“The Castle in the Forest,” by Norman Mailer; Random House; $27.95.

Norman Mailer’s first novel in 10 years, “The Castle in the Forest,” is a work of such audacity that many readers, and, doubtless, not a few critics, are likely to be so offended by its method and means that the extent of its novelistic achievement will be lost on them.

More’s the pity, for readers capable of meeting it on its own terms will find “The Castle in the Forest” a source of tremendous narrative pleasure, even if some passages may best be read, as it were, between the fingers of a hand clapped protectively across the eyes.

On the surface, “The Castle in the Forest” is a ridiculous project, one that seeks to locate the source of evil in a fictionalized childhood biography of that great antichrist of the 20th century, Adolf Hitler.

What’s more, Mailer, now 83, tells the story through the first-person narration of a mid-level demon, an infernal functionary assigned by Satan to shepherd the development of an obscure boy, born of an incestuous bloodline, with the potential for great accomplishments in the continuing battle between the Devil and God.

Survivors of the Holocaust, their advocates and descendants, may perhaps be the most ready to locate Hitler’s power outside the realm of humanity, labeling him a literal fiend. Sadly, though understandable, this thesis lacks explanatory power, leaving us defenseless against the rise of a next Hitler.

Mailer’s selection of a demonic point-of-view character to relate his tale constitutes a defiant, almost foolhardy, means to attack the impenetrableness of Hitler’s life and personality.

But it works beautifully, for it challenges every received assumption. It is akin to drawing a mustache on the Mona Lisa; it allows you to see the subject anew.

The strength and joy of Mailer’s narrative – if such a word as “joy” can yet be affixed to a novel about Hitler – is two-fold. First, however much fun he has, Mailer plays it straight. He never winks at the reader; if he did the entire fantastic edifice would collapse into ruins.

Second, Mailer develops his portrait of Hitler’s home life with the detail of a very good 19th-century domestic drama. Indeed, the true hero of the book is Alois, the father who rose from peasantry to become a distinguished government bureaucrat, a lover of women and begetter of bastards, a deeply flawed man who devoted his retirement to apiculture – the keeping of bees and the harvesting of honey.

Every character in Mailer’s narrative lives and breathes as a fully developed human being, including little “Adi,” even if the budding sexual perversities, the secret malice toward friends and family, and the profound insecurities fail to quite explain the monster he became – although they do lay the ground work for a proposed sequel, which presumably will follow Hitler to his alienated young manhood in Vienna, where he discovered politics.

While we await that book, “The Castle in the Forest” stands on its own. The novel is Mailer through and through, the work of a bold and confident writer who may yet be seen as the pre-emminent novelist of his time.