Interview: Norway's literary superstar Lars Saabye Christensen

Lars Saabye Christensen was born in 1953 in Oslo, the city he has consistently celebrated in his work. He made his literary debut in Norway in 1976, and proceeded to work in many media: poetry, film scripts, and the novels which have secured his fame after Beatles in 1984. The Half-Brother (2001) was phenomenally successful at home and abroad, and among its three major awards won the Nordic Council's prestigious Literary Prize in 2002. It is published in the UK by Arcadia, as are Herman and The Model, released this week in Don Bartlett's translation. His latest book is Saabye's Circus (2006). In 2006, Norway made Lars Saabye Christensen a Commander of the Order of St Olav, and Beatles was voted by readers as the best Norwegian novel of the past 25 years. He is married and lives in Oslo.

"I started writing very young, but was always searching for my true literary world," explains Lars Saabye Christensen. "Then one day, looking out of the window of my own house in Oslo, I realised that this world was all about me, the world of myself and those I'd grown up with. I'd come to literature through my love of rock music. So, at the age of 25, I began the novel Beatles."

Beatles, published in 1984, was Christensen's breakthrough book, achieving enormous success in Norway. It launched him on the journey to the pre-eminence he now enjoys, and which spread throughout Europe with his best-selling family epic The Half-Brother. He has come to London for a conference at University College on Norwegian writing, and to celebrate the publication – in a fine English translation by Don Bartlett – of his latest novel, The Model (Arcadia, £11.99).

The book deals with an artist – a painter, Peter Wihl – who, like his creator, enjoys a tremendous reputation and of whom much is expected in both life and work. He is six months away from his 50th birthday, and, says Christensen, "The novel began for me when my publishing house, Cappelen, asked a painter to do a portrait of me for my own 50th. Sitting for him, I became the observer of a man observing me."

Preparing one October afternoon for his birthday exhibition, Peter has a horrifying experience. He is smitten by "a terrible pain in his eyes, as if something had shattered inside them and burst, as if his eyes had been filled with noise. Colours merged, lines dissolved, all perspective was lost, everything went black and he sank to the floor." The attack doe not last long. Soon he is able to see, out in the autumnal garden, his dear wife Helene and young daughter Kaia, with whom he lives harmoniously.

Yet his relief at recovery is short-lived. Taking a rest before his evening visitors arrive, Peter slips into an alarming dream. He is back in the schoolyard of boyhood, with a fellow-pupil asking: "If you could choose, would you prefer to be blind or deaf?" He wakes up abruptly, with the desire to reply: "This is not a choice. This is a threat."

And so it turns out. "Our bodies," Christensen says, "often know what is in store for them." Another brief bout of blindness follows. Norway's leading eye-specialist diagnoses an advanced and incurable disease. Within six months – ironically, in time for his grand commemorative show - he will have lost his sight completely. Peter, Lars comments, "is his eyes. His sight gives him his identity and has been responsible for his success. Blindness will deprive him of his very reason for existing. And it will take away from the only kind of future he has ever wanted."

Suppose that there were a way out for Peter from his appalling destiny. His dream of a return to the playground turns out to have been prophetic not only about sight loss. For he encounters a former classmate whom he has not seen in over three decades: the unnerving Thomas Hammer, so strangely knowing, so over-persistent, whose card proclaims him an Ophthalmic Surgeon though he has cut loose from a professional establishment which disowns him. But he exerts a growing fascination on Peter and presents him with an escape route from the fate that official medicine has declared unavoidable.

Its unorthodoxy, its risk, its involvement in the exploitation of others, are scarcely to be doubted, but how can Peter, for whom sight is everything, resist it? He finds himself poised on a moral borderline knowing that he will not be able to withstand the temptation of crossing it. Perhaps the certainty of this is the single most frightening feature of The Model, especially as Peter's yielding will be vindicated.

When Christensen talks about this novel, he does so as someone still engaged with the exacting moral problems that are, so enthrallingly and disturbingly, its theme. He reminds me of what Wihl himself tells a reporter: "You don't finish a picture; you forsake it." Though The Model was published in Norway in 2005, he still sounds intimately bound up with his protagonist's predicament and its implications.

Yet about one thing he is quite adamant. "There can't be one law for the artist, for a Peter Wihl, and another for ordinary people," he says. "The artist is obliged to follow the same moral criteria as everybody else. Yes, a painter might avert disaster by totally ignoring the rights or feelings of others, by bypassing moral laws, and so go on to create those great works he still has in him.

"Peter Wihl may save his art but he loses himself. And that's never a real possibility for us; we are humans before everything else, and live by our responsibilities to our fellow-beings."

Not that doing so is easy or painless. Christensen says that a major part of the interest of this novel for him derived from self-questioning. "Just how far was I myself prepared to go to write the truly good novel of my hopes?"

Many of his readers may feel this is not something he need ask himself; that he has produced "a truly good novel" more than once. Beatles (which Arcadia will issue in Don Bartlett's translation next year) captured the spirit of a whole generation and was met with the enthusiasm of gratitude. At the conference, one delegate declared her son had read this book 50 times.

Internationally, however, his breakthrough novel was the magnificent The Half-Brother, in which the narrator Barnum's account of his journey to attempted self-realisation leads into a presentation of Norway's own journey from harsh wartime occupation to the affluent present. "Beatles was my 'Penny Lane', and The Half-Brother my 'Strawberry Fields Forever'. "

Christensen reports that Norwegian critics have commented on the difference between the new novel and its predecessors. Here, he never names the city it is set in, whereas his other fiction very much belongs to Oslo.

"But, for me, it's extremely closely connected to my earlier books," he says. "Like them it's concerned with innocence, like many of them with the innocence of a child – in fact, in The Model we have two children – and with how that innocence is often cruelly abused."

Barnum in The Half-Brother is undersized and feels it, so seeks compensation in storytelling. Herman, in the eponymous novel that tells his story, loses his hair at the age of 11, a traumatic experience for a boy. "But I also see the new book as a political novel," explains Christensen, " because it's about exploitation, how much we are prepared to accept, or simply to ignore it, to achieve our own goals."

The quiet intensity of Christensen's conversation might seem to belie his position as a celebrity in his own country, where a major public building has been officially named "Halvbroren" (Half-brother). Yet his gentleness surely relates to that moral conviction that underlies his writing, and frees him from need for self-assertion.

What happens after Peter has crossed the moral borderline must be left for readers to discover. But they should be alerted to the author's careful preparation for it: his revelation of darker elements in Peter's make-up that enable his transition, particularly in two ugly episodes when the artist as voyeur consciously triumphs over the feeling human being.

Though the moral parable of The Model follows a relentless trajectory, it does not preclude a marvellous delineation of those whose lives impinge on the painter's: Ben, his gallery-owner and older mentor, Patrick, the young installation artist who sees Peter as a has-been and, most moving of all, Helene and Kaia, the book's two most insightful characters.

Helene is a scenographer currently at work on a production of Ibsen's The Wild Duck, with its recurrent image of threatened eyesight. Ibsen's Hjalmar Ekdal, the photographer able through a kind of vanity to betray the unswerving loyalty of his loving wife and daughter, hovers behind the figure of Peter.

Of Helene, Christensen says that "She has the willingness, the capacity to follow Peter into the literal darkness of sight loss, but never into his moral darkness... The Wild Duck is such a rich, profound play." It's a measure of Lars Saabye Christensen's achievement that it seems entirely appropriate to discuss his latest novel in relation to Ibsen's masterpiece.