Unless I have drastically misunderstood his latest novel, I’m forced to conclude that, in his ninth decade, Norman Mailer has completely dropped his conkers. The Castle in the Forest is a preposterous book; a bafflingly preposterous book. It is, at least ostensibly, trying to tell us something about Adolf Hitler. But what on earth is it trying to tell us about him?

As it opens, its narrator introduces himself as ‘DT’, short for Dieter – a former member of an elite SS Intelligence group under the supervision of Heinrich Himmler. Himmler, Dieter tells us, is obsessed by incest. Himmler thinks that, as well as magnifying and exacerbating congenital defects in the products

Literary Review

Feb 2007

Categories

Sam Leith

Talking It Over Again

Another Shandy?

Back to the Future

The Spy Who Came Out of the Chippy

Diary: To Be or To Not Be

Reach for the Stars

Compound Interests

On the Road to Nowhere

The Agoraphobe Within

Kidnapped for the Cows

You Got Me on My Knees, Leela

Waking Up Is Hard To Do

What The Doctor Did

Living In A Box

Stories of a Century

Puritans Vs Papists

Family Matters

The Adman Cometh

Desperately Seeking Puttenham

The Donkey & the Howler-Monkey

Walk On The Wild Side

Acting Up

Oceans Apart

Unreal Cities

A Mesopotamian Palimpsest