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5 days ago
17
Karl Ove Knausgård’s Morning Star cycle may turn out to be even larger in scope than his six-volume autofictional bestseller, My Struggle. Four books deep, this gargantuan work of supernatural existentialism is an unsettling account of the occult phenomena that attend the appearance in the sky of a bright new star. Mysteries from the first three volumes include: who killed the musicians in the forest? What’s going on with the local wildlife? Why does no one seem to be dying any more? By the end of The School of Night, the most burning question may sound comparatively mundane: who is Kristian Hadeland?
Scattered references appeared in the saga’s first 2,000 pages. Kristian Hadeland was the 67-year-old man buried without mourners by doubting priest Kathrine Reinhardsen in The Morning Star (2021). In The Third Realm (2024), he was the sinister chap hitching a lift with Kathrine’s husband after the unloved man she buried is supposed to have died.
The School of Night offers another answer. Here, Kristian Hadeland is the author of a 500-page suicide note, and the misanthropic narrator of a compellingly nasty novel. From the remote Norwegian island where he’s preparing to end his life, Kristian sets down the story of how he got there, starting with his time as a photography student in mid-1980s London.
Young Kristian has a good eye and self-belief, even if – as a visiting professor suggests – his photos are “a bit dull. Without temperament.” Soon after arriving from Norway, he meets the enigmatic Hans, a Dutch artist into artificial intelligence, and Vivian, who is staging a production of Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus; he develops an uneasy friendship with the former and a hostile sexual relationship with the latter. Kristian is reflexively unpleasant, quick to disdain everyone and everything from homeless people to old women in jeans and coffee with milk.
When Kristian is home for Christmas, he’s antagonistic towards his family, too. After his sister overdoses, he hears his father describing him as “a black hole … a narcissist, through and through”. Outraged, he returns to London, retreating into himself. He cycles through the rain in a cityscape that resembles a graveyard. He steals a dead cat from a vet’s, planning to photograph its skeleton. Like so many of Knausgård’s men, he drinks a lot. Then a chance encounter with a homeless man sets Kristian on a path from near ruin to staggering glory.
The Faustus subplot indicates Knausgård’s literary model as well as providing an interpretive lens for the reader. When the central crisis of the story is resolved thanks to a mysterious intervention by the Mephistophelean Hans, Kristian’s abilities as a photographer are miraculously transformed. “Every photograph seemed incandescent, it was as if I was being carried forward by some momentous force,” Kristian writes. Twenty-four years later, we find Kristian finalising a retrospective of his work at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. But then, his life and success begin to unravel.
Knausgård’s assertion that he barely plans or edits his work may unsettle those who have ventured this far, not to mention repelling readers who are yet to start. Each new instalment in the Morning Star cycle has contributed to a sense more of creeping entropy than grand design; and it’s not clear how The School of Night fits into the bigger picture – if there is one. The next two volumes, already out in Norway, seemingly focus on the Løyning family first introduced in The Wolves of Eternity (2023). Are the anachronisms and inconsistencies in the text deliberate, features of a superstructure beyond rationalism whose outline is still only partially visible? How else, when their birth dates don’t align, could the protagonist of The School of Night be the man Kathrine buries in The Morning Star?
Other readers will be drawn into kabbalistic exegesis. I found myself translating Danish Reddit threads, examining Norwegian ferry schedules to trace Kristian’s movements, and scouring the classics to understand how the Faustus story may illuminate the world of The Morning Star. When Marlowe’s Faustus asks Mephistopheles, “How comes it, then, that thou art out of hell?” and the demon replies, “Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it”, it’s as good a description of the bleak universe Knausgård has created.
As in the first three books, the author’s philosophical preoccupation with death is a constant, expressed through the tension between an instinctual materialism and the haunting possibility of something beyond comprehension. It’s a tension Kristian seems to want to ignore, yet he is unable to explain Hans’s strange agency in his life, let alone the Dutchman’s sudden diabolical appearance at a pivotal moment at the end of part one: “Abruptly, he threw back his head and stared into the sky, the orbs in his sockets rolled white. Three times in quick succession his mouth opened and closed like a fish’s.” Close readers may recall the same convulsion afflicting Jesper, the musician suspected of murdering his three bandmates in a satanic bloodbath, in the chilling final pages of The Third Realm. Intimations of the supernatural give the saga much of its momentum and uncanny frisson. But can the mystery be indefinitely sustained?
Some readers won’t be persuaded. Knausgård’s prose is sometimes not just erratic but incoherent; even fans will concede that you don’t read him for the beauty of his sentences. Besides, 500 pages in Kristian’s hateful company is a lot to handle – and getting the most from The School of Night entails thousands of pages of background reading. (You will need to have paid close attention to experience as a thrill the revelation that the house where Kristian writes his last testament belongs to Egil Stray, the writer of the essay On Death and the Dead that concludes The Morning Star and may yet provide a kind of Rosetta stone for the mysteries of the saga … et cetera.)
A lot is riding on Knausgård’s ability to deliver on the colossal promise of this sprawling epic. But for readers with the stomach, patience and faith to keep going, this work of millenarian fiction remains an object of fascination.
