This novel should carry a warning: its appeal will be greatest for fans either of Wagner and European history, or of politics and philosophy. At the least, you are going to have to be very keen to learn more about these subjects. Reading Winnie and Wolf is like ingesting a university syllabus in days, rather than years. Nobody could accuse AN Wilson of being lowbrow.

Set in post-Versailles Germany, this is nominally the story of a love affair between Winnie, Richard Wagner’s Welsh-born daughter-in-law, and Adolf Hitler (known fondly to the family as “Wolf”). The novel is narrated by Herr N, Winnie’s faithful assistant, as a confessional letter to his adopted daughter, the illegitimate child of the Hitler-Wagner union. The book’s main characters however, are not these individuals but far more gargantuan beasts: the Weimar republic, western philosophy, Wagner’s oeuvre.

On its smallest scale, the sense of a nation in flux works well. Wilson conveys the mood of the time through the eyes of the rather wishy-washy Herr N with great conviction, “the optimists who supported the National Socialists were not all sinister, Jew-hating decadents in love with death. We thought this band of admittedly rough-and-ready types, forged into a great national movement, would bring about good things, not bad, life not death”.

However, an uncontrollable intellect powers the narrative, and (at the expense of smaller human dramas) rampages through historical, political and biographical genres, firing out a barrage of names, dates, details, facts, exposition, supposition and criticism.

There are many intense detours into philosophy: “The whole of The Birth of Tragedy was posited on the idea that truly creative art is Dionysian – Greek – and that its enemy is Apollonian.” There are pages of discourse on Wagner: “Until he wrote the Dutchman, Wagner was still an apprentice, learning from the Italian bel canto composers and from Weber”, “Tristan und Isolde appears to have been inspired by Wagner’s unsatisified yearning for Mathilde Wesendonck. Tannhäuser is about the shocking disparities between our erotic selves and ‘the rest of life’. ” Then there are frequent excursions through 20th-century history: “the world-wide depression that year culminated in the Wall Street Crash . . . The next year there was yet another general election. The Nazis had a mere handful of seats in the Reichstag . . . On October 13, 1930, 107 Nazi deputies took their seats in the Reichstag”. It is all frankly overwhelming if not bamboozling; even the jokes, at times, need footnotes.

Those who make it to the end of the novel will have amassed a stack of information and wrestled with some serious abstract thought. Whether they will feel any more enlightened about the human condition is perhaps debatable.

WINNIE AND WOLF by AN Wilson
Hutchinson 17.99 pp362
Buy the book here at the offer price of £16.19 (inc p&p)

Times Recommends

• Superfreakonomics by Steven D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner
• The Times picks the 50 best paperbacks of 2009
• Vincent van Gogh’s letters show the soul of the artist