson lightens the perspective by placing most of the action in the small Bavarian town of Bayreuth of the 1930s, among the arty, opera-mad Wagner family.
His novel - now longlisted for the Man Booker Prize - is posited on the love affair between Hitler ((Wolf) and Winifred (Winnie), the English daughter-in-law of Richard Wagner, the great composer. That Winifred Wagner and Adolf Hitler had a deep, mutually admiring friendship is true, but their affair seems to be a novelistic device. That they had a daughter together, another device here, is certainly imagined.
Winnie and Wolf is written in the form of a long and discursive letter to that putative daughter, now an unremarkable, church-going, middle-aged woman who lives, oblivious of her parentage, in Seattle. N, the man writing the letter - the novel's narrator - is her adoptive father. Living out his latter days behind the Iron Curtain, N wants her to know who she really is. More especially he wants to explain; and to a degree, excuse. There is a lot, he knows, to explain and excuse.
As a young man, a philosophy graduate and Wagner enthusiast, N enters Wahnfried, the Wagner household, as a secretary, and quickly becomes the family dogsbody. Just as quickly he falls in love with Winnie, a statuesque Germanophile and wife of Siegfried - Fidi - Wagner. When the opera fan and rising politician Adolf Hitler shows up in Bayreuth in his lederhosen as the guest of Frau Bechstein - the piano Bechsteins - he and Winnie have an instant rapport. It is "du" rather than "sie" at once and "Winnie" and "Wolf". (One of the many interesting things we learn is that Adolf means Noble Wolf, which clearly impressed Hitler himself.)
N's devotion to Winnie ensures that he remains, despite his misgivings, a member of the family through the thick and thin of its tolerance for Nazism. It also makes him intensely curious about her new love. He sups with him often.
He notes the disagreeable things about him - his sweatiness, his stuffing himself with cream cakes, his fastidiousness, his phenomenal flatulence - this last leading him to formulate a novel and laughably awful explanation for Hitler's reluctance to engage in normal sexual relations. He sees, too, Hitler's empathy with children and his affability in the domestic setting of Wahnfried. He is drawn by the mesmeric effect of his "night-blue" eyes and the hypnotic power of his oratory. He detests his squalid entourage and the hatred of Jews he preaches. But grateful for the rejuvenated Germany that Hitler succeeds in creating once he becomes chancellor, he turns aside from his principles.
N is really the voice of those millions of mild and well-meaning Germans who, as far as we, with the benefit of hindsight, can see, incomprehensibly fell for Hitler's charms. Now with the same hindsight, N ruminates at length on the subject. He paints a picture of the desperation and chaos of the early 1930s when unemployment was rife, a loaf of bread, if you could get it, cost billions of marks, and decent politicians could offer no solution. Only Hitler, with his histrionic conviction, promised hope. Even N's mother, an anti-Nazi campaigner, is joyous at the re-occupation of the Rhineland, and his Communist wife is happy to be drinking real chocolate at last.
N's apologia however is not for Hitler, nor for his own fitful support for him, but for Wagner. If there's a hero here, it's Wagner's opus. N passionately defends the operas, seeking to rescue them from the charge of Teutonic propaganda with which they were tainted after the Nazi hijack. Their illimitable and complex art, he argues, was falsified and corralled by these "fundamentalists" for their own use.
This is a hugely impressive meat-and-potatoes novel, an exegesis on a baffling and terrible time and everything that formed it, dressed, you could say, in novel's clothing. It pleases because it's challenging and thoughtful. Do we learn much more about Hitler? Disconcertingly, since we'd prefer to see him as other and demonic, the fact that he was human is inescapable. His greatest talent was perhaps his unique view of reality, his sense of himself as a Wagnerian hero, like Parsifal. It brought him and his imagined world far, but also to ruin.
Anne Haverty's last novel, The Free And Easy, was recently published as a Vintage paperback
Winnie and Wolf : A Novel, By AN Wilson Hutchinson, 361pp. £17.99