[The protagonist of Pound's modernist poem "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley"] is the main character—initially, at least—in Timothy Findley's new novel, Famous Last Words. Immediately, one recognizes it as a brilliant idea that sparks a variety of possibilities in the reader's imagination. Findley has re-invented Mauberley for his own purposes, making him a younger man than Pound's, American, and a novelist. But any artist—according to Brecht, anyway—has the right to steal another man's work, provided he transforms it in the process. And it's in that transformation that the roots of our initial excitement grow. Pound's Mauberley was a symptom of a world that had apparently been wiped out by the First World War. Findley revives him and uses him to examine the way in which that old world of class and style had not been eliminated after all, but went on clinging to its power with increasing avidity for another 20 years or more. (Even now, has its grip been broken?) Naturally enough, Findley's Mauberley, like Pound, is drawn to fascism, but a fascism attenuated and sweetened by the desire to reconcile itself to the pretences and subtleties of an older aristocratic tradition. The Duke of Windsor for Führer?!

The concept is a fine one. It affords Findley the freedom to move easily between the old hypocrisies and the new barbarism that was replacing them in the 1930s. In the process there's a lovely, wicked irony: that Pound's alter ego, whom he had used to liberate himself from the past, should now be used to expose the political falsehoods that he in his own due course was seduced by.

One's appreciation of Findley's cleverness may be so great that one suppresses the inevitable question that has to be put to it—at least, until much later in the novel. What is the necessary relationship of Findley to Mauberley? In Pound's case, the relationship was clear. Mauberley was the mask Pound might have become, and by writing about him, by making him a character in a poem that Mauberley could never have constructed in its entirety, Pound was able to make the separation complete. But why does Findley need this Mauberley he creates? Who is Mauberley to him? Or to us? It's only as the novel progresses, and as our dissatisfaction with it grows, that these suspended questions force their way back into our consciousness…. (p. 9)

At the start of the novel … there is [a] perfectly conceived metaphor for the role of the artist in a modern social context. It's a metaphor that is at one and the same time melodramatic and satirical, and it gives Findley a remarkable freedom to manoeuvre among the various trajectories of his narrative. Yet from that point on he seems to lose his grip on the intertwined themes that he has shown to be so potentially interesting. Or to be able to grip only one thread at a time while the others dangle loose.

I write those words hesitantly. This is an ambitious novel and Findley is a serious writer. The probability is that his readers will misunderstand what he is doing. A novel that starts from the intricate social and psychological puzzle of "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley" will be likely to mislead us, may do so even with glee. We cannot expect its fragments to build themselves brick by brick into a load-bearing arch. The arch will be an illusion created by contradictory free-standing shapes, and when we shift our position slightly it will disappear.

Moreover, a novel such as Famous Last Words is not simply an intellectual experiment. It has bifurcating purposes, taking as it does a tale of intrigue and wartime espionage and disrupting it so as to open it up to the light of analysis. The adventure novel is a form that reconciles a middle-class audience to the suppressed horror of the world it rests on. Findley is clearly concerned to break that form in such a way that the violence he so passionately abhors will flood back into it.

All that is clear. But not, finally, in this novel. I hold it up to the light and try to see through it. I look into it from different angles. I leave it on its own and walk out along the edge of the lake, turning my back on it, hoping to catch to catch it off guard when I swing round and…. And still it doesn't work. A novel like this deserves the benefit of every doubt. Every doubt except the last. In the end the doubt envelops it all.

There are three main threads that Findley draws out of the superb symbolic knot he has tied for us at the beginning. One, recounted in the first person, is the strand of Mauberley's personal reminiscence as he recalls the bewildered way in which he shuffled headlong into the elegant and vicious half-world of right-wing politics. Mauberley himself is hollow, and there is little real interest either in his political conversion or in his belated consciousness of what it entailed. As the novel progresses, his plight loses much of our attention. That in itself is not necessarily a fault. There are many novels, after all, that have nonentities at their centres, and Pound's Mauberley was just such a devitalized bore. But Pound's Mauberley implied by indirection another kind of dynamics altogether. Findley's does not.

The second thread is the tale of botched high politics that Mauberley recounts: the plot to capture Wallis Simpson and her waxwork husband, the Duke of Windsor, and to transform them into the saviours of fascist Europe. The telling itself is suspect in that one never senses the presence of Mauberley the narrator behind it. But that would only be a significant fault in a realist novel, which this is not. The story, in some of its parts, is brilliantly handled with fine set-pieces of absurdity and flaring horror. The relationship between the ex-king and his despotic mother, Queen Mary, seems at times to be the one real emotional experience in the whole book. Yet one wonders constantly why it needs Mauberley to tell it at all.

The final narrative thread is the present description of the soldiers who occupy the hotel and of their conflicts and dreams about what they find there. In many ways, this is the most achieved aspect of the novel. It is surrealistic and satirical simultaneously, and one finds onself wishing there were more of it, since it might well provide the focus that could hold the novel's divergencies together. But Findley seems particularly constrained in these scenes, hardly ever giving them a free enough rein to establish a developed relationship with the rest of the plot.

So we are left with fragments, many of them very fine indeed, a few rather dull and pedestrian in their attempts at historical interpretation. But fragments, in sum, that don't mesh or even point significantly toward each other. There is neither a meaningful argument nor a convincingly imagined interdependence between them. The novel, in consequence, does not lead to any new insights either into the social and psychological forces that made fascism such a demanding necessity in the 1930s, or into the relationship of those forces to the pressures of our own world. Findley affords us some fascinating glimpses of the effects of political perversion; he leaves the causes hidden. (pp. 10-11)