Storting

The Storting, Norway’s national parliament, is presented as both a working institution and a symbol of national power whose outward modesty unsettles those who expect grandeur. It is the setting of Marit Olsen’s political career and, after her murder, the focus of intense public attention. Through the contrast between its ordinary surroundings and the ambitions carried into its corridors, the institution connects political representation to reputation, access, and scrutiny.

Identity and Institutional Setting

The novel identifies the Storting as a body of 169 elected representatives supported by 380 employees. Its building, completed in 1866 to a design by the Swedish architect Emil Victor Langlet, stands on Karl Johans gate in Oslo. The historical and civic landmarks around it make the street a concentrated image of the country’s institutions: the university and knowledge on one side, the National Theatre and culture on the other, the royal palace behind, and political power ahead.

Yet the building is not monumental in the manner Mikael Bellman expects. Its stone stairway and gilded red interiors do not produce the overwhelming official grandeur he associates with authority. Two lions carved from Grorud granite flank the small rise at the entrance, but the building is described as modest and not especially imposing. The tension between its national importance and its unshowy appearance makes the Storting a distinctly Norwegian setting in Bellman’s eyes: a place of power that refuses to dramatize its own power.

Marit Olsen and Political Representation

Marit Olsen represents Finnmark for the Norwegian Labour Party. By the time of the novel’s events, she has served two parliamentary terms, after rising through local and regional party positions: she entered the Alta town council, became deputy chair of the local party, and joined the leadership of the regional party secretariat before being nominated for the Storting. The institution is therefore the destination of a gradual political career, not an office she enters without prior work or local ties.

Her public profile, however, remains slight. She seldom speaks from the parliamentary podium, usually to advocate for the concerns of her constituency, and receives far less attention than more photogenic colleagues. A newspaper editor dismisses her as a political lightweight in a remark that makes her body part of the insult. Marit prefers to understand her lack of recognition as a consequence of having made no major mistake or damaging public misstep. Her own conception of her qualification is different: she is a representative from outside Oslo who understands ordinary people and can speak for them with verbal intelligence and humor. In the Storting, her promise rests less on grand abstractions than on that connection to constituents.

The gap between her political position and her public visibility becomes consequential after her death. News of a parliamentarian found dead in the Frognerbadet plunge pool circulates widely, and the press gathers around the cordoned-off crime scene seeking images. The same institution that has not made Marit widely recognizable in life gives her death a prominence that the earlier murders of Borgny Stem-Myhre and Charlotte Lolles did not command. Her parliamentary office changes the scale of public attention and the pressure surrounding the investigation.

The Building as a Stage for Ambition

At eight in the evening, Bellman walks down Karl Johans gate and enters the Storting. A security officer directs him through a Gilardoni metal detector, which registers that he is unarmed but has metal at his belt. The combination of a scanner, a receptionist, and the two stone lions at the entrance conveys controlled access without suggesting a heavily fortified seat of power.

Rasmus Olsen, Marit’s husband, meets Bellman at reception and guides him through the building, supplying details about its staff, representatives, architecture, and decoration. Bellman barely attends to this informal tour. He is preoccupied with being in the corridor of power and disappointed that the place does not inspire the awe he expects. His response turns the Storting’s modesty into a measure of his own ambition: unable to reach the top among the “wolves” at Europol, he believes he can rise in Norway by competing with people he regards as excessively self-effacing and small-minded.

The building’s history also surfaces in Rasmus’s commentary. One room had served as the office of Terboven during the war; Rasmus adds that no one has an office that large now. The passing reference places a reminder of wartime authority inside the present-day parliamentary workplace, while the contrast in office size makes the institution’s current restraint tangible.

Politics, Investigation, and Public Scrutiny

The Storting is not itself the police organization at the center of the jurisdictional dispute, but its political authority is implicated in the debate. Gunnar Hagen describes a conflict between the Oslo police’s Violent Crime Division and Kriminalamt over who should control major murder investigations. The Norwegian Ministry of Justice sees the dispute as an opportunity to consolidate investigations in a single competence center, while the Oslo police argue for local knowledge, broad expertise, and the ability of each police authority to decide when to seek help or surrender a case. The parliamentary setting gives this administrative contest a political horizon: decisions about policing and institutional power reach beyond the agencies competing over cases.

That horizon is also personal for Marit. Before her death, she fears that accepting a publicly funded bodyguard for her nighttime runs in Frogner Park would draw attention to an obscure parliamentarian and invite ridicule once the reason became known. Her concern captures a contradiction in public representation: the office can make her death newsworthy, but it does not guarantee that her safety or her ordinary experience will receive attention beforehand. The Storting thus stands in the novel as both the source of her public role and the institution whose prominence magnifies the consequences of her murder.