How Do You Write About the Inexplicable?

The novels rifle through the history of thought and culture, tracing the paths existential unknowns have carved. The second book in the series, “The Wolves of Eternity,” is concerned partly with techno-futurists who seek to defeat death through science; “The Third Realm,” from 2024, follows Norwegian black-metal bands who begin summoning the Devil for theatrical effect but end up believing in, and channelling, dark forces. There are countless ways to domesticate the unknown by cozying up to it, and many of them are found in the novels: addicts embrace self-destruction, romantics read the Romantics, and so on. Still, the advent of the star unsettles these familiar pathways. The unknown actually appears, as in an allegory, and it doesn’t explain itself.

Knausgaard started the first book during the pandemic, he told me. “And I wrote into the pandemic. And that book is about a danger from outside, threatening.” He recalled sitting with his family in London, hearing the sirens, understanding that a large, unknown, and overwhelming force had arrived in the world. The new books take this feeling and generalize it. We’re all going to die; we all get older, our lives and the world flowing away from us, and so we try to habituate ourselves to time and to death. Still, these forces rise up, as alien as ever, reminding us that it’s not they who live in our world, but we who live in theirs.

Knausgaard slips easily into this way of looking at life. In London, he haunted Deptford, the part of the city where the playwright Christopher Marlowe is buried; “The School of Night” is concerned partly with Marlowe’s play “Doctor Faustus.” “I knew I wanted to set a novel there,” Knausgaard told me. “Because I’m incredibly fascinated with the fact that what separates us is time, and I don’t know what time is.” The novel’s protagonist, Kristian, thinks that the essence of death is “absence”: absence is “the shadow of death.” When we feel the absence of the dead, that’s because we no longer coincide with them in time—and yet time, though clearly real, is also profoundly mysterious. Are the dead absent, or is time somehow an illusion? For those who grieve, like Kristian, no question could be more important. What does it mean to live without an answer?

It took me a while to adjust to the world of “The Morning Star” and its sequels. I have two small children at home, and so my life is all about life—I’m surrounded at all times by growth and learning, accomplishment and development, vitality and joy. And I’m also, professionally and personally, committed to the value of rational explanation. “The boundary between the rational and the irrational is almost as absolute as that between life and death,” one character in the series reflects. “A rational perspective can entertain nothing else.” The irrational, he continues, including belief in God, has therefore “been allocated its own designated sphere, a bit like a children’s table at a family celebration, where belief rather than knowledge dictates the truth. . . . It is where the children sit, with their children’s food, indulging in their children’s matters, while the grown-ups run the world.”

This view of things was like a barrier between me and the books. Two experiences broke it down. First, I attended a conference on artificial intelligence, where I moderated a couple of panels; I had conversations with scientists about what consciousness is, and whether machines could have it, and I was struck by how even people at the forefront of our technological civilization embrace quasi-mystical speculations about souls and minds that might have made sense hundreds of years ago. They thought of themselves as hyperrational, but lived with mystery, too.

And then I had a series of conversations with my son, who is seven, about death. Over a period of months, he asked me, “Will I die?” and “Will you die?” He had more questions: Why do living things age? Is Heaven real? Will we ever know what happens after death for sure? On his own, he arrived at the ancient philosophical idea with which Knausgaard begins “The School of Night”: “There is no reason to be afraid of death,” Kristian writes, since “when we exist, death is not; and when death exists, we are not.” This, he notes, is more or less “how Epicurus put it a long time ago.” Seven, it turns out, is the age at which philosophy begins.