Category: Scandinavian Literature

Art, God, and Madness – Jon Fosse’s Melancholy I-II

Jon Fosse’s novel Melancholy, through four linked episodes, makes a forceful argument for what being a certain kind of artist actually means and feels like. Taking the real 19th century Norwegian painter Lars Hertervig as its central figure, a man who was released from an asylum as incurably mad and who ended his days destitute in a poorhouse while still having created many masterpieces, Fosse finds Lars’ artistic power to be inextricably linked to his ability to see what others could not and place it on the canvas. He was great precisely because he was mad, mad because he was great. This special sight, his gift, in both its glory and its terror is presented not only through what Fosse writes, but also how he writes it. Preceding those extraordinary works Septology and Aliss at the Fire, Melancholy is every bit as extraordinary as them in its use of language. It’s a truly beautiful work.

Four episodes comprise the novel, each giving us a new angle from which to observe Lars himself. In the first and longest, we follow Lars for a single feverish afternoon in Düsseldorf in 1853 as he gets kicked out of his rented rooms and wanders between them and a pub frequented by others from the art academy where he studies. The second sees Lars in 1856, already trapped within an asylum and still less in control of his mind than he was even in the first section. The third deals with a writer, Vidme, who in 1991 is trying to write about Lars, and decides to visit a pastor to enquire about returning to the Norwegian Church. The fourth and final section follows one of Lars’ sisters, Oline, shortly after Lars’ death in 1902, as she tries to hold onto life in the present as memories and age keep her drifting back mentally into the past.

Lars is there, forcefully, for the reader from Melancholy’s very first words – “I am lying in bed…” The man we get acquainted with strikes us immediately by his strangeness and his child-like vulnerability. He is in love with his landlady’s daughter, Helene, a fifteen-year-old girl, and by the novel’s beginning has already had a moment of rapture with her. Not sex, but something stranger – “And then Helene Winckelmann stood there and looked at him, with hair falling down from the centre part over a small round face with pale blue eyes, with a small little mouth, a small chin. With eyes that shined. Hair flowing below her shoulders. Pale, flowing hair. And then a smile on her mouth. And then her eyes, that opened towards him. And out from her eyes came the brightest light he had ever seen”.

This is chaste, the kind of thing that is reminiscent of a saint’s vision. Lars is innocent in other ways too. For one, he’s incredibly susceptible to others’ words. At the inn, Malkasten, the other artists taunt him, saying Helene is hiding there waiting for him, and he believes them as readily as he believes himself when he convinces himself that she has telepathically called him back to the house where he has just been thrown out onto the street. He seems petulant rather than upset at being mistreated, mentally tapping his feet while he waits to be allowed to go and find Helene again. At the same time, we notice the purity of his belief in his own artistry. Over and over, he remarks mentally that he is an artist. It’s not as if he fears he is not one, rather it is the fixed core of an identity that is otherwise totally unstable.

For Lars is, admittedly, barking mad. Just as he has these beautiful visions with Helene, he has visions of a darker sort too. He sees black clothes hovering and trying to smother him. His anger is ferocious, and he declares an intention to kill every single other painter on a regular basis. His mood swings from elevation into despair. He loves Helene with every tick but with every tock believes, wholly without any textual evidence, that she is actually trying to get rid of him to pursue a sexual relationship with her uncle.

These negative qualities become still more pronounced once Lars is incarcerated in the asylum in Melancholy’s second section. Where in the first section he referred to how Helene’s uncle would “do things” to her, now he expresses a hatred of all women as mere whores and spends a considerable amount of the section touching his penis against the guard’s explicit instructions. Deprived of his art, all of Lars’ worst qualities are magnified. Unsurprisingly, ripping out the core of someone’s identity is no way to bring them back to anything approaching sanity. While the novel at no point makes any suggestion that Lars is even several kilometres away from sanity, it presents those who challenge his mild delusions as only making things worse – whether Helene’s uncle, the guard at the asylum, or the workers of the poorhouse in the final section – and reminds us of the dire state of mental health treatment in past centuries.

