A long, slow tease that ends with a bore
The novel follows the lives of several Norwegian characters, each of whom narrates their own chapters in the first person. The story takes place in Western and Southern Norway over the course of two days. An abnormally large star unexpectedly appears in the sky. Scientists conjecture that it may be a new supernova or similar astronomical phenomena, but Knausgaard leads the reader to suspect there may be a more supernatural reason for the star’s sudden appearance. The star seems to have sparked strange behavior and abnormal activity among Norway’s wild animal populations, and some of the characters are troubled by unsettling hallucinations.
The bulk of the book is comprised of the characters describing their daily lives. Knausgaard does a great job of crafting compelling characters and painting authentic pictures of real life. I don’t believe there’s a single character in the book that I couldn’t identify with in some way. None of them are boring, and each individual’s psychology is believably rendered. They often express profound and provocative thoughts. In a typical chapter, you read about one character’s activities for a half hour to an hour. A minister performs a funeral service. A teenager throws a party in the hope of making friends. A jerk cheats on his wife. A caregiver performs her shift at a mental hospital. Then, on the last page, there’s a hint of something that belongs in a Stephen King novel. Then you move on to the next character. All the little bread crumbs of horror that Knausgaard drops at the end of each chapter don’t add up to much of a story. Thus, the book is mostly a series of disconnected scenes, admirably well-drawn, that never coalesce into anything resembling a plot. Many of the book’s chapters end in cliffhangers that are never followed up. That makes for the kind of ambiguity that literary critics praise as deep, but most readers will just find annoying.
Knausgaard makes a halfhearted attempt to tie things together in the last two chapters. The penultimate chapter is an overdone piece of supernatural fantasy that feels familiar and clichéd. The final chapter is written in the form of an essay, and spends a lot of its length lecturing the reader on ancient Greece. I enjoyed the character of Egil in his earlier chapter, where he really showed a unique way of looking at life and had some interesting things to say. In that last chapter, however, he bored the devil out of me.
The fragmentary, half-baked, and arbitrary style of the narrative was surely intentional on Knausgaard’s part, and may even be a savvy marketing ploy. The Morning Star feels incomplete, like it’s just begging for a sequel. Sure enough, Knausgaard published a sequel, The Wolves of Eternity, in 2021. A third novel in the series has since been published in Norway, and a fourth is on the way. Perhaps when all is said and done, the complete saga will be a masterpiece. This book does indeed deliver some beautiful passages of writing. On its own, however, The Morning Star leaves one feeling like they’ve been cheated out of a complete novel and left wanting more.
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