Ezra Pound in his poem sequence "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley" claimed that "The age demanded an image / Of its accelerated grimace, / Something for the modern stage." With benefit of a hindsight denied to Pound, Timothy Findley in Famous Last Words takes up the challenge in a "prose cinema" of dazzling brilliance. Like his earlier novel The Wars, the story revolves around a man trapped in wartime events. Transforming Pound's poetic persona Hugh Mauberley into a plausible fictional character, Findley probes the meaning of history with such insight and skill that Famous Last Words becomes a leap forward in his work….

Through his uncanny descriptive powers, Findley moves outward from a base of facts to convey an atmosphere in which the "porcelain revery" of Pound's Mauberley poems is finally shattered as the civilized world cracks apart. (p. 53)

In a novel of wider scope than anything he has yet attempted, Findley uses Mauberley to demonstrate that all it takes for evil to triumph is that men of conscience stand silent. Mauberley, like all men, must resist the evil he sees and feels not only around him but inside him….

Although Famous Last Words is based on well-documented events gleaned from a range of sources—Frances Donaldson's Edward VIII, Hugh Kenner's The Pound Era, and James Pope-Hennessey's Queen Mary, among others—fact ultimately rallies to the side of fiction. What Findley knows defers always to what he has sensed. By according his own imagination the highest authority, he recreates history in terms that bring it uncomfortably close to us. But he keeps us always slightly off-balance, leaving us just uncertain enough to question our own hold on reality. Those electric moments of history, like blurred camera frames suddenly springing into focus, bring us face to face with our own souls. The result is a novel of the first magnitude: Sophoclean in power, certain in craft, and hauntingly beautiful. (p. 54)