DO THE dead live? When a bright new star appears in the sky, is it a portent? What does it mean? Karl Ove Knausgaard tells the story of nine characters over two days, all watched over by the star. It stands as a perpetual reminder that everything is not, perhaps, quite as it seems, infusing the novel with a sense both of possibility and of dread.
Kathrine, a priest stuck in an unhappy marriage, officiates at the funeral of a man whom she is sure she encountered only the day before at the airport. Arne, a professor whose wife is suffering from a psychiatric episode, finds the road he drives home swarming with crabs. Jostein, a seedy, alcoholic journalist, follows a lead to the scene of the brutal murder of a death-metal band. Turid, his unfortunate wife, goes after a patient who has escaped from the psychiatric-care unit in which she works, only to encounter a strange creature in the woods.
The strange and the commonplace happen alongside each other. And Knausgaard narrates the former better than the latter; despite the new star, the characters are mostly caught up in their own lives, in mundanity and crisis, or crisis that has become mundane. The strangeness is less effective; the horror is just not very horrifying. The novel is good at asking whether there is more to life than what we see, and what it means to live in death’s shadow.
The final part, which takes the form of an essay supposedly written by one of the characters, is a disappointing way of answering these questions, leaving a sense of something unfinished. What does the star mean? In the end, that’s up to you.
The Revd Anna Matthews is the Vicar of St Bene’t’s, Cambridge.
Morning Star
Karl Ove Knausgaard
Martin Aitken, translator
Harvill Secker £20
(978-1-910701-72-0)
Church Times Bookshop £18