In some sense though, it doesn’t matter what personality Lars has, or what the external world does to him. What matters is only the implicit argument of Melancholy that being an artist (of a certain sort) can bring us closer to God or, if you prefer, something higher. To some vision of the sort Lars experiences with Helene, which can provide succour for a whole life. Perhaps the best way of exploring this, however, is to shift from the content of the text to how that content is itself presented, the texture of it. For all of the oddities of Fosse’s style – the shifting times, the shifting perspectives, the repetition – turn the novel into something more like a picture than a prose work, and bring the reader to the borderlands of something she would be hard pressed not to call mystical in nature.

Melancholy is a book that drifts from the now into the then, and the real into the unreal. Even without considering the black clothesthat attack Lars, he travels in his mind while remaining physically in one place – to Helene’s transfiguration, to his departure from Stavanger on the boat, to images of his father and sister Elizabeth underwater. Vidme, the writer, drifts between what he expected of his meeting with the pastor, and what he actually experiences. And Oline, in the final sections, drifts between the drudgery of her aged life (emphasised by repeated struggles to maintain control over her bodily functions and trips to the outhouse) and the wonder of her childhood with Lars in the Norwegian countryside. Overall, the technique is less advanced than it is in Aliss at the Fire, but still, we might go from now to then with only an “and” to warn us.

The impression of such shifts is that life is turned into a thing of layers, a little like those transparent sheets we place and shift around for an overhead projector. It gains a wholeness and interconnectedness from the prose which in its lived moments it can seem to lack. Even as the present moment is devalued, something we see most concretely in the way Lars will often talk to people who aren’t there, or fail to talk to those who are, individual experience is placed on a still higher plane.

Something similar happens when we think of the novel’s willingness to shift between the first and third person within the sections. It’s almost like the characters in Melancholy decide from time to time to turn away from their embodied lives and talk directly to us, reflecting on themselves and their fates from a strange new distance. Here again, loosening themselves from the physical world, the emphasis seems to be placed on life seen as flux rather than constancy. This is something that is in evidence also from Lars’ shifting moods and liquid identity. Perhaps I can venture to say that if the text presents the leap from first person to third as no great jump, it implies the leap to another perspective or other life is no great challenge either.

Perhaps the most unique aspect of Melancholy’s prose in comparison to other fiction is, however, its use of repetition. Many writers aim at the telling detail or the careful avoidance of cliché as they craft their images, so that their works build up huge beautiful flat scenes like artful, intricately layered watercolours. Fosse does not even work from the same paints. He uses oils. That is why it is so hard to quote him. Not just because he writes long flowing sentences, but because taking individual pieces from the work is like chipping off some paint, no, varnish, and expecting it to tell us something about the picture it was trying to represent. Fosse’s works are thick, lumpy, textured things. He builds up impressions through repeated words – “white” and “black”, or “eyes”. Perhaps this is closer to how the world really comes to us moment to moment – wave after wave of the same vision with only slight differences each time.

What matters here is the effect: the reader is forced to confront a kind of loosening of the bond between text and meaning. We sense that here what is important is not what is in the text but what lies behind it, the “silent language” Fosse refers to in his Nobel Prize speech. No text tells us how to interpret this. There’s no evidence for the pub Malkasten being like Hell other than the overwhelming impression on my soul caused by page after page of Fosse’s prose. In the same way, God isn’t a character, but the text brings us closer to the mystical way of thinking by showing us what it looks like, what it feels like. We see things as an artist, a particular artist, perhaps saw them. The light and dark, the magic and wonder of shifting impressions, shifting times, intense visions – these things make us look up from the page to see the world as being closer, perhaps, to the kind it is to a believer.

