Ab Lofthus’s age-of-mercy credo

Ab Lofthus’s age-of-mercy credo presents punishment as a duty to be carried out when lawful institutions fail. Simon describes Ab’s belief that mercy had ended and judgment had begun, a conviction Sonny inherits as a reason to pursue criminals whom he believes the corrupt police protect. The credo gives Sonny’s violence a language of justice, but the novel sets that language against Simon’s later repentance and belief in second chances.

The credo and its meaning

Simon recounts Ab’s belief that the age of mercy was over and the day of judgment had arrived. In Ab’s formulation, the Messiah’s delay left people to do the work of punishment themselves. Simon connects this teaching to Sonny’s actions: he believes Sonny feels bound to carry out what his father died for, seeking justice beyond the law because the Oslo police protect criminals.

The credo therefore joins a moral claim to an institutional failure. Its premise is not simply that wrongdoers deserve punishment, but that ordinary legal authority cannot be trusted to deliver it. That reasoning helps explain Sonny’s self-appointed pursuit of criminals while exposing the danger in treating private vengeance as a substitute for justice.

From Ab to Sonny

Sonny’s father was not, as the suicide note claimed, the police mole who had helped traffickers and drug dealers. Johannes tells Sonny that Ab suspected the mole’s identity and learned that Nestor’s organization wanted to eliminate a policeman named Lofthus. Ab chose to investigate alone because he believed other officers were compromised, and made Johannes promise to keep the warning secret. Alone at the family’s yellow house in Berg while Sonny and his mother were away at a wrestling competition, Ab barricaded himself inside, expecting an attack.

That account gives the credo a history of betrayal and isolation: Ab’s distrust of the police was grounded in the danger he faced from a criminal network and its connections. Simon later interprets Sonny’s pursuit of criminals as an attempt to fulfill Ab’s sense of unfinished justice. The inherited credo thus carries both a demand to punish and the consequences of a system in which a policeman believed he could not safely rely on his colleagues.

Punishment and its costs

The story places the credo beside examples of violence used to control, not to establish justice. Franck invokes a prisoner’s suspicious death to intimidate Johannes and threatens to withhold his cancer treatment unless he reveals Sonny’s whereabouts. Elsewhere, men allied with Parr threaten Sonny with a knife and demand information about Sylvester. These episodes show coercion operating within prison and criminal power structures; they do not validate the distinction between lawful punishment and private violence that the credo seeks to collapse.

Simon’s own history makes that collapse especially consequential. He once sold his soul to the Twin and recruited Ab into the same criminal arrangement, exploiting Ab’s concern for his son during a period of debt and financial crisis. Simon eventually killed Ab to protect his position. Afterward, he repented, stopped being the mole, and spent the rest of his life trying to make amends and pursuing corrupt officers. His account frames justice not only as punishment of others but also as an obligation to confront one’s own wrongdoing.

Mercy, repentance, and the novel’s tension

Simon’s later outlook stands in marked contrast to Ab’s credo. His experience of gambling addiction and debt ended when Else forgave him; he quit gambling and came to see the possibility of a second chance differently. He associates that change with honesty between them and with his willingness, as a police officer, to stop treating every criminal as incorrigible. Mercy in this account does not erase responsibility: Simon continues to live with what he did to Ab and to make amends.

The credo remains powerful because Sonny understands it as an inheritance and a charge to act where the police have failed. Yet the novel’s parallel accounts make its limits visible. Ab’s distrust had real causes, but punishment carried out outside the law can reproduce the violence and coercion that corrupt institutions already impose. Set against Simon’s remorse and changed belief in the possibility of reform, the credo becomes both an explanation of Sonny’s mission and a question the story does not reduce to a simple endorsement of vengeance.