Norwegian Blue

The Wolves of Eternity by

Karl-Ove Knausgaard

People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually, from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint, it’s more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff. - Trad.

1

Some years ago, there was a TV series called Heroes. The first episodes followed the apparently unrelated life-stories of several super-powered characters. Gradually, over slightly too many episodes, we started to see how their lives were connected; until by the final instalment, they all turned out to have been part of a single story. Someone certainly had to save the cheerleader. Because it was about a network of overlapping relationships it was called the first popular drama of the Facebook era. By me, if by no-one else.

Social media makes a difference. Past Lives, a film which somehow didn't excite me quite as much as it excited everyone else depends on Facebook for its central premise. It would have been quite impossible, prior to 2005, for two people on two different continents who were sweethearts at the age of twelve to reestablish contact at the age of twenty four. Not without private detectives, or a gigantic coincidence involving handbags and strawberry marks. You may remember how Rustum (a father who long ago lost contact with his son) and Sorhab (a son who was raised entirely in ignorance of his father's identity) inadvertently killed each other in single combat. That sort of thing used to happen all the time in the days before Twitter.

Alan Moore's Watchmen, which came out as early as 1986, is another story in which multiple narratives about disparate characters gradually converge, until we perceive that, from a certain point of view, everything is connected to everything else. Moore's Ozymandias sits in front of a huge bank of television screens, randomly changing channels, in the belief that this will somehow enable him to perceive the Big Picture. Nowadays he would spend all day on Twitter. Come to think of it, he would probably own Twitter.

Conspiracy theory thrives online; and conspiracy theory, almost by definition, involves drawing lines between things which are not connected. Until 2022, the titular head of the United Kingdom was called the Queen. One of the Queen's children is alleged to have links to Jeffrey Epstein. Jeffrey Epstein was accused of sexual offences. Men who wear extravagangtly feminine clothes as part of a theatrical performance are sometimes referred to as Drag Queens. This proves...

But Alan Moore came to believe that ritual magic and creative writing were both equally about creating new connections between unconnected things.  All stories are true.

I wonder if the Marvel Cinematic Universe -- and the various franchises which have so far entirely failed to emulate its success -- are knock-on results of the ubiquity of Twitter? We're disinclined to see stories as lines and more inclined to see them as webs.

2

In 2012, someone called Helge listens to a record that they used to like when they were eleven.

"The cover alone sent a tingle down my spine. The image of the world, shining in the darkest firmament, the band name in electric lettering and the album title underneath in computer script–wow! But it didn’t really knock me out until I pressed play and started listening. I remembered all the songs, it was as if the melodies and riffs hidden in my subconscious came welling up to reconnect with their origins, their parents, those old Status Quo songs to which they belonged. But it wasn’t only that. With them came shoals of memories, a teeming swathe of tastes, smells, visions, occurrences, moods, atmospheres, whatever. My emotions couldn’t handle so much information all at once, the only thing I could do was sit there trembling for three-quarters of an hour as the album played.”

Well, quite. Frenchmen often have that kind of experience when they dip little cakes in their tea. One thought leads to another and suddenly Helge remembers something very odd that happened to him in 1977. It's all over and done with in six pages and I don't think we hear another peep out of him for the rest of the very long book. 

The second section, amounting to a longish novel in its own right, is about a second character, named Syvert. It's 1987 and Syvert has just come home from his national service (which is, or was then, a thing in Norway). He was a cook in the Navy and is rather good at it, although he doesn't want to go into the restaurant trade as a career. He doesn't know what he does want. Gradually, some facts about his life unfold. He lost his father a decade ago; his mother is seriously ill (he finds blood in the washbasin and then a bloody tissue in the bin). He has a younger brother who has been having vivid dreams about Dad. Almost without us noticing, a plot starts to happen. Syvert finds some of his father's old papers, which include letters written in Russian. He didn't know his Dad spoke Russian. He becomes curious, and gets them translated. Meanwhile and in passing he visits the local Vicar. It seems that everyone is automatically confirmed in the Church of Norway by default, and has to pay tax to the church: they need a signature from a clergyman if they want to opt out. The Vicar is very nice about it, but half-seriously asks Syvert to return the favour by reading Crime and Punishment. Dostoyevsky is the most Christian of writers, he says, more Christian than Jesus. Syvert is not only an atheist, but quite right-wing, although this only manifests as occasionally having unkind thoughts about people he assumes to be leftists. When he finds the only Russian speaker in the village to translate his dad's letters, they recommend Dostoyevsky to him as well. He rejoins a football team, develops a crush on a girl he has never met, unwisely gives an interview to a local newspaper and finds a temporary job -- as an undertaker's assistant.

