Book Review: Mailer explores influences that shaped Hitler’s life

If a Christian believer accepts the biblical story of God’s angel Gabriel hovering over the conception of Jesus Christ, can that person also believe that Satan’s stand-in angel lurked at the beside at Adolf Hitler’s conception?

Such becomes the basis of Norman Mailer’s latest novel, “The Castle in the Forest” (Random House, $27.95), a long and rather ponderous investigation of the dual sides of good and evil.

Here, Mailer delves into the mind of one of history’s major psychopaths by tracing the influences that eventually triggered the insanity of the Holocaust.

Incest dominates the Mailer’s theories and insinuations as he uses a fictional demonic angel to appear and disappear on the scene to influence the infant, then the boy, then the teenager toward a life steeped in dark fears and hates based mostly upon an over-doting mother counterbalanced with a distant and domineering father willfully acting upon his monumental lecherous lusts.

The narrator in the novel, a mysterious SS man named Dieter, who reveals the core secrets of the novel, brags, “Indeed, I knew the moment when creation occurred.

“Even as the angel Gabriel served Jehovah on a momentous night in Nazareth, so too was I there with the Evil One at the conception on this July night nine months and ten days before Adolf Hitler would be born, on April 20, 1889.

“Yes, I was there, an officer of rank in the finest Intelligence service that has ever existed.”

For revealing too much of Satan’s workings, Dieter suffers demotion by the Maestro (Satan) and, oddly enough, that punishment involves a modern-day transfer to America where he will take up a new identity.

“I can say that I have had to vacate a body more than once,” he explains. “So I did move on. I traveled to America.”

Here, he will work to fulfill his Maestro’s words, “We will invest in Arabs and Israelis both!”

Perhaps the down side of the novel comes in the long passages about bee keeping and howthe young Adolf learns that a nation must construct itself similar to how bees build their society within a hive.

For example, after drones have served their purpose, they must be killed and thrown from the hive for the continued survival of the society.

The passages on bees serve as transparent metaphors for the later establishment of forced labor camps of the highly efficient Nazi state.

Thus, with his lessons about bees, another of Satan’s evil agents, the foul beekeeper, Der Alte, influences the boy beyond anything his father can teach him.

But wading through the lessons can leave a reader rather stupefied.

Then, a page or two later, Mailer shocks the reader alive with a thought so pure, so brilliant that the reader turns down page corners to return to the passages later.

Such a passage rings near the end of the book when Mailer writes, “(Statesmen) now possess the mightiest of all social engines of psychic numbification—patriotism.

“We (Satan and his minions) love fundamentalists. Their faith offers us every promise of developing into the final weapon of mass destruction.”

That Norman Mailer has demanded attention of the American reading public since “The Naked and the Dead” (1948), his first novel, no one can deny.

As a clear and undeniable candidate for a Nobel Prize one day, this American giant continuously has put his finger on the American societal whims and woes, never more so than in his Vietnam-era Pultizer Prize docu-novel “Armies of the Night” (1969).

Though Mailer just passed 84 years, his novel seems the first part of a trilogy about the youth, the twisted development and the assumption of power, then the destructive madness of the fully grown Adolf Hitler.

Mailer fans must hope that he lives to complete at least a second volume that continues to investigate the nature of evil and good in all people.

A.L. Shaff is a freelance writer for the Green Valley News.