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While Karl Ove Knausgaard was a university student in early ’90s Bergen, agonising about the sort of writer he might one day become, an extreme subculture was solidifying. The young men in the first Norwegian black metal bands painted their faces to look like decomposing corpses, mutilated themselves on stage, and would go on to burn churches and kill each other.
Now that Knausgaard has made black metal central to his Morning Star series of books, I couldn’t help but see uncanny parallels between that phenomenon and the phenomenon the author has become. Both are now major Norwegian exports, with mainstream and cult followings, inspiring different tones of fascination. The six novels in Knausgaard’s My Struggle series, first published between 2009 and 2011, are an intense act of realism: a 4,000-page project to put the author’s entire life up to that point on the page in what often feels like real time. Many around the world found his long descriptions of a dissatisfied man having breakfast, cooking for his children and smoking through writers’ block addictive. But explaining the books’ success can feel insufficient. There’s always been some unquantifiable magic at play.
In the new series, which launched in 2020 with The Morning Star, we follow tens of characters whose lives are changed when a “new star” appears in the sky. Animals have started emerging in great numbers, behaving without fear of humans. Three members of a black metal band have been ritually murdered in a forest, a smell of sulphur pervading the crime scene. And people have stopped dying.
Book three, The Third Realm, picks up with the spouses and children of protagonists from the first book. Last time we saw artist Tove, she was on holiday with her family, implicated in the death of two cats and painting prophetic canvases. Now we are shown the “Hell on Earth” of her depression, mania and psychosis, overlapping with hellish portents that exist for other people too. Meanwhile Syvert, the undertaker who had a central role in book two, The Wolves of Eternity (2023), is worried. People not dying will put him out of business.
Other new point-of-view characters include a neuroscientist, an architect, and Line, a 19-year-old student who in a previous book made a brief cameo to be surly towards her mother. She is revealed here to be recovering from an abject experience at a gig by Domen, a secretive black metal band. They were an inspiration to the dead musicians, and may have been responsible for their killings, or their sacrifice. We are coming to realise that all the supernatural events may stem from here: that this “grotesque” act was performed to bring about some “other world”.
But in Knausgaard’s world of apocalypse and apparitions, people still spend a lot of time worrying about potholes. It’s a very ordinary Ragnarök, full of the big Knausgaardian concerns. Partners grow estranged and dissatisfied in their marriages. Teenagers throw parties. Young men write terrible lyrics. The bodily reality of characters is inescapable. They are always eating, sweating and washing.
Three books and nearly 2,000 pages in, we’re still very much in the build-up phase of the series. Knausgaard hasn’t finished introducing new narrators, each of whom brings with them chunky backstories and more satellite characters. They swarm like the crabs, adders and badgers that materialise as doomsday omens. Knausgaard also pursues a doppelgänger motif from book two, meaning quite a few characters have the same name. There are at least three Jarles, two of them in the same line of work. The Jarle whose perspective we occupy is brilliant company, but that’s not to say his narrative duties couldn’t have been taken up by someone else.
Other signs of bagginess will be very familiar to Knausgaard readers: the long theological discussions; the exhaustive, moment by moment descriptions of middle-aged men making breakfast. A typical passage of prose, rendered here in English by Martin Aitken, who has translated the whole series so far, might run: “I brushed my teeth, turned the TV off in the middle of someone explaining something about comets, slipped my key card into my wallet, put my jacket on, picked up the book I’d bought about dreams and left the room.”
It could be said that the supernatural elements and high-stakes horror allow Knausgaard leeway to be more himself. To span the full range of what people are capable of during an ordinary day, from their most mechanical actions to their most esoteric thoughts. Not that he’d require anyone’s permission. Knausgaard is one of the few living authors who can write 600-page novels of ideas without worrying his publishers. People won’t stop buying his books. Still, a satanic police procedural and flying demons reward our patience for slogging through essays his characters have written on Kierkegaard, reproduced in their entirety, or long extracts from their books about consciousness.
In presentation, Knausgaard’s supernatural evils seem all the more intense when given context by his commitment to naturalism. Or rather, the dark subject matter seems to emerge from the mundane, just as those first Norwegian black metallers came from “pleasant little places . . . in a society that took the best possible care of them”. It’s possible, here, to see things as Tove sees them: how “in the everyday that the eye revealed, with all its many banalities . . . ” there can be a “flooding darkness”.
The Third Realm by Karl Ove Knausgaard, translated by Martin Aitken, Harvill Secker £25/Penguin Press $32, 512 pages
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