“Signs 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.
In the first volume, 2021’s The Morning Star, a disparate group of Knausgårdian characters – a jaded academic with a manic-depressive wife, a doubting vicar with a jealous husband – found their lives illuminated and sent off kilter by a new, preternaturally bright star in the sky. The vicar buried a man she’d seen alive after his death; two characters shared a vision of a ghost. This was followed by The Wolves of Eternity, a tighter story where a funeral director with an unexpected zest for life meets his half-sister, watched over by that same potentially diabolical star, amid a series of disquisitions on resurrection. Both novels had flashes of brilliance, but were unable to find a satisfying structure to blend the everyday with the supernatural and philosophical.