After four hundred pages of this, we switch to Russia, where a lorry driver named Yeygeny Pavlovich is robbed by thugs and then wrongly arrested by the police. And then a new, long section about Alevitina, a Russian academic. She's lecturing in biology and becomes quite irritated by a student who tries to quote Intelligent Design texts at her. 

"The kind of reductionist materialism you all stand for can only point to physical and chemical laws, but there’s nothing in those laws that can explain how life arose out of non-life. Is that science? And as for the theory of evolution, is it able to explain how the genetic code emerged, not to mention how it’s actually read? The theory has to be able to do that in order to be valid. Only it can’t. Is that science? Or is it orthodox faith?"

There is a very long flashback to when she was an graduate student; she was briefly interested in "biosemiotics"; the idea that if trees can at some level pass information to other trees, and if there are extensive networks (networks!) of fungi beneath the earth, forests could be complex enough to possess something analogous to consciousness. This led her into thinking about shamanism, and a brief experiment with magic mushrooms. 

And thence to a whole chapter of a work in progress by her friend Vasilisa. It deals with similar themes and is, of course, entitled The Wolves of Eternity. 

The starting point of Fyodorov’s philosophy is that death belongs to nature and life belongs to humans. Nature is a destructive force we permit to control us. Death is a result of our passivity towards nature: we allow nature to kill us. But this is by no means a necessary outcome. Whereas the forces of nature that tear everything asunder are blind processes taking place according to laws and systems of which nature itself is unknowing, we human beings possess consciousness, will and emotions.

3

How does Karl-Ove Knausgaard do it?

This is the sort of eight hundred page novel which you devour in hundred page chunks. It's the sort of book which leaves you breathlessly on the edge of your seat, waiting to find out if Syvert and his kid brother Joar will have a nice time at the swimming pool; or if Syvert is going to extricate himself from talking to a couple of over-chatty tourists without undue embarrassment. It's the kind of book you find yourself reading, if not quite from behind a sofa, then at any rate with mounting nervousness, almost afraid to get to the end of the chapter. If Syvert goes on the date with the girl he's been obsessing about for the past hundred pages, and leaves Joar home alone, will something terrible happen? Will his mother look at him in a judgemental way? Will he say exactly the wrong thing and ruin the date?

In fact, the answer to these kinds of questions is almost always "no".  A really, really bad thing did indeed happen in Syvert's family before the book started; and if the book has a single theme, it's Syvert's gradual realisation of what that bad thing was. But the bad thing happened a very long time ago, and the repercussions are not especially dramatic. But we keep reading. Karl-Ove's books grip us like nothing else. We apply words like "compelling" and "addictive" to them. One reviewer said correctly "even when he is boring, he is interesting." 

How does Karl-Ove Knausgaard do it? 

Some people might say that the question is really: how does Karl-Ove Knausgaard get away with it?

4

Knausgaard's fame chiefly rests on having written a four thousand page fictionalised autobiography, from the point of view of a writer whose chief claim to fame is having written a four thousand page autobiography. Naturally, it was entitled My Struggle. The book is quite aware of its own cheek, or provocation: a book about the trivia of daily life comparing itself with the most infamous and egotistical autobiography of the twentieth century. If I'd been doing it, I'd have probably gone with The Greatest Story Ever Told, which wouldn't have been nearly so clever. There is a three hundred page digression about Hitler in the final volume, which, treated as a sub-book in its own right, is genuinely interesting and informative.

