A review of ‘THE CASTLE IN THE FOREST’ by Norman Mailer, 2007

By Edward St.Boniface

The actions of the Devil in human affairs are a standard engine in horror literature, fiction and cinema. Whether the evil of the Evil One and his minions is outrageous melodrama, surreal comedy or grim mechanical conspiracy, it is an accepted given that the forces of darkness are there, conscious and sentient and intent on dragging humanity down into the abyss; the soul is the demon’s greedily-prized prana.

We’re used to a fairly simple formula – evil is tireless and will ensnare the unwary and innocent by any means; usually illusion and magic and promises of Earthly reward for serving He Who Goes By Many Names; with the inevitable reward of joining the Big Barbecue Down Below. Most authors touch on these themes in some way across their writings but actual narrations by supernatural entities, even in C.S. Lewis’ ‘The Screwtape Letters’ are rare in literary fiction. Enough evil gets done in the contemporary world not to need the agents of Satanic forces to motivate them.

Norman Mailer, who died in 2007, is one of those authors for whom the spirit world was often at the centre of his characters and the stories they lived through. In ‘Ancient Evenings’ and ‘Harlot’s Ghost’ the unseen universe and its half-coherent ghosts and echoes of the past impact directly on the present and even guide its events. In his final published novel ‘The Castle In The Forest’, a fictional account of the formative years in Austria of the young Adolf Hitler, Mailer takes us relentlessly, convincingly and brilliantly into the terrifying apotheosis of this ‘speak of the devil’ theme that runs through so much of his work.

The occult influences on Adolf Hitler and which were central to the Nazi Party itself (the reversed and quarter-turned swastika is an actual demoniac symbolism similar to an inverted cross) are documented historical fact and are examined most chillingly in ‘The Spear of Destiny’ by Trevor Ravenscroft, but although the early adulthood and career of Hitler are exhaustively covered in biography and historical analysis, his childhood and its formative influences are little examined and this is the territory Mailer takes us into.

It begins with the sardonically-toned account by a young SS officer of attending a series of seminars on Germanic blood purity and racial heredity given by Heinrich Himmler. The anonymous officer is less than impressed with ‘Heinie’ and his invocations of Teutonic racial supremacy compared to his dull and dyspeptic appearance. These are lectures leading up to how to best implement the almost unimaginably harsh conquest-and-colonization policies of the Third Reich and inevitable Final Solution for the Jews that were at the core of its satanic agenda.

Literally satanic; since we gradually learn the officer is in fact an ambitious but low-ranking devil, whose name we never learn. It is engaged on a continuing, highly complicated commission from its master to warp and deprave its assigned section of human history using the most dreadful instrument of persecution and destruction the world has ever seen, Adolf Hitler himself. By the time we meet this evil spirit it has completed its work propelling Hitler onto course and is simply observing events unroll, reflecting on its hard efforts to bring about the catastrophes destroying millions in central Europe and Russia.

In a series of leisurely flashbacks Mailer takes us back into the long-vanished world of the Austria-Hungarian empire; a monarchy with its roots going back a thousand years to the days of Charlemagne and a society with a rigid class structure remaining almost as feudal as the middle ages. We meet Adolf’s future father, an ambitious and handsome but low-born rural peasant boy who seeks his fortune in Vienna not long after Franz Josef, the last Hapsburg emperor, comes into his vast imperial inheritance.

The young man sets up as an apprentice bootmaker for the aristocratic staff officers who crowd the imperial capital and carouse with their mistresses through the parks and salons of one of the greatest cities of the era; centre of the arts and culture and wealth of an empire of nearly a hundred million citizens. He longs to be one of the dashing officers but his humble birth makes the army a closed career for him. Despite this and virtual illiteracy he is good looking, quick and smart and prospers; womanizing his way through a long series of housemaids and servants of his many customers. Eventually he finds a way to get into the imperial civil service as a customs clerk and as the decades go by his incorruptible devotion to duty lets him rise high.

