Knausgård's 'The Morning Star' Is Apocalyptic And Prophetic

Karl Ove Knausgård. Photo by Magnus Liam Karlsson via Norstedts.

(REVIEW) Norwegian novelist Karl Ove Knausgård is often mentioned in conversations about future Noble Prize winners in literature. His most well-known work, “My Struggle,” consisting of six separate books, has been translated into 35 languages. With his hyperrealistic style, he blurred the boundaries between fiction and autobiography and attracted readers from all over the world.

“The Morning Star” is Knausgård’s first novel in 10 years, written during the coronavirus pandemic that “marked the end of our romance with market society,” according to Politico — or at least changed the ways we look at globalization, climate, science, humanity and the future.

On the very first page of the new novel, you will find a quotation from Revelation 9:6, giving the reader a key to understanding the separate life stories that make up the book: “During that time these men will seek death, but they will not find it; they will long to die, but death will elude them.”

Even for Christians well acquainted with the Bible, the Book of Revelation is sometimes difficult to understand. Revelation is also known as “the Apocalypse,” telling us about the end of the world as we know it but simultaneously about the work of God.

However, Revelation is not the only reference to Christian faith used by Knausgård in this novel, and the title itself, “Morning Star,” is a commonly used metaphor for Christ — but sometimes a symbol of evil.

So, what is the book about? This time, Knausgård has abandoned autofiction and writes about everyday people, which is refreshing in a world of literature that too often is engaged with people at the margin. We are introduced to a university professor, a crime journalist, a care assistant, a nurse and a priest.

The typical style of Knausgård, with detailed maximalism and great length at 666 pages — note the number! — is recognizable, albeit this novel is not about the life of the author. “The Morning Star” can be described as a collective novel, a cluster of voices intertwined to construct a map of Norway around 2023. Simultaneously, it is describing an ancient or eternal landscape.

The story of the university professor in the first chapter tells us about a father struggling to keep his family together during his wife’s severe physical illness. In the following chapters, we meet the nurse, Solveig, working at the hospital while also nursing her old mother, who’s ill with Alzheimer’s disease; crime journalist Jostein, just about to drink himself to death or at least to divorce and risk losing his son; and the possibly pregnant priest Kathrine, who wants a divorce.

They all struggle with vital decisions and urgent problems. Above all, a bright shining star to which they are all witnesses appears in the sky. Is it a new sun, a nebula or a completely new and previously unknown phenomenon?

The atmosphere of disaster is underpinned by small but important details: Crabs are walking in the forest, deer have become tame and thousands of ladybugs appear on a veranda. They create a subtext of alarm, apocalypse, or in a less dramatic approach, unease — the vague sense of a collapsing ecosystem or a change that might become irreversible. Some of the people in the text even see people they know are dead.

The people in this small country of Norway, in northern Scandinavia, react differently to the star. Some look distractedly to the sky, some are worried, some see it as a sign and some just go on with their lives.

Here and there, the descriptions of the quotidian are a bit bland. It feels like a transport route, and reading about it can make the reader lose patience and wonder where all this is going. But then, all the sudden, you come to a magical place — a glade in the middle of the woods — and time seems to stop.

Here, you become one with the text, and there is this sensation that the text tells you the truth —not any truth but an existential one — and the result is that you feel you are not alone in the room, yet you are only reading a text. I don’t know how Knausgård does this, but what he creates is great literature.

“The Morning Star” is not the first novel by Knausgård that compiles biblical references or references to Christian faith, but this time, it is more explicit and an important key to the text. There are also references to Greek mythology, the poet Hölderlin, the author Swedenborg and shamanism.

The character Egil, a mystic, is a failed documentary filmmaker whose films about the Christian sect “Smith’s friends” and the satanic rocker band “White Christ” — murdered in a tragic way — did not make an impact or attract many viewers. Egil leads an isolated life in a cottage by the sea after having religious experiences in a church and in the forest.

“One day, in an indescribable moment of happiness everything fell into place,” Egil says. “Even though the days were dark the light always shone somewhere, in the forest or out on the sea or in the world of my soul, I just had to find the right way to get there.”

At the end of the book, there is an essay said to be written by Egil entitled “Essay on Death and the Dead.” It stands out in style and content, as it is full of references to philosophy, history and poetry. The theme of the essay is how humans have related to death. It highlights several difficult questions: Is there a reality behind the reality? Insects — and other animals — see something different than humans do, so how can we be so sure about what reality is? And how can we know for sure that dead people are not, in one sense or another, present in our world? Further, with science likely to blur the line between humans and androids or AI, how can we speak about a clear line between life and death?

Thoughts like these can be regarded as something unrealistic. But reading works such as “Homo Deus — a Brief History of Tomorrow” by Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari can make you believe the future could indeed bring a blurred line between humans and androids as well as life and death. “Death is just a technical problem,” says Harari in his best-selling book.

What, then, is the message of Knausgård’s novel? As in all great art, there are multiple meanings to be found. It is possible to read the novel as a postmodern text with a chain of voices — one voice as meaningful or true as the other. It is possible to read it as a voice warning against climate change, with nature suddenly becoming both closer and more distant, demanding an answer from us. It can be read as a text exploring secular society, a study of nonreflective lives.

However, I would say that if read in the light of the title, “Morning Star,” and the quote in the very beginning, it is also possible to say that this is a book first and foremost about a different kind of light, directing us to religion. “Let there be light,” God says in the Bible. Here, there is another kind of light, possibly telling us that we will witness something new emerge — or something predicting the end of the world as we know it.

The final essay by Egil about death implies that the meaning of the text relates to religion. That said, it remains unclear whether the morning star is God or the devil. What is important, though, is that it is a light of a different character — something new.

At the very end of the novel, Egil says, “The Morning Star. I know what it means. It means that it has started.”

“The Morning Star” looked upon this way can be read as a prophetic warning: We are lost in a border country, looking at a new star that is shining on us and our lives on this planet and marking the beginning of something new. What, then, is our reaction to light of a whole new category?

We must ask ourselves, Who are we, and who do we want to be?

Inger Alestig is a Swedish journalist and author who was the culture editor of Dagen, a Christian Swedish newspaper, for 15 years and now reports for Dagen on foreign affairs in Europe.