Rumours and published reviews to one side, the new novel by Norman Mailer, called The Castle in the Forest, is not the ‘biography’ of Adolf Hitler or even the story of his youth so much as it is the life of his father Alois Schicklgruber, or Hiedler, finally Hitler. He turns out to be an unusually interesting man, or perhaps a merely ordinary man who, because he is rendered by Mailer’s hand, becomes far more: dangerous, daunting, dutiful (an ever ascendant and honest customs official), sexually rampant and obsessed with bees and bee-keeping. Possibly a product of incest, he continues the family tradition. As the story of a petit-bourgeois, sometime rural, sometime urban household in the Austrian empire at the turn of the last century, this gleeful novel is probably unmatched; as an explanation of the mystery of Adolf Hitler, creature of flesh and blood and born of woman, it is necessarily circumscribed.

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