Vidme, in the third section, is ultimately rejected by the pastor. She says she has read one of his books and dislikes the mystical inclinations in it. Lars himself is raised a Quaker, a group that look for their own inner light rather than waiting to be told how to live. The emphasis on interconnectedness made me think a little bit about Spinoza, who saw the everything as one substance, and his successor Schopenhauer, who believed that if we could “still” our will, we could notice that all things are interconnected and simply manifestations of the same single longing. Reading Melancholy I certainly felt the strange connections it seemed to want me to find.

In the end, Fosse himself did not return to the Norwegian Church, neither when Melancholy was written in the late 1990s, nor later. Instead, around 2012 he became a Catholic, a church which has historically been far more accommodating to mystics. Reflecting now as I come to the end of this post, I realise I have perhaps given the wrong impression when I wrote about the role of God in this novel. Rather, Melancholy expresses a longing for God, but not yet a success in finding Him. We are still far away from the awesome beauty of Septology, where God is right there on the page and the single salvatory force holding the painter Asle’s life together. This lack makes Melancholy a sadder book, as its title implies, but still far from a hopeless one. It remains a beautiful, wonderful, if occasionally insane, novel, and perhaps the best vision of what it means to be an artist that I have yet read.

Jon Fosse – Scenes from a Childhood

Jon Fosse’s collection of shorter pieces, Scenes from a Childhood, contains prose so dreadful I would be embarrassed to put my own name next to it. I loved Septology and Aliss at the Fire, but the quality gap between those works and this one is titanic. I also do mean that word “quality”, because this blog has seen plenty of works that I did not enjoy grace its (web) pages, such as most recently Handke’s Goalie’s Anxiety, works in which nevertheless I was able to find literary merit and interesting ideas. Scenes from a Childhood is just shockingly bad, however. The words are bad, the style dead, the ideas thin. There’s a chance that in writing this post I might succeed in redeeming the book in my eyes, but I think the more likely outcome is that by seeing the negatives, we might instead understand how to do better.

Scenes from a Childhood is a hodgepodge of prose from throughout Fosse’s career. “How it Started” is a story of first love; Scenes from a Childhood collects various semi-autobiographical vignettes from Fosse’s own life, most no more than half a page; “And Then My Dog Will Come Back To Me” is a revenge fantasy where the narrator’s dog is killed by a neighbour, so the narrator murders the neighbour; “Dreamt in Stone” seems to be about epilepsy and God; finally, “Little Sister” recounts a few events in the life of a very small boy. The collection is not uniformly bad, with “How it Started” being a particular highlight. However, generally, the quality really is this low.

Scenes from a Childhood

We can take a look at Scenes from a Childhood as representative of the bad tendencies here. After all, it has given its name to the collection. Even with just Septology under our belts, we can recognise images and scenes from that work, done here too. (Old sheds, certain cafes and characters, teen bands, a dying grandmother). Unlike Septology, however, Fosse’s prose entirely lacks magic here.

Take a random example:

ASLE WANTS A DOG OF HIS OWN

On Sundays when he was little Asle and his parents used to go for walks. They used to walk past a little house and the man who lived there had a little white dog with black spots. Whenever they walked past the house the dog leaped over to Asle, who patted it and talked to it. Asle wants a dog for himself so badly but his mother says he can’t have one. Asle wants a dog of his own.

I want to make clear from the start that this is not the shortest, nor the simplest of the stories. Many others are worse. This one is representative of them, however, in style. We have here simple sentences, reflecting perhaps the relatively simple consciousness of Asle’s experience (sometimes we have an “I” instead). There is none of that flowing consciousness expressed through run-on sentences which we are used to from Septology or Aliss, just declarative sentences without any energy behind them at all. Those aspects of Fosse’s work that work brilliantly when enveloped in the mystical power of those breath-like sentences in those stories, instead are unexciting here – for example, his repetition of the word “dog”. In normal prose, repetition can quickly become monotony.

And what of the ideas? Asle sees a dog and wants one but can’t have one. Each of the scenes in Scenes from a Childhood is similar to this. Asle rides a bike and likes it. Asle reads a book and likes it. Asle is nervous about playing at a concert with friends. The problem with these stories is that they are flat. There is only ever one idea at a time, one single moment from the narrator’s past which can only be interpreted emotionally: this happened, and this was how he felt. Such an approach means we cannot actually think about these stories, because there is nothing at all to think about.

