The School of Night:
A Novel
by karl ove knausgaard
translated by martin aitken
penguin, 512 pages, $32.00
Back in college, one of my literature professors once remarked that the first hundred pages of a Balzac novel are often boring, but the ones that follow are the most gripping you have ever read in your life. Something similar could be said of The School of Night, Karl Ove Knausgaard’s updating of the Faust legend for our age of global celebrity. The story takes a while to gain momentum, but having reached full steam, it grabs the reader and pulls him along on a terrifying and at times revolting ride of temptation, moral compromise, and tragedy.
The novel—a standalone entry in the author’s Morning Star cycle—is told as a long flashback. It opens with Kristian Hadeland, the first-person narrator, alone in an unspecified seaside location meditating on death and loneliness and announcing his decision to take his own life. Before committing suicide, however, he will write about what happened to him—and the reader, presumably, will then better understand “the despair that night and day rips and tears at me, the bottomless darkness.”
The novel then shifts to August 1985. We encounter Kristian as a twenty-year-old aspiring photographer who has just arrived in London from Norway to attend art school. While reading about Shakespeare, he discovers Christopher Marlowe, author of the tragedy Doctor Faustus and (as we later learn) supposed member of a secretive group of atheists dubbed the “School of Night.” Knausgaard sprinkles some clues that point to an ominous connection between the would-be necromancer Faustus and the protagonist of this novel, whose very name, Kristian (Christian) Hadeland (Hades-land?), comes shrouded in hellish connotations.
Soon afterward, Kristian meets Hans, “a tall, skinny man with big hair” and an “intense gaze” who appears before him in a pub and invites him back to his studio, which is lined with mannequins, “a number of animal skulls,” and various “items of electronic equipment.” At once profoundly charismatic and profoundly off-kilter, Hans critiques Kristian’s photographs for being just “the expression of an idea” with no connection to the world, and then shows him mechanical rats and turtles that give an uncanny appearance of being alive.
By the time Kristian returns to his own flat, drunk on homemade vodka and doing his best to convince himself that he “didn’t care about Hans’s criticism,” it has begun to dawn on the reader that Knausgaard is rewriting Doctor Faustus as a modern-day Künstlerroman. Kristian, like Faust, is a gifted but amoral striver who will stop at nothing to fulfill his ambitions (art, he affirms, is not something he does “for fun” but is a “matter even of life and death”). Though no explicit pact is ever sealed between them, Hans plainly embodies the role of the devil (and, the novel suggests, may literally be Mephistopheles).
When his work is dismissed by teacher and students alike during a brutal critique session, Kristian, realizing that Hans may have been right after all, decides to create more radical photographs: Intending to take pictures of its skeleton, he steals a dead cat from a veterinary hospital and boils the cadaver in his tiny flat, releasing an unbearable stench. Soon afterward, he is welcomed by Hans into a small group of eccentric artsy types, one of whom—a sexually magnetic female theater director ten years older than Kristian—is staging what will prove to be an all-too-ingenious production of Doctor Faustus.
The pages start to turn more and more quickly. One has the sense of being in the hands of a master storyteller, thoroughly in control of the unsettling effects he is creating. By about a quarter of the way through the novel’s 500 pages, as Kristian vows resentfully to surpass and destroy a famous photographer who humiliated him, the reader—or at least this reader—has begun, against his will, to feel sympathy for the unbearable, self-centered student, and to dread whatever awful events await him.
Those events are awful enough in themselves, but the real horror resides in the way they emerge organically from Kristian’s abyssal egotism. If Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus is a tragedy, it is one that, with its good and evil angels trying to sway the hero, owes a great deal to the medieval morality play genre. The School of Night is likewise a kind of morality play, one that succeeds in rising above its familiar novelist-writes-about-an-artist plot by staging a series of intense conflicts within Kristian’s soul, probing the consequences of his absolute commitment to art and the destructive effects of his selfishness.
Fittingly for a novel about a photographer, and in keeping with his preoccupations in past works, Knausgaard’s prose luxuriates in the mundane, as in this description of Kristian’s sister arriving at the family homestead:
I woke in the middle of the night, hearing a car pull up outside. It lingered a while with the engine turning over. I lifted the curtain and looked out. Liv was standing beside it, clutching a down jacket to her chest, while some guy opened the boot and took out a rucksack. The headlights lit up the yard and shone out into the field, making the snow there glitter and sparkle. Fumes puffed from the exhaust in waves tinted red by the rear lights.
At times, the level of detail seems indiscriminate, the most trivial events treated with as much visual richness as far more important ones. But this flattening of narrative contrasts is justified when, as the reader plods through the novel’s highly textured world, moments of great intensity detach themselves from the backdrop. “It’s like they’re coming towards me,” one minor character exclaims, taken aback by the power of Kristian’s post-Hans photographs. “How did you do that? They’re completely alive!” I had the same reaction to certain passages of the novel, from Dostoevskyan scenes of cat-and-mouse between Kristian and the police to a chilling performance of Doctor Faustus that collapses the distinction between the dramatic urgency of the theater and the slow burn of novelistic storytelling.
Because Knausgaard’s readers inhabit the perspective of his first-person narrator, we cannot help but have an intimate experience of Kristian’s obsessions and rationalizations, as well as of his indifference to the pain of others. I found the novel quite disturbing (increasingly so as its ending drew closer). But there is no denying either its underlying ethical seriousness or its cathartic intensity. And although Kristian, who oscillates between contempt and sniveling, sets new records for unlikability, I was left shaken by his destiny, and if not exactly purged of the sort of amoral ambition he embodies, at least eager to be so.
The novelist seems to have intended just such a reaction. Given the controversy surrounding Knausgaard’s autofictional My Struggle series, which propelled the author to international fame while infuriating family members, I felt warranted in reading a personal, existential dimension into this fable about a young man who will stop at nothing, including betrayal of loved ones, to achieve an artistic breakthrough. At one point, Kristian fears that he will die before he is able to execute a particularly inspired idea for a series of photographs, suggesting the degree to which, for him, life is for art, as opposed to the other way around. What he realizes too late is that by making art into an idol to which he is prepared to sacrifice everything else, he has already brought about the death of his own soul.
