Apart from his first symbolistic novel,
Dyretemmerens Kors, Axel Jensen's early novels mostly depict a young man that attempt to break away from his social and cultural background. These novels include
Icarus: A Young Man in Sahara (1957) (a new 1999 edition is illustrated by Franz Widerberg),
A Girl I Knew (1959) and
Joacim. Some critics have argued that these early novels are influenced by Beat-authors like
Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and
William Burroughs. The reason for this is that the novel's male main characters often try to escape from their obligations in a Western
capitalistic society. Instead they try to replace their former life with some sort of undefined spiritualism and fail miserably in their attempt.
Later Jensen departed from the realism in his early novels and began to move in a new direction by writing
science fiction, poems, essays and manuscripts for cartoons. In this experimental phase he produced manuscripts for the
psychedelic comic-strip
Doctor Fantastic (published in the newspaper
Dagbladet between March and July 1972), the science fiction comic strip collage
Tago (1979), the animated movie
Superfreak (1988) and a manuscript for a comic novel which is a caricature-rendering of the life of the French playwright and founder of
pataphysics, Alfred Jarry. In the same period, Jensen also published a poem-collection with a
hindu-theme called " Onalila - A Little East West poetry " (1974), an essayistic novel called
Mother India (1974) and three autobiographical novels named
Junior (1978) and
Senior (1979) and
Jumbo (1998).
But Jensen is perhaps most famous for having written the science fiction novels
Epp (1965),
Lul (1992) and
And the Rest is Written in the Stars (1995) illustrated by
Pushwagner. With these novels, Jensen created a
dystopian vision of the future, much in the tradition of
Aldous Huxley, George Orwell and
Ray Bradbury. Nevertheless, Jensen's novels also differ from these authors since the tragic vision in his novels is supplemented with comedy, setting an ambiguous and absurd tone. In this way, Jensen's novels are similar to the satirical and parodic novels of
Jonathan Swift and
Kurt Vonnegut.
Besides his fiction, Axel Jensen also published a series of articles and essays which focused on three main political and social issues. His collection of essays,
God Does Not Read Novels. A Voyage in the World of Salman Rushdie (1994), is a critique of the
fatwa against
Salman Rushdie and a defense of the
freedom of speech. Another political text by Axel Jensen is the article " A Children's Disease ", published in the anthology
The Collective Fairytale. A Book about Norway, Europe and the EU (1994). This article discusses Norway's role as a future member in the
European Union. The third main issue that was of great concern of Axel Jensen, was how sick and disabled people are treated in a modern bureaucratic society. Two books containing articles on this subject was therefore published;
The Deafening Silence (1997) and
The Patient in the Centre (1998). All the articles are an account of how it is to suffer from
ALS and at the same time not receive adequate help from the Norwegian
welfare state.
Among his political writings, Jensen also found the time to write a biography on the mythical guru
G. I. Gurdjieff which is titled
Guru - Glimpses from the World of Gurdijieff (2002). In addition to this, Jensen was also the co-writer with Peter Mæjlender on his own autobiography, called
Life Seen From Nimbus (2002).
Axel Jensen received a literary prize from the Austrian Abraham Woursell Foundation in 1965 for his novel
Epp. In 1992 Jensen was given the annual literary award from the Norwegian publishing house Cappelen for his novel
Lul. For his essays on Salman Rushdie, he received the
Carl von Ossietzky-award from the
International PEN-club in 1994 and an award from The Freedom of Expression Foundation in Norway.
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