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The School of Night is the fourth book in Karl Ove Knausgaard’s The Morning Star series.

It feels both perfect and insulting to apply that word ’series’ here; perfect, because the protagonist of the novel, Kristian Hadeland, is a photographer who obsessively arranges and rearranges his photographic series, and insulting because it’s impossible to use the word without its streaming-services baggage.

The name matters, however, because as the reader progresses through the (long) volumes – four of which have so far been translated, with the fifth, Arendal, slated for English publication in January 2027 – the question of how the parts relate to the whole feels more and more essential, and especially so in The School of Night.

’Cycle’ might be an alternative term, but it sounds pretty pretentious, carries with it its own fantasy-genre baggage, and wouldn’t be strictly accurate either. ’Sequence’ would be technically accurate, but despite also sounding pretentious, says nothing at all except that the books follow each other. Since two more volumes will follow Arendal, we could use ‘septology’ – but that’s just ridiculous. (Proust’s In Search of Lost Time evades this naming problem by claiming that its six volumes constitute a single novel).

So, alas, ‘series’ must remain. But this seems to be what The School of Night wants, through showing us photographic series and also record collections, with Kristian offering us, at several points, quite explicit theories of arrangement: broadly, that works must be ordered so that one gives something to the next, either by similarity or by contrast, making it possible to progress stage-wise so that a final photograph/record might be completely different to the first but that it is possible to appreciate all of the intermediary shifts which constitute the distance between them.

The School of Night follows, for example, a strand about evil/Satanism backwards in time, from a present-day satanic murder ritual which occurs in the preceding novel, The Third Realm, to an (accidental) murder in the 1980s and its resonances with Christopher Marlowe and Doctor Faustus. Kristian Hadeland, the novel suggests, makes a ‘deal with the devil’ for his international success as a photographer.

I put the phrase ‘deal with the devil’ in quotation marks, and yet where this novel differs from the previous three in the series, is that we are now encouraged to take such an idea literally.

In books one-three, when we encounter things like: the strange star, a kind of second sun, which gives the series its name; the satanic murders; visions of fire; descriptions of the afterlife attached to near death experiences – we are in the uncertain realm which the theorist Tzvetan Todorov calls the Fantastic.

The Fantastic means that we do not yet know if we are in the Uncanny – in which everything can be rationally explained (e.g., the people having visions are insane and the star is a scientific anomaly) – or in the Marvellous, in which the causes for phenomena are truly supernatural. A novel which remains uncertain on this point for most of the narrative is thus resolved as either the Fantastic-Uncanny or the Fantastic-Marvellous.

The simultaneously harrowing and chilling ending of The School of Night seems to resolve this question for the series: we are in the Fantastic-Marvellous.

But The School of Night shifts from the preceding Morning Star books in several further ways. The obvious ones are that: it is the first in the series which is not multi-perspective – an interesting feature in itself – and it is significantly darker. Most importantly, perhaps, it reads more consciously like a novel than any of the previous books, which feel close to the autofiction (for want of a better term) of My Struggle. For example, in a very un-Knausgaard move, there is a clear plot.

It feels, too, like it could work as a stand-alone novel in a way that the others don’t – which makes me wonder if The School of Night is actually a good entry point for someone unfamiliar with Knausgaard. (Perhaps this is in part why it has been listed for the National Book Award).

I also wonder if it’s technically the strongest in the series and if, in a few years, it will become prescribed on writing MAs as a kind of guidebook for such concepts as ‘character’ and ‘interiority’. Lolita is a comparison I want to reach for because Knausgaard does a tremendous job of getting us close to Kristian, of encouraging us to share his mind-space despite the fact that he is an almost irredeemable ass.

The greatest narrative strength, though, is simply how well Knausgaard gets us to imagine what it is like to be this particular photographer, what it is like to be Kristian – how photography is his way of being in the world; how he looks at images and colours and light – life – only as the potential for photographs.

I read The School of Night just before going to the Kruger National Park, which I’m glad about, because I think all of Kristian/Knausgaard’s philosophising about photography made me think about my game viewing more consciously.

What’s unique about game drives as an activity, particularly when you are self-driving, is how seriously you are required to look at things.

For the time that you are in the game reserve, your life revolves around the act of looking – you wake up before 5am and get into a car in which you spend eight+ hours staring out the window and trying to detect a small band of slightly different orange-brown within hectares of shrubveld.

Even though you aren’t seeing animals most of the time, the fact that you are constantly trying to find them lends an intensity to your looking; you are never only passively looking, or you are doing your best never to be so, because the momentary lapse can mean missing out on a lion, leopard, eagle, sable antelope. I can’t think of any other activity in which you look so intensely at something for so long – except, perhaps, painting or photography.

But one thing which differs between the visual arts and writing is the necessity of naming: a photographer doesn’t need to know the difference between a ‘cornice’ and an ‘apse’ in order to photograph either of these things – she may not even need to know that the broader object is a ‘building’ – whereas a writer does in order to describe them.

Except it isn’t right to say that having / not having names would make no difference to the resultant photograph because such knowledge alters the viewer’s relationship to the object.

This is especially so for things in nature – the difference between architectural features may not be so important after all – but something more essential is elided if ‘leadwood’ and ‘acacia’ are conflated into ‘tree.’

Naming, as Jean McNeil explains in Latitudes, is a kind of power, ‘a refutation of chaos;’ giving something a name is a precondition for having knowledge of it. Naming is a way of according external reality with consciousness – we name things so that the world outside matches up with the world inside. Birding is perhaps the finest example of this, as McNeil reflects during her training as a safari guide:

‘Now I know what keeps the hardcore birdwatchers addicted. It isn’t after all the list-checking but the authority, the stability and certainty in being able to say night heron, Hartlaub’s turaco, golden-breasted starling, double-banded sandgrouse. Our brain loves order and control, and behold, the 2,477 species of African birds are there to oblige us.’

But naming, McNeil says, is also a kind of ‘ugly dismemberment,’ requiring the thing described to be chopped up into its component pieces: once something is named, our knowledge of it is circumscribed, delineated – and the result, while neater and more comfortable, is necessarily smaller.

One of the undercurrents of Latitudes is that this distance between name and thing is particularly absurd when it comes to place, to specific places – because what are the thousands of bird names, tree names, mammal names, compared to the experience of being within the landscape?

See you in two weeks,
Blake