Herr Hitler is a philanderer though from his earliest years and a series of failed marriages and scandals leads him eventually to an incestuous union with a close cousin after divorcing an earlier wife who infatuated him in his younger days. The complex legalities and networks of relationships and corruption he must find his way through eventually lead to the late birth of Adolf Hitler, the product of this incestuous marriage and prized by the demon; for children born literally in sin are the best material for their plans.

Domestic tyranny gradually brutalizes the young Adolf and destroys the family as the father grows older, his career stalls and he tries several unsuccessful business ventures (including bee-keeping), finally ruined by his eldest son in revenge for a beating when the son runs away and cleverly waits for everyone to be gone searching for him before returning to burn the hives. These hives prove to be a key part of the formation of Adolf’s character, introducing him to a world of savage ruthlessness and cruelty justified by biological necessity, even as he observes the poisonous relationships of his family deteriorating his world and alienating any sense of compassion in him. Indeed, increasingly under the influence of the demon (who can only appear in dreams to him and other ‘clients’ like a local old paedophile beekeeper the elder Hitler is forced to work with and who corrupts his eldest son) Adolph regularly attempts to murder his weaker siblings and subtly torments his father with his many failures.

Corruption and its long, intricately-wrought labyrinthine webs of detail are the heart of ‘TCITF’. The young life of Adolf Hitler was typical; a caste-ridden patriarchal society full of hypocrisy, bigotry, personal and political repressions and vast social tensions that created an explosive potential for frustrated ambitions like his own. Mailer shows us that this society in itself had the seeds of the chaos which would help Hitler to rise; not merely the great issues of politics or social prejudice distorting it but the simple and less visible disintegration of empathy between generations and the closest filial ties into blank and numbing isolation.

That grim loneliness is mirrored by the demon as it tells its story – Hitler is not its only assignment and it is diverted for a couple of years to the court of Nicholas the Second of Russia (shot by the Bolsheviks in 1917 with most of his family) to pervert the young well-meaning Czar’s public reputation and lay the foundations for another future evil regime. After helping engineer a huge public disaster of accidental death during a week-long celebration of his marriage, the devil confides it is not really happy in its work, despite its success.

Here is the true impact of the novel: the sheer banality of evil, its ploys and plots and agents. The devil is just a mechanism of The Devil’s will; it is told only so much of The Big Plan as it needs to know and carries on pretty much like a junior partner in a big law firm or a short contract worker in a corporate media organization. It does all the work but gets little joy out of it; and the reward is little more than ironic approval and the maybe-promise of promotion with betrayal and termination and quick consignment to the lower depths uncomfortably close at hand.

Much as in our own world The Big Boss pulls all the strings and keeps the connections carefully hidden from the toiling minions and functionaries; so ensuring he stays on top of the vasty pile of remorseless ambition he provokes and epitomizes. The minor aspiring devil is left with only a sense of the void from which it originally came that threatens to engulf it into Hellish exile again; it does not even have much of the gift of memory to relate its devotion to the work with achievements further back in the past. In a final and supreme irony the Devil even keeps an employee’s service record and human history to himself lest his own servants get too wise about his methods.

That metaphor is the central theme of the book and makes it especially poignant. Mailer made his name with ‘The Naked and The Dead’, a war novel set in the Pacific theatre of WWII exploring the inner worlds of the soldiers facing death far from home; their isolation from both the task and each other. Only by learning to think in each other’s heads and feel each other’s pain do they learn the lessons that will help them survive the madness around them and one day return to normal lives with the harsh lessons of war guiding them. In ‘TCITF’ that inherent mutual empathy necessary for human survival and continuity is progressively broken and destroyed by simple small actions and betrayals; Adolf Hitler turns into the monster he will become by slow degrees of family neglect, indifferent abuse and stunted emotional growth. But around him that experience is commonplace. In the end the devil and The Devil can only lie to us; we choose whether to believe and act on it and resist or make the kind of world they would have us inhabit.

We have to choose to live like human beings and not give into a sense of futility or descend into cynicism and fatalism with no faith in those around us or in our own future. Through the voice of a devil picking its embittered way through a pitiless spiritual wilderness, Norman Mailer has given us this old truth in a new form and crafted with diabolical insight a remarkable, frightful and fitting end to an incredible literary career.