Little, Brown, £17.99; 496pp

MY GRANDFATHER — a jeweller in Manhattan, and perhaps the last man in New York to wear spats — was fond of aphorisms. Once, when stopped on the street by a guy hawking fake Rolexes, he said: “Basic rule of life: everybody’s always sellin’ something”.

I sense that Norman Mailer would nod in agreement — not simply because his work has so often been rooted in the crazed mercantile dance that is the USA, but because, in the course of a literary career that began nearly 60 years ago, he hasn’t exactly been an Oblomov-style introvert when it comes to self-promotion.

This is a writer who titled a collection of essays Advertisements for Myself. Anyone even minimally familiar with the freewheeling antics of the 1960s will know that Mailer won many column inches by such curious activities as stabbing one of his many wives, and running for Mayor of New York (a campaign that had so many deranged moments that his running mate, the columnist Jimmy Breslin, once noted: “I’m running with Ezra Pound!”).

But whatever you think about his self-mythologising past, the fact is that the body of Mailer’s literary work — though wildly uneven — does impress. Any writer who has turned out an important war novel (The Naked and the Dead), a big piece of in-our-time reportage (The Armies of the Night), and one of the great works on crime and punishment (The Executioner’s Song) deserves a place in the pantheon of heavy-hitters.

Now 84, Mailer has hardly retreated into twilight introspection. His latest novel, The Castle in the Forest, shows his audacity in full flight. It is an attempt to grapple with the origins of evil by embracing that most conventional of literary genres, the family saga, and subverting it by centring his narration on the family that spawned one of the most reviled figures of the last century.

This is the story of “the Hitlers of Hafeld” as Mailer’s narrator quaintly calls them. It is a family history of petit-bourgeois dysfunction, with incest, a failed father, a mother with a dark secret, and — wait for it — a crazed beekeeper by the creepy name of Der Alte, who has more than a hand in twisting young Adolf’s world view.

Our guide to the mess that is the Family Hitler is a former SS officer. But, in what can best be described as the Vincent Price Moment, we discover a truth about the narrator: he works for a man known to his colleagues as “the Maestro”, but whom mere mortals call the Devil.

Our satantic narrator is no red-faced joker with a pitchfork. He comes across as the type of European smoothie who should be propping up the bar of the Cipriani in Venice — Bellini and small cigar in hand — as he expostulates, in a world-weary, ever-ironic voice, on that blurred frontier between Good and Evil.

Whether you buy into this depends, in part, on whether you will really accept the Devil’s adjutant as a narrator. There is a whiff of bargain-basement Freud about a novel that playfully posits the idea that a satanic force shaped Hitler’s psychotic world view.

Still, Mailer is no fool — and one should probably consider the metaphysical-struggle-between-good-and-evil essence of this novel in the context of the Manichean times in which we live. Mailer has always been a first-rate Zeitgeist surfer, so it’s not surprising that he is exploring definitions of the demonic at a moment when demonisation is embraced as a political and theological tool by fundamentalists on both sides of the Christian-Islamic divide.

Like his narrator, Mailer is one crafty operator — especially when it comes to drawing you into the vortex of his narrative. Yes, he can pontificate and drift into the portentous. But what is most intriguing is the novel’s extreme readability and the fact that Mailer has (I sense) deliberately set out to write a diabolical entertainment that forces the reader to dwell in the day-to-day mess that created a true monster.

Is he hinting that, as we are all byproducts of day-to-day mess, we are all capable of the most outlandish evil imaginable? Or is he trying to remind us that the diabolical is rooted in the banal? Mailer is certainly not going to provide us with any straightforward resolutions. But this strange, sometimes foolish, sometimes brilliant, always compelling novel does what any bracing fiction should: it poses a lot of tough questions and dares you to answer them.

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Extract

THE CASTLE IN THE FOREST by Norman Mailer

Spirits like myself can attend events where they are not present. I was in another place, therefore, on the night Adolf was conceived. Yet I was able to ingest the exact experience by calling upon the devil (of lower rank) who had been in Alois’s bed . . . I must say that that is always an option for us — we are able to share a carnal act after the fact. On the other hand, a minor devil can, on the most crucial occasions, implore the Evil One to be present with him during the climax. (The Maestro encourages us to speak of him as the Evil One when he does choose to enter sexual acts, and on that occasion, he was certainly there.)

Afterward, once I began my assignment to young Adolf Hitler, the moment of impregnation was repeated for me by the devil who had been present. It came into my senses with a completeness of odour and physical impact that can be termed absolute. Thereby, it happened to me. Among us, to be given an exact recollection is equal to being present. So I also knew from the . . . intensity of the occasion that the Maestro had actually joined with the attendant devil for one instant (even as Jehovah offered His immanence to Gabriel during another exceptional event).

While I would not be attached exclusively to Adolf Hitler for some years, he was always in my Overview. So I am ready to write about his early life with a confidence no conventional biographer could begin to feel.

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