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The organizer of Steiner's posse is careful to warn his agents by radio not to let their prisoner speak while they march him out of the jungle. "When He made the Word, God made possible also its contrary," says Emmanuel Lieber, who is apparently modeled on Wiesenthal. "He created on the night side of language a speech for hell ... There shall come a man who ... will know the grammar of hell and teach it to others. He will know the sounds of madness and loathing and make them seem music."
There are other eerie possibilities in the interplay between language and the inhuman. Suppose, one of Steiner's hunters reflects, that the saintly scholars who first copied down the holy words of the Torah made a mistake somewhere, and that in this mistake lies the explanation for all the world's discords. Or suppose, the hunter goes on, it was the unnamable name of God that was taken down wrongly, so that "each time we call upon Him we call in error and cough like toads in the green scum."
From the sputtering traffic in radio messages, the hunters soon realize that what started as a campaign for justice may end as a fight between rival intelligence agencies trying to kidnap or silence the Führer and rival media packagers trying to sell him. To forestall that, they head deeper into the jungle and put him on trial themselves. Hence Hitler's climactic defense speech, which turns into one long, hideous embrace.
It was from the Jews, cries Steiner's Führer, that he learned everything: "To set a race apart. To keep it from defilement. To hold before it a promised land ..." What really enslaved mankind, Hitler raves on, was the Jewish invention of a God purer than any other, a God whose "inconceivable, unimaginable presence envelops us." Says he: "The Jew invented conscience and left man a guilty serf." The Nazi execution of such inventors brought secret rejoicing to the rest of the world, according to this judgment, but since the Holocaust ended in the creation of Israel, Hitler also claims to be the benefactor of the Jews. "Perhaps I am the Messiah . . . whose infamous deeds were allowed by God in order to bring His people home."
Such views cry out for refutation in the novel. But after Hitler's Sturm und Drang, his captors and critics remain mute. In effect, Steiner allows A.H. the last word, and ends on a note of bleak ambiguity: the noisy arrival of the first helicopters from the waiting world beyond the jungle. Portage largely avoids both the satisfactions of the traditional novel and the horrifying details of Holocaust literature. Instead, Steiner has taken as his model the political imaginings of an Orwell or Koestler, and although he has not reached their challenging heights, he has produced a philosophic fantasy of remarkable intensity.
And if Hitler really did walk into the room, would George Steiner get up? Yes. "It's a dreadful answer that I didn't expect from myself," he says. "I stumbled onto it—this profoundly disturbing, almost nauseating answer. But when a certain immensity of history walks into a room, you can't sit on your bottom."