Rather than, as my blurb claims, these stories showing short prose “occasions some of [Fosse’s] greatest works”, we see that by paring down the stories and depriving them of any length, the result is utterly discardable. There is no accumulation of images to give even the mundane its strength. There’s no rhythm to the prose to let it wash over us. And there is no depth to the content, which after all can be gained in a pinch by letting us look at the same puddle from different angles. Without length, the puddle has to be deep, for we only have one angle to look at it from.

What, we might desperately ask, of the topic? Is this not so relatable? This is the weakest defence a book can have. Indeed, as a child (and now) I have felt anxious, or excited, or wanted things I cannot have. Even, growing up in rural Scotland, a few of the scenarios in Scenes from a Childhood were familiar to me in their specifics. But relatability is never an end, only a means. Relatability brings us in; good literature takes that closeness and does something with that, like revealing some tension or strain under the surface of our lives. Fosse here does not do this. He just writes something we know and stops. The problem is that relatability is easy. It’s how popular music, art, and literature works. Nothing against them, but Fosse needs to do more, both with his prose and with his ideas, than happens here.

“And Then My Dog Will Come Back To Me”

“And Then My Dog Will Come Back To Me” is quite a different work. The novella is much longer than everything else in the collection, and since it involves murder, it is less likely to be something we as readers relate to from our personal histories. However, those of us with pets might not struggle to imagine murdering anyone who hurt or killed them.

In any case, the novella is strange, and if nothing else a feat of imagination, at least it appears so. The man’s dog is shot, and one neighbour says it was another neighbour. When the man goes home, he sees his dog, dead, on the porch. At night the man gets on his boat, rows to the other neighbour’s house and stabs him with a pitchfork dipped in manure, before returning home. He digs a grave for the dog, speaks with a few neighbours, and then the story finishes with him admitting to the initial neighbour who told him of the murder that he did it.

If this sounds exciting or tense, it is not. As with the stories in Scenes from a Childhood itself, the dominant note is monotony. The dog dies, and the narrator is filled with a murderous rage. For the next twenty or thirty pages this is the single emotional note of the novella. We see quickly how little variety there is in such an emotion. “That fucker’s gonna die tonight” is repeated, over and over, until the neighbour does indeed die. No images of rage, no torrents or torments, just hate directed towards the neighbour until (and after) he is dead. It is actually not very exciting, and again – we sit there wondering if there is anything at all to interpret. There’s no motivation for the dog’s murder, just as there’s no complexity to the revenge. As a reader, you’re faced with the uncomfortable thought that there’s nothing to think about as you turn the pages.

Once the murder is complete the narrator behaves irrationally, failing to bury his dog and answering questions from his other neighbours in a way that would immediately throw suspicion upon him. There are moments of tenderness towards the dead dog, and moments of madness where the narrator seems confused about where the dog went after he has buried him. The tenderness is touching, and almost hints at a kind of metaphysical aspect to the story which the rest of the text does not really cater to:

“…I’m standing with the dog in my arms and rocking him back and forth like a baby and I say you have to go away now, far away, but it’s somewhere where it isn’t cold, it isn’t freezing, you need to go away now and I have to go now, I can’t stay standing like this, I have to just go, now, you’ll wait for me, I’ll be coming soon, you’ll be excited and wag your tail when I get there, because I’m coming too, soon now, it won’t be long…”

In general, however, the story just does not withstand any inspection. There are no motives to analyse, no nuances to the narrator’s emotions and only limited rationality to his actions. As far as literary murders go, it just does not do anything interesting. The prose has its moments, but that is the best I can say for it.

“How it Started”

The story I liked best in the collection is “How it Started”, which has much in common with Scenes from a Childhood. What separates them is the prose, which is vastly more musical, and which also gestures towards far more than does that other work. “How it Started” is about the first flush of teenage love or infatuation. Other stories covered the same, but merely described the scene. Here, prose and theme merge:

…when we ran up to the big attic, lay down on the floor, and when the others came running in, when the girls came in, when that girl in particular came in.

