[In the favorable review below, Tonkin discusses Findley's focus on history, historical figures, and nostalgia in Famous Last Words, noting the book's contemporary relevance.]

In this century novelists have their own special Valhalla, a place of mirth and luxury to which many are called but few chosen. It would astonish me if Famous Last Words didn't at some stage receive this final accolade: 'soon to be a major motion picture.' What makes it so unmistakably a work of our time is the uncanny sensation that it has already been one.

Published in his native Canada in 1981, Timothy Findley's novel has had to wait for an English edition as a result of what the blurb coyly calls 'legal reasons'. In a multi-national cast that also features Lana Turner, Ezra Pound and Joachim von Ribbentrop, two of its principal figures are the late Duchess and Duke of Windsor. It hints, among other revelations, that Wallis Simpson and the former Edward VIII preferred to make love under the unsmiling gaze of a photograph of the ex-king's mother, Queen Mary.

Where does gossip end and history begin? Balzac and Tolstoy muddied these waters long before today's theorists of discontinuity started to splash about in them. Presenting the fate of Europe in the age of the dictators as an unlucky-bag of accident and conspiracy, Findley shoots a version of the Thirties and Forties lit by the twin lamps of glamour and chance.

He assumes a readership which no longer tells itself stories of destiny or revolution. Instead, we glimpse the face of Garbo or trade insults with Senor Hemingway, while in the background a little man with a Chaplin moustache makes trouble for the beautiful people. If we no longer believe such events had meaning or direction, only these foolish things can remind us of them. Findley plays on one of the few emotions that the late 20th century can claim to have patented: a heart-stopping nostalgia for a world we never knew.

Alone at the Grand Elysium Hotel, high in the Austrian Alps, in the winter of 1945, the expatriate American writer Hugh Selwyn Mauberley records the secret history of two decades, before the allied armies arrive to punish his flirtation with high-minded Fascism. (I expected him to take tea at some point with J. Alfred Prufrock, but they never meet.) Mauberley scrawls not in his notebooks but on the plaster of his empty suite: American graffiti, the writing on the wall. The inter-war Belshazzar's feast is over. He weighs the guests in the balances, and finds them wanting.

A fastidious pillar of the glitterati, Mauberley has idled away his years trailing redundant royalty around the Caribbean and the Med. As confidant of Wallis Simpson, he watched her take command of the weak-willed Prince of Wales and his shoal of parasites. Now he spills the beans about the global plot, codename Penelope, that sought to replace Hitler as the figurehead of anti-Communism with the spineless and malleable Edward Windsor … Compounded of derring-do, cultural name-dropping and bursts of bravura prose, Famous Last Words embroiders a fantasy of the past in the manner of Burgess's Earthly Powers and Doctorow's Ragtime. Such novels refer not so much to a pattern of actualities as to the clutter of cultural artefacts that gather round them.

So Mauberley's Windsors belong squarely in the William Hickey school of historiography: beings brought to life by the light of a thousand flashbulbs. Findley opens the door on a gilded mausoleum of celebrities. As his narrator reflects, 'This was the new mythology … Homer might have written it.' The neurasthenic author takes on the job of recording angel for the sins of a generation.

Both symptom and critique of the paranoid theory of history, the action of the novel steams along with the same kind of manic energy that drives all those books about how Josef Mengele killed John Paul I on the orders of Anthony Blunt and the Freemasons. Findley knows better; the final secret is that there is none. Truth 'was just another bit of gossip in amongst the litter of names and dirty jokes on the partitions of a comfort station'. He arranges the fabulous monsters of the entre-deux-guerres into a gallery of archetypes, seen hazily through the veils of fame. 'History is made in the electric moment, and its flowering is all in chance.' So writes his hero, as did Nietzsche long ago. Lavish in its disenchantments, Famous Last Words holds up a glass, not to the 1930, but to the suspicion and amnesia of the Age of Reagan.