A DISAGREEMENT HAS broken out among the serially quarrelsome Wagner clan as to who should take over the running of the Bayreuth Festival – just in time for the publication of A. N. Wilson’s 20th novel, Winnie and Wolf. The “Winnie” of the title is Winifred Wagner, née Williams, the Welsh-born wife of the composer’s epicene son, Siegfried, and grandmother of the three formidable Wagner women, Nike, Eva and Katharina, currently vying to take over the artistic direction at Bayreuth.

As for Wolf (or “Uncle Wolf”, as he is known to Winnie and Siegfried’s children), our first sight of him is in a delightful domestic setting, giving a dramatic rendition to the four little Wagners of the Grimm’s folk tale of the poor fisherman’s wife, whose husband one day nets a magical flounder with the power to grant wishes, but whose vaulting ambition eventually grows so outrageous that her entire edifice of magical grandeur collapses in ruins. The rasping voice, the compelling oratorical powers, the shiny serge suit . . . yes, dear Uncle Wolf is none other than Adolf Hitler.

The observer of the scene is another intimate of the Wagner menage. Herr N- (he follows what he calls “the polite German convention” of identifying name and place only by initials) is officially assistant to Siegfried Wagner, but in effect a general dogsbody and repository of confidences, drawn to the menial work by a passion for the works of Richard Wagner, about whom he hopes to write a book.

The conceit of Wilson’s novel is that it is a confessional letter by Herr N-, written to his adopted daughter, Senta. A preamble dated Easter 2007, by “Hermann Muller”, a pastor of the Lutheran Church in Seattle, notes that he received the typescript from one of his parishioners, an elderly woman who charged him not to read it until after her death. On translating the pages he came to share his late parishioner’s conviction that she was the natural daughter of Winifred Wagner and “Uncle Wolf” (although having stated his belief in a ringing first sentence, he ends his remarks with an equivocal final paragraph, suggesting that the memoir may be a work of fantasy, perhaps even confected by the aged parishioner).

From this sensational proposition there develops a subtle and captivating fiction.

The ambiguity of Herr N’s position within the Wagner household, together with his unrequited love for Winifred Wagner, allows him to view the rise to power of Uncle Wolf from the shifting perspective of the insider/outsider.

While able to construct, from his vantage-point among the favourites of Uncle Wolf, a lucid and beautiful explication of the web of connection between the works of Richard Wagner, the place of folklore in the German psyche, the death of Christianity and the rise of Nazism, with particular reference to the place of flatulence in the personal psychology of Hitler, and the complicated transactions of public power and private attachment, Herr N- pays a heavy price for his stance of mild and melancholy detachment. The great passion of his life remains out of reach; his marriage becomes a hell; his life, in postwar East Germany, wretched. He knows himself to be a man without conviction.

Perhaps narrative is the revenge of the weak, the ironical, the reflective and sceptical on the towering figures of history. Certainly no reader of the elegant fantasy that is Winnie and Wolf is likely to forget Herr N’s pungent analysis of the extraordinary bond between Hitler and Winifred Wagner as that of a man who couldn’t help farting in bed, and “a woman who could be relied upon to be neither disgusted nor amused when the explosion took place”.

Winne and Wolf by A. N. Wilson

Hutchinson, £17.99; 384pp

Buy the book here for the offer price of £16.19 (free p&p)

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