When she came in.

When she came in from break…

Here the repetition is conscious, rather than the result of (apparent) laziness. It reflects the shock and the butterflies in the chest, the break in the world’s continuity when someone we so earnestly want to notice us has come in and we can no longer sit idly but must take ourselves and be our best.

The prose also now flows:

When she came in from break, from all the breaks when you’d seen her, when she came in with her long hair, those small breasts just barely visible under her shirt, when she came running up the stairs and you knew that you’d never dare talk to her, as you wrestled and shouted there on the floor, playing with Geir or another one of your friends, when she came in you calmed down, you stopped kicking your legs, you stopped fooling around, joking, shouting, you calmed down, you were a bit embarrassed, you got up from the floor and suddenly you didn’t know where to go or what to do with yourself, your heart grew troubled because now she was there, she was near you, with her hair, her body, she was just a few yards away from you, so close, and you couldn’t talk to her even though she’d sent word to you two days before, even though one of her girlfriends had come up to you, giggling, and said she was supposed to say hi to you from her, from her, from her, the girl with the long hair. When she stood there, calmly, talking to one of the other girls, up in the half-dark attic at the pastor’s farm, with the other kids who went to youth group, and we all did, almost all the kids in the area went, when she stood there with her new breasts, her long hair, and she smiled at her girlfriend, and you stood there, stood there alone while the others wrestled, and felt a sadness grow large inside you, that was probably when it actually started.

That was when the music came to you.

There and then it came, and it’s never left.

I’ve quoted generously because this is finally good prose. It reflects a consciousness – anxious, excited. And it also shows more than just a scene by giving a sense of consequences – “that was probably when it actually started”. I presume this is the ability to write (as music standing in for creativity in general), but it might just as much be simply love. Either way, we have a sense of something higher, some significance stretching beyond the scene.

This nervous enraptured consciousness envelopes the prose. It brings us closer to the narrator and his struggle. For the first time, we have tension, which can grow over the story’s length because rather than a single paragraph we have five whole pages. We also, finally, have a sense of perspective, by which I mean that we can look onwards to higher meanings and consequences for a whole life. “And Then My Dog Will Come Back To Me” might have had this, but instead the narrator’s mind is so focused on revenge that there’s no opportunity for any kind of thought or reflection. Here is how “How it Started” ends:

That was how it started, in the dark, the rain, on a road along a shore, there were waves always beating, and skin that grew bigger and bigger. Her kiss was a mark on my skin, it was like it entered into my body and stayed there. She’s married now, her kids are grown, she’s a housewife and she usually goes to village parties with her husband. They were there the summer we played at the village party. She was there, but her body is more shapeless now. Her hair is short. Her breasts have grown much bigger.

This is magic prose because, like the kiss, it sticks with us. There’s more than what I’ve quoted, of course, but I hope here is enough to give a sense of the power of that moment when they kiss in the dark, and how that moment becomes indelible even as time passes.

Conclusion

All of this raises awkward questions, however. If the only thing separating “How it Started” from Scenes from a Childhood is long flowing sentences and a few ambiguous phrases that point towards something of higher significance, then doesn’t that almost devalue Fosse’s whole work? Or, at least, doesn’t it say that we can just do the same by taking anything mediocre we write about our own lives and removing the full stops to whip it into something Fossean with no difficulty?

In that case, of course, it would be obvious who we are imitating. Originality counts for something, so that most modern autobiographical prose seems just waiting to have “Sebaldean” slapped on it, and any kind of ranting prose at all will forever be indebted to Bernhard for blazing the trail. The precise way that Fosse builds up his rhythms and repetitions is not just casual or the work of a hack, and combining long sentences and repetitions with hints of the higher requires talent well deserving of the Nobel Committee’s praise.

