Funny peculiar and ha-ha

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.

Mailer’s real interest, as is widely known, is in evil, and in its practitioners who may be called devils (plural, apparently), led by one over-arching figure sometimes known as Lucifer, although here, simply as Maestro. (His eternal opponent, God, is called D. K. or Dummkopf.) The Castle in the Forest is narrated by one such minion, whose war years are spent in the guise of an SS officer named Dieter; but almost all the action takes place before 1905, when Adolf barely gets through secondary school. Adolf may be Dieter’s client, but callow youth is boring next to Alois’s seasoned manhood, and Dieter is easily distracted. The book is his biography too. His narrative project, he reveals, is unauthorised; he is a whistle-blower yet still on the job, ‘with modest duties in America’ at a time the never-seen Maestro ‘is heavily engaged’.