Unkindly light: The Morning Star, by Karl Ove Knausgaard, reviewed

Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle sequence is one of this century’s great projects: an intimate epic in which the overriding obsessions of our times — identity, gender, the meaning of truth — play out through six maddeningly detailed, curiously compelling autofictions. It’s the kind of work that casts a long shadow; any fiction that follows, the author knows, is in communion, and competition, with that momentous work. Which is why The Morning Star, Knausgaard’s return to the novel after an almost decade-long break, is both fascinating and frustrating.

With its biblical allusion title and occult MacGuffin (a new star has mysteriously appeared in the night sky over Norway), the book suggests Knausgaard has returned to his interest in divinity, one he explored in his second novel, A Time to Every Purpose Under Heaven. A couple of pages in, however, and it’s clear we are back squarely in the rhythms of domestic life that dominated My Struggle. In fact, Arne, the narrator of the opening section, is so similar to ‘Knausgaard’ it is both comforting and disappointing. The arrival of the star does change the dynamic of this familiarity, but not enough to feel that any new ground is being staked out.

The disappointments soon stack up. While there are some brilliantly distilled scenes — a daughter talking to her infirm mother, a man unnerving a priest at an airport — it becomes clear that the narrator of each section will not be distinguished by their writing style. Men and women, young and old, speak with the same voice: they ‘slurp’ their tea or coffee or beer; they light ‘fags’; they tell you what music they are listening to; they overuse one-sentence paragraphs; they ask a lot of rhetorical questions; they have interesting conversations pertaining to the key themes of the book.