Tag: the school of night

The School of Night by Karl Ove Knausgaard

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The School of Night is a novel about a photographer who dreams of success, but when it comes, there’s a price to pay. Kristian is a Norwegian student who moves to London to study photography. There, he feels bored and frustrated, getting negative feedback on his work that he doesn’t agree with. He meets Hans, a Dutch artist who sees the world differently and is interested in the historical occult, and when something terrible happens, Kristian finds inspiration. However, Kristian’s success might not be as stable as it seems.

This is my first Knausgaard novel—I’d always assumed his work wasn’t going to be my sort of thing, but the connection this book has with Christopher Marlowe made me want to read it. It is really a novel of two halves, with the first half a story of London in the 1980s, a young photographer who becomes intrigued by Marlowe, a strange new friend, and what happens when the photographer does something terrible. I really liked the first half, with its vivid 1980s London setting and the way that Kristian is shown to be pretentious, often annoying, and focused on his own success over anyone else. There’s a lot of narratives running alongside each other and they all play together, in an accessible style and lots of detail (I liked how Kristian kept returning to trying to decide an order for his record collection, for example). I was intrigued how the motifs from Doctor Faustus that the story plays with were going to play out as the book continued.

The second half jumps forward in time. Kristian is now a successful artist with his photographs getting a major exhibition, and he’s balancing that with his wife and child. There’s a framing narrative at points throughout the whole novel that hints to his current position as he’s been narrating the novel, too. I found that the second half didn’t quite live up to the promise of the first half, for me. The things I’d liked about the first half—the specificity of detail, the lingering occult—were no longer really present, and maybe a few more flashes of time before reaching the final section would’ve made it feel more like it was getting across Kristian’s rise and readying his fall. The events of the second half, mostly around the same self-centred man now dealing with interviews and arguments with his wife before a final dramatic moment, were less exciting to me and felt more like any novel about an self-obsessed artist.

However, the conclusion to the novel does bring everything back together and I think it works quite powerfully to get across the novel’s message. I have to admit that I do find the middle part of Doctor Faustus less interesting as well, so maybe it was inevitable! I also just really enjoyed the 1980s pretentious artsy vibe and how it played into the Marlowe/Faustus side, whereas I’m less interested in the atmosphere of the second half, at least until the ending. Overall, I enjoyed The School of Night and how it engaged with Doctor Faustus to tell a story of ambition and the price of success. Also, it made me realise I should actually read more Knausgaard.

Marlovian tales: The School of Night by Peter Whelan

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Christopher Marlowe, playwright, poet, and probable Elizabethan spy, is the perfect kind of historical figure to include in fiction. The information about his life is both striking and mysterious, with unexplained gaps of time and a suspicious death. Peter Whelan’s play The School of Night is one of many fictionalisations of Marlowe and doesn’t do anything particularly notable, but that doesn’t stop it being enjoyable.

First performed in 1992 and thus predating the publication of Anthony Burgess’ fantastic A Dead Man in Deptford, The School of Night features Kit Marlowe at Thomas Walsingham’s home in Scadbury, attempting to influence life with dramatic performance. For Marlowe fans, the characters are familiar: Marlowe, Thomas Kyd, Thomas Walsingham and his wife Audrey, Walter Raleigh, and the infamous men surrounding Marlowe’s death, Frizer, Poley and Skeres. Questions of religion, scandal, and betrayal haunt the plot, again no surprise to anyone with familiarity of Marlowe’s biography.The interactions between the characters and the play’s dialogue are what particularly help to make it stand out, combining literary and historical references with the kind of sixteenth century intellectual banter that draws you into the world.

 As with many fictional Marlowe works, Whelan inevitably is drawn towards the Shakespeare question, weaving the more famous poet into the narrative and playing around with the claims that Marlowe either wrote Shakespeare’s works or was in deep competition with them whilst he lived. Whilst Whelan’s version manages to keep elements of this enigmatic, the plot requires the big Shakespeare question that Burgess was wise to sidestep in his novel about Marlowe. Luckily, Marlowe is written as a big enough character to keep himself central in his own narrative.

The School of Night is a worthwhile read for Marlowe fans, because unlike some other fictional versions of the playwright (for example, Tamburlaine Must Die) this one is solidly written and gets in all the major details or possible details of his life. For those more familiar with works centred on Shakespeare, the play may illuminate more about Marlowe the bit character in Shakespeare’s real/fictional life (though I’d recommend reading Park Honan’s biography of Marlowe too as the play format does not leave space for historical detail or elaboration).