ONE of the teachers at the Realschule in Linz was left with a bizarre memory ofanexpelledformerstudent called Adolf Hitler. "I remember," said Professor Theodore Gissinger, "that he used to hold conversations with the windblown trees."

This detail is worth singling out from the standard lives of Hitler by historians Bullock, Payne, Kershaw and others, because it illustrates how Norman Mailer has fictionalised the life of Hitler from his birth to the age of 16. Trees feature prominently in the Austrianbackwoodssettingsof Mailer's novel, and the character of the boy "Adi" performs a lot of stupendous shouting at them. In this treatment it is not the wind that rustles the leaves, but the rasp of the future demagogue.

Those who contrive to be offended by the subject of Mailer's novel may fail to understand the playful irony he has brought to his sources. The comic absur-dity is an unexpected surprise. Dare one suggest it is a more Jewish humour, irreverent, gentle, less exhibitionist, than Mailer has previously revealed in his work. No writer should be required to defend his moral right to choose his subject, but Mailer, the maternal grandson of a rabbi, the son of a Jewish emigrant father, is one of the few active novelists today who can claim to have served during the second world war.

At 84, he hardly needs answer those who presume to represent the sensitivities of the dead. Besides, who challenged the appropriateness of George Steiner's late career novel, The Portage Of A.H., on Hitler's mythical reappearance after the war in South America, or Beryl Bainbridge's right to create her novel Young Adolf out of the curious (but biographicallyauthentic)episodeof Hitler's visit to Liverpool in the 1920s?

Neither is there obscenity in Mailer's scenes of the adolescent Adi's tentative acts of mono-testicular masturbation, the inspiration for his signature moustache in furtive sightings of a female pubis, his bedwettings, or his first tests of the theory of iron will while bent over to receive the thrashings of an authoritarian father. The satire is more in the hilarious spirit of Mel Brooks than the alienated, Dostoevskyan youth usually portrayed by the straight biographers.

Yet these examples present a distorted impression of the novel, because it is also a very literary accomplishment, producing in several extended sections some of the best writing Mailer has yet achieved, certainly in fiction. This is not a sentimental judgment made out of deference to Mailer's 60-year career, but no concessions are necessary to what may become considered one of his finest novels, after the poundings he has given loyal readers in a series of megalithic catastrophes since the aby-smal Ancient Evenings. This book marks a courageous and unlikely comeback.

The chapters dealing at length with the enterprise of the father, Alois Hitler, to take up beekeeping as a supplement to his pension, are quite brilliant in their literal, symbolic and metaphorical resonance. Again, the biographies confirm that Alois busied himself with bees, but nowhere except in Mailer will the reader discover connections between the aerial sex life of bees, the strict social organisation of bee colonies, and both the extraction and taste of honey, with the theories the impressionable boy Adi would later evolve of the master race, casting himself as queen bee. These chapters are the novel's sweet centre - it is only at its edges, with a ponderous opening and an abrupt, near reluctant, conclusion, that the structure weakens.

Mailer being Mailer there are some inevitable diversions, and it is difficult to understand why the narrator of the Hitler family story, a kind of satanic agent, should suddenly drag the reader off for the coronation of Czar Nicholas II in Russia, but he is suitably apologetic in suggesting the chapter may be skipped. He otherwise manages to remain on-narrative, guiding the reader's attention with helpful nudges and reminders. Devils evidently make more solicitous narrators than angels, particularly when Mailer gives them his best tunes to play.

His previous experiments with biographical fictions on the lives of Marilyn Monroe, Pablo Picasso and Lee Harvey Oswaldallsufferedforlackofthe discipline demonstrated here. It's as though Mailer has finally reached an age where he can no longer give himself the same latitude for self-indulgent sprawl. In Harlot's Ghost he finally stopped on page 1282, only to dismay the reader with the grunted threat, "To Be Continued". This new novel ends with the reader genuinely wishing there was more, and who would bet against Mailer providing it? The narrator hints that he may return to chart Hitler's early rise to power in the 1920s.

Perhaps that would be a mistake, because part of the success of this novel lies in its refusal to let the character of young Adi dominate. The dust jacket's description of the book as a family saga reduces it somewhat, but the figures of the mother, Klara, the half-brother Alois Junior, and the phantoms of three siblings who died at birth or in early childhood, are all developed.

If the novel has a protagonist it is the father, Alois, a wonderfully realised character and the key to one of the enduringmysteriessurrounding Hitler. Was the illegitimate Alois Shicklegruber of Jewish or Austrian descent? Mailer provides no new theories, but he introduces an unconventional authority to settle the question that has long perplexed historians and biographers alike.