Book three in the Norwegian novelist’s Morning Star series takes in devils, black metal and revelation, and provides a masterclass in what fiction can offer
igns are taken for wonders,” TS Eliot’s speaker observes soberly in Gerontion. But what is the difference between a wonder and a sign – and which do we prefer? Such questions flow through Karl Ove Knausgård’s Morning Star series of novels, an ongoing effort to open fiction up into a kind of vast Book of Revelation in which visions of red deer, landlocked crabs and devils stream across a rural Norway populated by Knausgård’s familiar hotel bars and supermarkets.
“Hell isn’t the psychosis. Hell is leaving the psychosis,” she observes, awakening from the manic episode she entered in The Morning Star. Scenes from that book are then enacted from her perspective. The result is an exemplary masterclass in what fiction can offer: the expansion of readerly sympathies, bringing a sense that there are potentially endless perspectives available.
And the point of it all? Not many readers will come away believing in devils, so what’s gained isn’t new theological insight but something else: a commitment to the possibilities of transcendence within realism. Arguably, this has been Knausgård’s project all along, even as he was describing himself clearing up his dead alcoholic father’s flat in his breakthrough autofictional series My Struggle.
yet earthly experiment, as Jarle himself is. If he can record the ordinary lives of enough people faced with the extraordinary presence of the star, perhaps he will, as if inadvertently,
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