Ramsvik having done so meant only that he hadn’t been dead.” The star “was beautiful. The writing mostly lands like Frankenstein’s boot: “Death is irreversible. The more prosaic explanation – “Armageddon!” – is sadly so much less interesting than that. Has an obscene figure, similar to the controversial life-extension guru Aubrey de Grey, unleashed a kind of genetic mutation that means no life can really die, which has run infernally amok? The recurring theme, from the epigraph onwards, is something along the lines of the “death of death”, with various characters and animals apparently reappearing after dying. Suffice to say none of the characters’ plotlines go anywhere very interesting (or logical) and some of the timelines make no sense at all. (Most crassly in the case of a writer with a mistreated wife suffering from psychosis.) The sci-fi/horror storyline, such as it is, takes place in a kind of Roswell version of Bergen in southern Norway, where the appearance of a huge and luminous star in the sky dislocates the surrounding physical world and the lives of nine locals, whose situations echo aspects of Knausgaard’s own life, familiar to readers of My Struggle and Seasons. That The Morning Star fails on so many levels then is a bewildering and not especially entertaining experience. All of which is to say that the signs for a Knausgaardian metaphysical thriller were, at the very least, opaque but intriguing. Knausgaard has written about God and death with illuminating purpose throughout his career, from retelling the history of the angels in the early novel A Time for Everything, to the grotesque death of his alcoholic father in My Struggle – the key, defining event in the series.

In 2019, the final instalment of his epic six-volume work of autobiographical fiction, My Struggle – which made him a global literary superstar – was published outside his native Norway, concluding with the line: “I am no longer a writer.” Yet despite apparently abandoning literary fiction, in the Seasons quartet of short essays published in English around the time of Why I Write, Knausgaard refers to working on a new book, a “sort-of thriller” with a “religious theme”. “It was almost as if the plot hypnotised me,” he said.

He described the experience as captivating entertainment, prompting a flurry of charged emotions, but which left him “empty… in an unpleasant way”. In Why I Write, a characteristically nuanced lecture on art and creativity delivered in 2017, Karl Ove Knausgaard reflected on watching the TV phenomenon Game of Thrones.

Karl ove knausgaard the morning star