My Struggle ended with Knausgaard declaring that he was no longer a writer; but in fact he followed his huge autobiography with a huge work of fiction. The Morning Star was a montage of first person narratives connected by the fact that a new star has inexplicably appeared in the sky; and that dead people are equally inexplicably coming back to life. When you have written four thousand pages about the minutiae of your own life, I suppose there is nothing much to do but write about the minutiae of other people's. 

The Wolves of Eternity is a sequel to the Morning Star, although even saying that amounts to a kind of spoiler. Two more connected volumes have already been published in Norwegian: the title of the third book in the series, Det Tredje Riket arguably translates as The Third Reich.

5

It would be misleading to say that the Wolves of Eternity reads like a soap-opera; but the Wolves of Eternity does read a little like a soap-opera. It would also be unfair to say that it reads like a writers' workshop exercise or an RPG scenario; but it does somewhat resemble both of those things. Here are two major characters and three minor ones: can you think up reasons, thematic or narrative, that their lives are connected? 

In a sense, it would be better to go into the book not knowing that it is a sequel to the Morning Star -- or perhaps we should say, that it is part of the Morning Star Extended Universe. The ideal reader would be following the ins and outs of Syvert's and Alevitina's lives and be surprised on page 700 (or thereabouts) when the grown-up Joar, now an astrophysicist, appears on TV trying to explain the sudden appearance of the new star.  "Aha, they would say: not only are the five characters in the Wolves of Eternity obliquely connected; but they are obliquely connected to the seven or eight we met in the previous volume."

I am, though, trying to avoid spoilers. The book doesn't contain a particular Astonishing and Surprising twist. But I would say that when I spotted the connection between Syvert and Alevitina -- and the reader works it out slightly before the characters do -- I said "Aha!" Syvert and Alevitina's meeting also reveals how Helge of the first chapter is linked to Syvert, albeit in an indirect way that neither of them are likely to ever discover. That also made me go "Aha!" "Aha!" is probably the correct reaction to the works of Karl-Ove Knausgaard.

But the book isn't about the characters or their interconnections. Beneath all the trivia, Knausgaard is really interested in huge philosophical questions. He gets through the entire book without saying "quotidian" once.

It's breathtakingly erudite, although there are some signs of authorial contrivance. The central four hundred pages we spend with Syvert only cover a few days of his life: but when we rejoin him thirty-five years later, we find that all the important things in his life depended on those four days. He married the girl he had the crush on, stayed with the undertaking firm (and now runs a chain of four funeral homes) and is still concerned about the context of Dad's letters. 

The Wolves of Eternity, like all Karl-Ove's books, is about Death. (I think of the interviewer who asked William Golding why all his books were about the Fall of Man. "That's a bit like saying all my books are about people.") Both volumes carry epigrams from the book of Revelation. The Russian lorry driver, who doesn't otherwise intersect with the story, is sent to a remote location to pick up what appear to be very large fuel tanks. When he delivers them, he learns that they actually contain...cryogenically frozen heads and bodies. At the end of his chapter, he mysteriously hears banging -- from inside the tanks! Towards the end of Syvert's second narrative chunk, he is getting confused messages from the staff of his funeral parlours saying that, so far as they can tell, no-one has died in Norway for the past three days. 

While Alevitina was researching the consciousness of forests, she became interested in a (real) Russian philosopher, Fyodorov, who believed that it was possible, and indeed imperative, to resurrect dead people. He believed that Science! ought to be able to reassemble the actual atoms that the deceased were originally made up of and reconnect them with their souls, which must logically still exist somewhere. He also believed in aliens. Big Name Russians like Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky took him seriously. Fyodorov's "cosmism" naturally makes one think of contemporary theories about transhumanism and the singularity which flourish because social media has made it so easy for crackpots to link up with other crackpots.

