It may be the recent movie adaptation, called “The Exception,” that now brings Alan Judd’s novel, which originally appeared in Britain in 2003, to American readers. But those who avail themselves of “The Kaiser’s Last Kiss” will find this a welcome accident as they relish its crisp, adroit and subtle tale of great personal power, shrunken by downfall to the scope of a Dutch manor house.

It is at Huis Doorn, a small estate to the east of Utrecht, that we encounter this caged majesty. The former emperor of Germany and king of Prussia, Wilhelm II, Kaiser Bill of World War I legend, has, as the novel begins, lived an orderly life at Doorn for 20 years, having fled to the Netherlands after his abdication in 1918. He has long since survived attempts by the French to have him extradited, tried and executed. His life is quiet. The other members of the Doorn household include his second wife, Princess Hermine, a woman of lively temperament almost 30 years younger than her husband, and his secretary, von Islemann, an aristocrat and, like his master, something of a snob. As ambiguous as the kaiser’s reaction is to the way things have gone in Germany since Hitler’s ascent, von Islemann’s is even more so.

Judd has a good eye for the hypnotic and time-consuming rituals of rural exile. But the arrival of Hitler’s army in the Netherlands in 1940 puts an unpredictable pressure on the tenor of this placid life. “So the German Army was reunited with its kaiser,” the old man reflects, though the emperor seems to consider the Nazi state a fairly plebeian regime. Content until now with the prospect of dying in Doorn, at the same time he can’t help being teased by the idea, as his wife puts it, of “a Hohenzollern restoration, the kaiser’s triumphant return to Germany as its king once more. It was quite obvious that Germany needed royal leadership to counterbalance this regime of corporals and tobacconists.”

Waiting for that unlikely prospect to be broached by the Nazi authorities, the kaiser and the local members of the new regime, represented by the proletarian officer of the guard at Doorn, SS Untersturmführer Krebbs, barely know what to do with one another. Throughout the novel there is an interesting interplay between the kaiser’s reluctance to be too approving of the Nazis and his wife’s hope that Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, will invite Wilhelm “to return and take up the throne again.”

Hermine is thus pleased that the kaiser acknowledges the military successes of 1940, including the capture of Paris, which his forces had been unable to achieve. He thinks the Wehrmacht was right to have invaded the Netherlands, as a step to the defeat of what he regularly calls “Juda-England.” Hitler, the kaiser judges, had “evidently learned the lessons of the High Command’s failure last time.”

Yet the master of Huis Doorn is also a passionate Anglophile who thinks England’s sense of humor and willful geniality are to blame for the nation’s toleration of the Jews in their midst. He has affection for his deceased cousin, George V, and is proud that Queen Victoria “softly passed away in his arms.” He was the one “who put their queen into her coffin, which I had to have made,” he boasts. “I who had to reharness the horses when they refused to move the bier, I who was in charge at Osborne and got everything moving after she died.” But then, “Thanks to the English, I am stuck here having to be nice to this bunch of shirted gangsters who will rule in my country.” “They are not all bad, the English. But England just doesn’t want to belong to Europe.”

To instruct the visiting Germans, including Himmler, the emperor announces, “I shall now read you some good examples of the humor of the English.” He then makes his way through segments of P.G. Wodehouse’s tales of the Empress of Blandings, Lord Emsworth’s beloved sow, bewildering his guests. This comical recital occurs as part of an excellent set piece of a dinner held at Huis Doorn, where Judd lets the eccentricity of the emperor and the bribing of Himmler by Princess Hermine run along at a conversational pace, in the midst of which the most monstrous propositions are quietly uttered, allowed to take up room for themselves precisely because all that preceded them was so banal. In the polite tides of life at Huis Doorn, it is possible for evil to be uttered so casually that it almost escapes notice. “Our experiments prove,” the Reichsführer proclaims at dinner, “that a 5-cc dose of concentrated phenol injected directly into the heart guarantees a very rapid release. Our best operator is a man I have met. He is named Oswald Kaduk. The children love him.”

Despite the machinations of all-about-him, despite the siren songs of Churchill (who wants him to go to London and represent Germany in exile) and the Nazis (who want his approval and acquiescence), the emperor sails on convincingly in all his ambiguity in this novel of manners and nuances. Judd is able to let later history place its weight very satisfyingly on his story, so that the dialogue of the kaiser’s household in this early period of the war carries the innocence of a time in which the fullness of events and their horror has not been revealed.

The kaiser and Hermine argue about her attempts to influence the Nazis in his favor in what is perhaps the most distressing scene, because Judd has imbued us with a fondness for the old man. There is an almost obligatory spy denouement and a romance between Krebbs and a Jewish maid, but Judd doesn’t push these aspects of the plot in any way that impinges on his characters, among whom there are sufficient ambitions and conflicts to carry his masterly short novel to a satisfying end. History is a tease and a provocation to good storytelling and mythmaking, and “The Kaiser’s Last Kiss,” with both its historicities and its inventions, celebrates that fact.