The book: The Castle in the Forest by Norman Mailer.
Opening line: You may call me D. T.
Closing line: There may be no answer to this, but good questions still vibrate with honor within.
We suppose the Moby-Dick-esque opening informs the reader that we are in the hands of a first-person, perhaps unreliable, narrator. We are told that it is short for "Dieter," a former SS man who served directly under Himmler. Perhaps it also stands for "Der Teufel," as we discover not too far into this novel that our narrator is, in fact, a demon--and not just any demon, but the demon chiefly responsible for overseeing the development of young Adolf Hitler. The closing line seems nothing so much as an admission that, after slogging through some 450 pages, we are ultimately no closer to understanding what made a creepy, intellectually lacking little boy into the 20th-century embodiment of evil.
What's most disappointing about this novel is how it makes us feel nothing but contempt for its principal figure. Now, you may say, "Well, of course you feel contempt: It's HITLER!" But that's the point. We don't need to read a novel to find Hitler creepy and distasteful. If an author of Norman Mailer's stature is going to tackle the character of Der Fuhrer, we would expect it to offer some new (if imagined) insights into what makes him tick. The Castle in the Forest presents Adolf as a frankly charmless little boy, picked on by his older brother and put down by his father--but this reader, at least, feels no sympathy, perhaps because we constantly have in our minds what this boy will turn out to be--and we are shown nothing in his upbringing that could even begin to justify his later depravities. Maybe nothing COULD explain the depravities, but then, again, why write the book? At the risk of sounding prudish, we also found Mailer's preoccupations with excretory functions and incest (the latter being a major theme in the Hitler family tree) ultimately tedious.
The novel itself takes us only up to young Adolf''s teenage years, and we can only assume that Mailer had intended for this to be the first part of a multi-volume work. At least we hope that's what he intended because, if not, this is a fairly pointless book, a sad final act for a major American author.
As long as people are attracted to the abstract...the obscure and the darkest side of humanity there will be a need to attempt to make sense of it by writing about and seeking a forum to observe it from afar. There are also those who would live vacariously through such events in secluded praise and jealousy of the depravity of demons while most of us recoil in disgust and disbelief. It is indeed, human nature to fascinate the bizzare and macabre...it allows the law abiders to observe without participating. Perhaps one day the sequel will be found amongst Mailer's hidden belonging's?
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