Penguin
Review by Walter Cummins
Stories of alternative realities are especially popular today. When I was teaching in an MFA program, more and more young students were abandoning literary realism to immerse in invented worlds, some of them very impressively. My own daughters and granddaughter are drawn to the genre, eagerly absorbing linked novels of fabricated realms. As much as I admired my students’ abilities to construct complex realities, unlike my family, I do not seek out published examples. It’s not that I’m convinced the boundaries of standard realism embody all that is. Far from it. But I prefer to be intrigued by the possibilities of more things in heaven and earth that my philosophy can dream without leaving behind the seeming details of the realm I believe I function in day by day, even if they are only the shadows of Plato’s cave.
That’s why I like Knausgaard’s The Third Realm so much. This novel, the third in a linked group called the Morning Star series, offers significant clues that something very different is taking place in the world around us. But most of the people in this group of fictions behave the way I believe my actual neighbors would. With few exceptions, they just acknowledge the phenomena, admitting that what’s going one is strange but quickly shifting their attention to what really concerns them, like what they are going to have for dinner.
Rather than focus on a single plot, the novel gathers a group of incidents told from the first-person perspective of various characters—men and women, young and old, several returning more than once or playing a role in other’s incidents, all living in Western Norway. Knausgaard, in Martin Aitkin’s English version, makes each of these people unique and interesting, as varied as they are—from Jarle, a physician, writing a philosophical book called “Maps of the Brain” to the investigations of Gier, a detective assigned to solving the flaying murder of three heavy metal band members. Jarle gropes with ideas central to the issues of this novel: “Is it the case that we humans emerge as conscious beings only in the instant the world around us becomes manifest within us?” And what do vicious killings have to do with “normal” life?
It’s not until the novel’s second story, that in the midst of planning a barbecue told from Gaute’s perspective, a new star appears in the sky, “silently brilliant.” His friend Martin, a dinner guest, dismisses it as a supernova. The two couples shrug it off and clear the table for dessert. Later that evening Gaute finds a pregnancy test in his wife’s, Elizabeth’s, bag. That’s what dumbfounds him, not the star. When the next morning Gaute, a teacher, arrives at his school, “at least among the students in the playground, the star was old news. ”
Other characters in various stories in the novel acknowledge the existence the star, with a few brief thoughts but just temporary attention. It is Elizabeth, a pastor, who points out a coincidental connection with the appearance of the star and the fact that the same day people in the novel’s country, Norway, stopped dying. Gaute, her husband, shrugs off the link: “That’s astrology, that is. The idea that the stars can affect our lives on earth. You don’t believe that, do you?”
Perhaps Knausgaard is so effective at character creation because he made thousands of readers captives of his dramatization of his own life in the six-volume autobiographical novel, My Struggle. He appears to know the nine invented figures of this novel as fully as he knew himself. But for an author to know his people does not mean that those people are really aware of what is going on around them.
For, example the novel opens from the perspective of Tove, an artist with mental issues, including an actual hospitalization, who is beginning a family holiday with her husband, Arne, adolescent daughter, and twin sons. She is desperate to be normal but, as she takes long walks in the night and isolates herself with her painting in progress, knows she is not in control of herself. And it is also clear that her family has only a vague idea of what is happening to Tove.
Tove’s behavior can be explained by mental illness, but in the next incident told by Gaute, this husband becomes obsessively convinced that his wife, Elizabeth, is having an affair and actually plans for a divorce, although he is completely wrong. If people are failing to understand what is taking place in their own lives, could they be equally wrong about the significance of a new star high above them?
The novel’s title comes from a statement by the mesmerizing Valdemar, as reported by nineteen-year-old Line: “… he was talking about … something people had believed in the Middle Ages, that the First Realm was the age of God, the Second Realm the age of Christ, the Third Realm the age of the Holy Spirit.” She is both drawn and repulsed by him and the power of his black metal music, finally—impregnated by him—chooses to join him for her future. Is she right about accepting his realm?
As the novel moves more and more toward its conclusion, strange phenomena take on a greater role. Gier, the detective, asserts to Elizabeth, the pastor, that the Devil might be the musicians’ murderer. Elizabeth is shaken: “It was as if the mere thought, his entertaining of the idea that the Devil actually existed, made everything else seem trivial and stupid, and all that was human, the ordinary things we did and said, became cast in a doomful light. I couldn’t quite grasp exactly what it was that I felt, or why, but it had to do with just that. ” Yet when Elizabeth has the thought that only God can save us, she realizes that she does not believe in God and that “We were all alone.”
At the very end of the novel, Tove, the evening before she is to be released from a mental institution, is approached by Jesper, the surviving band member, arrested and confined for the murder of the others, who finally breaks silence and speaks, telling her that “he” and his kind are leaving and that her task will be revealed to her. Then the new star disappears. Our reality remains a mystery,
