Fate and chance

Fate and chance is the novel’s recurring question about whether lives are shaped by accidents beyond anyone’s control or drawn toward outcomes that were already waiting for them. Its image of “cosmic gravity” gives that uncertainty a forceful shape: events may look random from within a life, yet, looking back, their direction can seem almost inevitable. The idea is not resolved into a doctrine. It surfaces in moments of moral pressure, religious doubt, and remembered risk, where the desire to believe in purpose meets the fact that people cannot know what will happen next.

The question of cosmic gravity

At the heart of the concept is a question Per Vollan considers while struggling to speak with a boy about a woman who had been killed with a saw. He is physically nauseated by what he is asking the boy to confront, and he recognizes that exploiting the boy would be worse than enduring his own discomfort. Before continuing, he loosens his dog collar, steadies himself, and remembers what is at stake. In that moment, the question of fate is not abstract: it accompanies a choice made under pressure, when compassion and obligation pull against the urge to turn away.

Per wonders whether the outcome of a life comes from random events that no one controls or from a cosmic force drawing everything toward a predestined end. The alternatives remain open. Chance would mean that lives can be redirected by accidents; cosmic gravity would mean that what appears accidental may be part of a larger, inescapable movement. The novel gives no proof for either account. Instead, the question registers the unease of acting without knowing whether a decision changes the course of a life or merely carries it along a course already set.

Later, Per gives Martha a compact version of this opposition, describing it as fate against chance and cosmic gravity. Her response turns toward Mad Greta rather than theology, keeping the conversation grounded in the different ways people make sense of what cannot be explained. The exchange does not settle the question; it shows that the same uncertainty can invite religious language, speculation about fate, or a more local belief in ghosts.

Per Vollan’s crisis of belief

The question acquires personal weight when Per is alone in his small room at the Ila Centre. His single bed and wardrobe occupy a shabby space that costs 6,000 kroner a month, a price he notes could rent a whole flat outside Oslo. Sitting on the bed and looking through a dusty window, he watches ordinary signs of life: traffic outside, sunlight through thin curtains, and a fly struggling on the windowsill. The fly’s approaching death leads him to a stark distinction: death is nothing; life is what surrounds and resists it.

Per recalls that he had once concluded that everything people believe in apart from death is a defence against fear of dying. The conviction has not given him certainty. He recognizes that what people think they know cannot match what they need to believe in order to numb fear and pain. Yet, after moving through that doubt, he comes back to faith in a forgiving God and life after death, believing in them more strongly than before. His return to belief is not presented as a demonstration that fate governs events. It is a response to the limits of knowledge and to the need for belief in the face of death.

That renewed faith turns into a small, concrete action: Per takes a pad from beneath a newspaper and writes a few sentences on one sheet. He crosses his name off an envelope from Alma’s lawyer, which had briefly explained how little he was entitled to from their matrimonial property. The limited writing and modest material consequence contrast with the immense questions occupying him. The scene links beliefs about what lies beyond life to choices made within it, without claiming that faith can undo loss or guarantee a particular outcome.

Darkness, direction, and the approaching night

After leaving the centre, Per walks through the park as the sun sinks. At first, the evening seems orderly: people and objects appear to perform their parts without error. But the appearance of a peaceful summer evening does not reassure him. He senses hidden presences in a reflected window, a passer-by’s glance, and the shadows spreading from the east side of the houses. The details make his uncertainty about cosmic gravity spatial: beneath a calm surface, unseen forces seem to be moving into place.

Per reads his own life as a long, vacillating struggle between darkness and light, with neither side appearing to win. Then he revises the balance. The darkness is encroaching a little more each day, and he and those around him are heading for the long night. His thought shifts the image of fate from a single predestined endpoint to a continuing pressure, something that gains ground over time. He responds by increasing his speed. The gesture does not establish that he can outrun what is coming; it shows a person moving faster even as he senses that the direction of events may be beyond his control.

Simon Kefas and the roulette wheel

The concept returns through Simon Kefas’s memory at Åmodt Bro, where the river divides the modest capital between east and west. Simon remembers a drunken night there with his friends, the three young men bound together in a “troika.” He had long believed himself inferior to them in intelligence, strength, social ease, and appeal to women, but thought himself the bravest—or, more exactly, the readiest to take risks. When his friends shouted for him not to do it, he balanced on the railings and jumped into the river.

Simon later understands the leap as an act driven by pessimism: he felt he had less to lose than other people. A broken heart had helped propel him toward danger, and the dive became a wager on a future he did not value highly. The river’s “wonderful, spinning roulette wheel” makes chance vivid as both risk and escape. Under the foaming surface, he experienced an icy silence, solicitude, and peace; when he resurfaced unharmed, his friends cheered, and he did too, though he felt a vague disappointment at being back. The moment’s opposed feelings—danger and relief, survival and disappointment—leave the meaning of the leap unsettled rather than turning it into a simple story of courage.

Simon’s memory is interrupted by the present. He looks toward a waterfall between two bridges and notices a figure left there, frozen in mid-fall. A crime-scene officer says the man probably floated downstream before his clothes caught on something protruding from the water, in a stretch usually shallow enough to wade across. The movement from Simon’s remembered plunge to the body in the river brings past risk and present death into the same frame, but does not claim that one caused or foretold the other. Fate and chance remains powerful precisely because the novel lets these images echo without explaining them away: a leap can be chosen, survival can feel accidental, and a life’s apparent direction can still look, in retrospect, like a force carrying it toward an end.