Valdemar wasn’t a Nazi, even if a lot of people thought he was. When he spoke about the Third Realm, it wasn’t the Nazis he was talking about but 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.
My sensibilities haven’t really jibed with Karl Ove Knausgård’s writing (I didn’t get past the first volume of his much-lauded “Min kamp” series), and while I need to admit that I didn’t realise that The Third Realm was the third book in a new series when I decided to give it a try, I also have to state that I liked this a lot (and that there doesn’t seem to have been anything lost in starting the series here; this seems to be an alternate view of the same fantastical events from the first book, The Morning Star, with many of the same characters, and enough backstory that I never felt lost.) This reads as Sci Fi: a new star has appeared large and bright in the sky (but is it actually a star?) and it seems to be having some strange effects on Earth below (or are they all coincidences?) And like all the best of Sci Fi, Knausgård uses his concept to explore the human condition — consciousness, madness, the basis of reality — while exposing moments of relatable truth in mundane interactions, writing engagingly of the fells, fjords, and mountain pools of the Norwegian setting, and propulsively describing strange and uncanny events. My mind was piqued and entertained throughout, and I can definitely see myself going back to catch up on the other books in this series. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
The psychosis occurs when the mania exhausts itself, when the encounter with reality is the only thing left for it (and mania fears reality more than anything else). The psychosis is like one of the three doors in the folk tales, the one that must never be opened no matter what. It mustn’t be opened. Everyone knows. And yet it always gets opened in the end. When faced with nothing and something, you choose something first.
The novel begins with Tove — a painter, on seaside holiday with her family — who has a history of psychosis, and has decided to stop taking her meds. This leads to dark depression, terrifying voices, and when her mind shifts to mania, an upsurge in creativity with inspiration from Norse mythology, Jungian archetypes, and unbridled eroticism. Her husband suggests that she’s a “neosymbolist” or a “postmythologist”, with Tove retorting that while he’s interested in categorising, she focuses on decategorising. And I think that’s important because anytime an author writes a conversation like this, I assume he’s speaking for himself: throughout The Third Realm Knausgård has various characters discuss and create art, architecture, and music, and whether it’s a memorial building, third wave black metal, or a bipolar artist painting nude self-portraits, these characters consider and reject cultural touchstones (trolls, crofters, and underground halls) and strive for something more authentic and unformed. Tove says of her work (and I’m assuming this is Knausgård commenting on his own writing efforts):
I wanted my drawings to smell, to stink, to seep and bleed, writhe and squirm. But I hadn’t succeeded. I told myself it was the fault of drawing itself, the very form of expression. The pen stroke served only to encase and bring under control, rationalising everything and thereby rendering it tame.
So the plotline of this novel — often fantastical, with the mysterious new star seemingly affecting affairs below — seems very free form, with people going about their routine lives (drinking wine and eating prawns and putting the kids to bed), while outside these ordinary walls, other people are going missing, enacting bloody rituals, having strokes, and refusing to die. For every weird happenstance (a young woman who opened the door to her landlords’ hysterical son now wonders if he was even real, people seemingly stopped dying as soon as the star appeared, a round-faced stranger keeps popping up who seems to know everyone’s business) there are rational people investigating, and explaining, what’s going on: the detective, the journalist, the neuroscientist. While I started by calling this Sci Fi (because of the star — or is it a comet? A UFO, as one character muses?), this novel kind of defies categorisation; Knausgård seems less interested in neosymbolism than in decategorisation; in unshackling his ideas from the chains of the mode of their expression (which, yes, could be argued to be what he was aiming for with the “Min kamp” series, too, but autofiction on the minutiae of his ordinary life was less interesting to me). This shackling — the inability to express oneself without resorting to the artificiality of language — is the key conflict of the human experience, and this ironic discord is present down to the level of our brain tissue, as seen on an MRI:
It was like looking into the unknown. It was a language, but one so foreign and incomprehensible it might just as well have been delivered to us from outer space. The truly unfathomable thing was that it was ourselves we were looking at. That what was made manifest to us was our very coding of the world around us and all that we were. The mystery was that from the inside it didn’t feel like code at all, but the world itself.
The nature of reality (and especially its inconstancy between different minds), the division between life and death (and what comes after), what makes a moral life: these are all important questions being explored by this novel. But as the star continues to shine, and people continue to mysteriously suffer strokes, there is excitement in the plot as some of those sufferers awake with a message:
“The ddoor …” he said.
I held his gaze.
“... is oop …”
“He’s saying the door’s open,” said Mum. “Yes, you’ve said so a number times already, Mikael, but I really haven’t a clue what you’re talking about!”
She gave a laugh and glanced at me.
Her cold eyes were full of unease.
It turns out that starting at book three in this series was a good thing: I find myself compelled to go both backwards and forwards with this strange story. Happilt jibing with Knausgård on this one!