So perhaps, while praising the book for its erudition and fractal complexity, we need to lightly chastise it for its slightly clunky artifice. Syvert gets a job in the death industry while finding out about his dead father and confronting the mortality of his mother; meanwhile other characters discourse on the philosophical nature of death and the plot arc carried over from the previous volume suggests that death may literally be coming to an end. Or perhaps we are merely gob-smacked that the poet laureate of  prawn sandwiches is telling something with the general shape of a story?

6

There's no doubt that the writing style is odd: even Knausgaard's advocates smile at the endless cups of coffee and showers. A reviewer in, I think, the Washington Post prefaced his positive remarks with "if Knausgaard is your thing..."

The characters all speak in the same register: it always sounds to me, slightly, as if a patient primary school teacher is addressing a bright but obstinate child. 

‘Have you got any music?’

‘My record player’s in my room. I don’t think you’ll like my records much, though.’
‘Don’t underestimate me, thank you very much. What do you listen to?’
‘Heavy metal.’
'Is that all'
'Yes'
'You don't look the type if you ask me.'

Or

‘Listen,’ she said, ‘I’m sorry for being so presumptuous. I’m a bit drunk, you see. Well, more than a bit, actually. I’m very drunk.’
‘Some people get happy when they’re drunk,’ I said.
‘I know. I do sometimes as well. Only not tonight, it seems.’
‘That’s OK. I accept you as you are,’ I said. She laughed. I laughed too.

There is a sometimes self-conscious frankness; characters are a little too inclined to say things like "I put the beers and cokes in the fridge, the crisps in the cupboard, then went to the toilet for a shit, only there was someone in there". It isn't entirely clear who these detailed first person narratives are spoken to: perhaps everyone in Norway now writes incredibly detailed auto-fiction. Christos Tsiolkas also has a tendency to follow his characters into the bathroom: it may be the price we pay for living inside their heads. And, of course, we're reading a translation; it may be that Norwegian has a formality that doesn't quite have an English equivalent. When Syvert (Norwegian) and Alevitina (Russian) finally meet, it isn't immediately clear that they are conversing in English. A couple of times, I wondered what Norwegian quirk the English was representing: for example, when Syvert's girl-friend is surprised by his use of the word "flabbergasted".  Everyone uses "loo" for "toilet".

7

Knausgaard's second book, A Time For Everything, included a huge long section about a relatively normal family doing relatively normal Knausgaardian things, but as the section rolls on, we realise that they are contemporaries of Noah, and the point of the section is to imagine what a literal global flood would be like, and how it might have been perceived by its victims. (Which, come to think of it, recalls Jesus' words about people carrying on living normal lives right up to the moment when Noah went into the Ark.) My guess is that the Morning Star quartet is going to turn out to be Knausgaard's take on a literal, Biblical apocalypse -- Lucifer and the resurrection of the dead and all -- from the point of view of ordinary people on the edge of it.  A secularised Left Behind, if you will.

One could imagine Ray Bradbury, say, dispensing with the rising of Lucifer and the resurrection of the dead in three florid pages. Someone like Salman Rushdie would have taken six hundred pages in three languages, implied that the whole thing is a metaphor and offended two major religions in the process. Knausgaard just tells it, takes it for granted; as if it's not even the most important thing that happened. (I often imagine how the news media would cope if there ever was contact with aliens or a major nuclear exchange. "But now, in other news...") It's not magical realism, but it's not really science fiction, either. It's happening in a world where you have to change babies' nappies and check with the hospital morgue about the paperwork and decide what you're having for dinner. A world where a cancer diagnosis is necessarily followed by a discussion of whether it's better to take the train or the coach to the hospital. Syvert realises that he has promised to visit his maybe terminally ill mother on the same day that the girl he has developed the obsessive crush on has asked him for a date. Which is very much how life is. The big stuff is enmeshed in the small stuff; the small stuff is what we see the big stuff through.

It's compelling and gripping and several of the characters feel real in a way that fictional characters hardly ever do. It's eight hundred pages long and I wish I read Norwegian so I could plunge straight into volume three.

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