On a winter’s morning, outside the Three Lives bookstore in New York’s West Village, Karl Ove Knausgård has just finished signing copies of his latest novel, The School of Night. His features are familiar from the dustjackets – the gray-blue eyes, the grizzled beard – but he is surprisingly tall and his signature silver mane is now cropped short around the ears. Gone, too, are the cigarettes, traded for a vape.

The School of Night is the fourth novel in Knausgård’s “Morning Star” series. It takes its name from a secret society of Elizabethan poets and scientists, which included the explorer Sir Walter Raleigh and the play-wright Christopher Marlowe. Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus looms over the story, which follows Kristian Hadeland, a narcissistic young art student in 1980s London. He engages in a Faustian pact to realize his dreams as an artist with the help of a mysterious Mephistophelean figure called Hans. It’s all brilliantly diabolical. “None of this was planned,” Knausgård says. “I never know what’s going to happen in a novel. I believe in it if it just turns up in front of me somehow. Then, when I start to write, things just fall into place.”

This is an unsettling admission for readers of Knausgård, especially those who are new to his daunting output. The School of Night runs for more than 500 pages – and seven novels are planned for the series. But Knausgård pulls it off, marrying his exhaustive character studies with a compelling plot that is both eerie and addictive.

The author has lived in London since 2017, when he moved from Stockholm to be with his fiancée, now his third wife. He is an avowed Anglophile, having grown up listening to British bands, reading NME and following Premier League soccer. This was a “completely different world” from the one he knew from his childhood on the southern Norwegian island of Tromøy. It was one he wished to recreate with The School of Night: “I can’t really write about London now. There has to be some element of fiction for me in these books. So I tried to recreate the bleak........

© The Spectator