From the perspective of someone looking for what to read, however, this collection is clearly not where Fosse’s talents are best displayed. Most of the stories here really do seem too easily written and too lacking in depth. 

Jon Fosse – Septology

When I wrote about Aliss at the Fire, I wondered whether it had now become necessary for anyone wanting to write stories about faith and religion to adopt a style like Jon Fosse’s. A style that shifts constantly, fluctuating between perspectives and making porous limits which normally seem solid. One feels adrift within a more mystical world, where God and faith are not idle thoughts but lived experiences. Now, having finished Fosse’s much longer Septology, I wonder whether I can even write a blog post about it without adopting the same style, which here reaches still greater heights of mystic power, and letting my sentences run and run, and my entire language become like a breath, going in and going out but never, except at the end of the post, finally ceasing. 

I will spare readers such an attempt. Instead, I will try to say a few words about the book. It is hard. Normally, if I like or dislike a book, I will annotate it heavily. My Septology has been only lightly touched, mainly just with marginal notes indicating what scene we are in. I underlined only a single phrase. This gives some indication of some of the strangeness of the text, which has no full stops and lives by commas, ands, and paragraph breaks. Much of the narrative here is mundane, repetitive stuff, the kind we might know from Samuel Beckett or Thomas Bernhard – a character’s struggle to persuade themselves to get out of bed or open the door. When moments of great beauty or significance arrive, they are entire paragraphs of reflection which gain their power by accumulation and contrast, and which whither and die when we try to extract them. 

Septology concerns a painter called Asle, who lives in the Norwegian countryside. He has a friend, almost a double, also called Asle, who lives in Bergen and suffers from alcoholism. There is another double-like figure in the form of Asle’s wife, Ales, who died some time ago of a mysterious illness. Other characters include Beyer, a gallerist, and Asleik, a farmer. There is also a somewhat sinister woman called Guro, who has her own double too. Our narrative is mostly of reflection. The first Asle is our narrator, and he uses the first person, but when he reminisces or transports himself to the life of the second Asle, he uses the third person, even if he seems to be thinking of his own past.  

Over Septology’s seven books narrator-Asle goes to Bergen several times, discovers his friend Asle passed out in the snow and takes him to the hospital, delivers some paintings to Beyer, has an artistic crisis and decides not to paint anymore, and decides to visit Asleik’s sister for a Christmas meal. But mostly he ruminates. As in Aliss at the Fire, Asle seems to see into his doppelgänger’s soul. He also sees into his own life’s story, seeing figures as he drives past the places of his past, and in such a way that we cannot know whether he falls into their world, or whether they emerge back out into his.  

Asle is not the other Asle. But they are almost one another, being both artists, both being bearers of the same name. Yet what is the meaning of this? Fosse is careful with names. Streets and restaurants are given simple names like “The Lane” or “Food and Drink”; so too are people – “The Teacher”, “The Bald Man”, and so on. One effect of this is to give every encounter a heavy sense of symbolism and significance, even if we cannot always identify at first glance what that might be. The second Asle, when met for the first time in a memory, is “The Namesake” – not the same, but bonded to him, nevertheless.  

When I really think hard about Septology, I can say that it is a book of suffering. And the two Asles are part of this. They have led divergent lives, with a common root in their art and countryside upbringing, and the split occurring when it comes to the matter of love. Narrator-Asle meets Ales by chance in a café in Bergen, and immediately they fall in a kind of magical, dreamlike love that seems to last until her death. The other Asle arrives in Bergen to go to The Art School there with a girl already following him, pregnant with his son – The Boy. He marries her, but within a year has already found someone else, Siv, a woman who studies at The Art School and who seems to offer a more fulfilling relationship than the suicidal Liv. But like the names, the relationships echo, and it seems – seems, because nothing in Septology is quite certain – that Asle is then unfaithful towards Siv with another woman, Guro, and Siv leaves him too.  

