What impression does Norman Mailer's first novel in more than a decade leave? It is probably irony. Promoted as an exploration of the struggle between good and evil, The Castle in the Forest comes off making Adolf Hitler, a poster child of evil, little more than relatively commonplace. And while Mailer writes as well as ever, his talents largely serve to make staying with a plodding story less trying.
Mailer's novel purports to use Hitler's life from birth to approximately age 16 as a vehicle to explore the nature of evil. Yet most of the book focuses on Hitler's father, Alois, including his uncertain parentage and the extent to which that rendered Adolf "a First-Degree Incestuary." Throw in extensive discussion of beekeeping, a lengthy diversion about the coronation of Tsar Nicholas and a seeming fascination with excrement and sex and you begin to wonder where the battle between good and evil went.
The story is told by D.T., a middle-ranking demon among Satan's minions. He is called D.T. because, when we first meet him, he inhabits the body of an SS intelligence officer named Dieter. Satan, usually called "the Maestro" or occasionally "the Evil One," assigned the as yet unborn Adolf as D.T.'s client, a "project" D.T. is to monitor. Yet the ultimate message seems to be that those imbued with evil of Hitlerian proportions are born with it and what occurs in their formative years merely fine tunes and reinforces the necessary traits.
Referred to as "Adi," the nickname his mother gave him, Adolf's childhood comes off as relatively normal, albeit with somewhat Freudian overtones. Even when events occur that seemingly give the reader clues to Adi's actions as an adult, Mailer immediately discounts them. For example, at one point Alois, who takes up beekeeping in his retirement, destroys one of his bee colonies for fear it is diseased and the disease those bees carry will spread to his other bee colony. He gasses the colony, telling Adi, "In nature, there is no mercy for the weak." That night, D.T. uses the occasion to prepare a "dream-etching" that leads Adi to count and lay out thousands of dead bees in his dreams. Despite the potential relevance we might see to the Holocaust, D.T. writes, "I would warn the reader not to make too much of the gassing or the body count." Instead, this is merely a "dot" upon Adi's pscyhe. Similarly, when D.T. describes a large swastika cut into an arched gate at the Benedictine monastery where Adi is a member of the children's choir, he immediately tells the reader not to make too much of it because the swastika "was subtly carved." Why, then, is it mentioned if it is immediately deemed irrelevant to Adi's life and development?
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