A harmonious home life, versus a chaotic one. But both are marked with tragedy and ultimate loneliness. Both Asles drank heavily when younger, but Ales’s Asle gave up – under pressure from her – whereas the other Asle did not. Early on in the novel we are faced with shocking images of the second Asle, “weighed down as he is now, so weighed down by his own stone, a trembling stone, a weight so heavy that it’s pushing him down into the ground, I think”, as he struggles even to get up to pour himself another drink. His life has completely collapsed with the breakdown of family life, and his thoughts seem to circle around suicide.  

The other Asle has also seen his life collapse. The love he has for Ales is so pure, so total (in a novel with much German, Ales’s similarity to Alles – “everything”, cannot be entirely coincidental), that her loss leaves her own Asle with deep, deep wounds too. He lives alone, he lives in the countryside, with barely a friend, and now his heart’s companion is gone. Though years have passed since then, the wounds remain. 

But still our narrator survives. He does not return to drink, he does not end his life. The reason is, without a doubt, his religion. Septology is a novel about faith’s ability to be a fortress that can protect us from the greatest injuries. Faith is this novel’s foundation and its source of power. Each of Septology’s seven sections begins with art, but each ends with Asle in prayer. Whenever he is in pain – and he often is, thinking of Ales and his loss – he takes his rosary and prays. The Our Fathers, Hail Mary’s, and Christ Have Mercy’s, stabilise him and help him cast off from the world when he needs to sleep. Because his life is so full of pain, these moments in the text feel fair and earned. Religious or not, we see that these moments are necessary – utterly vital and necessary – for Asle’s own survival.  

For the survival of pain is this story – not its complete defeat. We notice that for all the memories we encounter, Septology is also full of silences. Asle mentions, without remembering, the end to his drinking. And in truth aside from its beginning, the relationship with Ales is also a blank. We have to take on faith that the relationship was what he claims it was. Often Asle thinks of Ales and then says he doesn’t want to think about her, that the pain is too great, so that these blanks remain. We notice, sooner or later, that Asle’s memories of the boy Asle are indeed usually about himself. But making him another, not the “I”, seems itself a way of hiding past pains whilst approaching past realities.  

God is also present in the silences. Asle feels God, just as he feels Ales’s presence, and seems even to see her at times. The flowing prose of Septology allows for this, just as it allows the whole text to seem, at times, like a breath or a prayer. Asle’s art draws him close to God, as does his contemplation of Ales – who had introduced him to faith to begin with. Septology’s world is full of pain, as is that of Aliss at the Fire, so that as with that work God becomes a necessary force – the only way of not falling into despair. A child drowns, a sister dies suddenly of illness, as does a beautiful friend – and many other characters suffer similarly upsetting fates. But we see here, unironically, what it might mean to commend the spirits of the departed to God – and what solace we might find in those words.  

Ultimately, what Septology does is argue for the power of faith as well as any apologist could, perhaps better. Religion is proved, if ever, by experience, and Septology draws us into an experience which shows faith’s potency in that specific life – and, in the second Asle’s case, the damage of its absence. We see something similar in my other favourite religious writer, Marilynne Robinson. Both writers, Fosse and Robinson, are adept at making a reality that is sanctified and filled with wonder. Fosse’s difference is that it sometimes seems we are relying on Asle’s consciousness to make his reality so, whereas in Robinson’s works life really does seem to be invested with God’s reality. By this I mean that her language constantly confirms God’s presence, whereas Fosse’s language confirms God only at particular points, for a particular consciousness. That means that stretches of Septology can be quite dull and meandering, as we wait for that moment where we will feel significance and harmony again. 

Such an approach would most aid a story showing a wavering, on-off faith. But that’s not really what’s going on here. It’s just that Asle is remembering something, and we need to work to make it meaningful for ourselves, if we can. If sometimes it can feel like this is not worth the effort, that shouldn’t take away from the rest of the book. Septology is a work of contrasts, of light and dark, faith and the loneliness of its absence, and it may be that its magnificent, truly heavenly highs are dependent on the moments when the story is simply a limited low. Really, truly, it’s a marvellous book regardless.