1970er Jahre

The 1970er Jahre enter the novel through Mikael Bellman’s account of adolescence in Manglerud, a rapidly expanding district where construction blasts formed the soundtrack of his childhood. His memories connect a landscape being opened by dynamite with the choices confronting teenagers there, and later give a personal context to his interest in an explosive fragment found during the investigation.

Childhood in a Changing District

Bellman describes growing up in Manglerud in the 1970s, when land was being cleared and developed all around the expanding suburb. In the afternoons, after the work crews had finished, he wandered through the blasting areas collecting cable scraps, red plastic caps, and paper from dynamite sticks. Explosions were not a remote spectacle in this account: their sound belonged to the ordinary texture of his childhood, while the materials they left behind could be picked up and carried away.

The memory also places Bellman among teenagers facing sharply limited prospects. He recalls sports, gospel choir, or drugs as the available choices, and says he wanted no part of the path from hashish through glue to heroin that had taken four of his classmates toward early deaths. His recollection does not present him as untouched by his surroundings; rather, it shows him forming his opposition to them while watching what happened to boys his own age.

Dynamite and the Turn Toward Police Work

At fifteen, Bellman found an unused stick of dynamite on a construction site. He recounts taking it behind the Manglerud church, where a group of hashish users had built an underground bong: a bottle set upside down in a hole, with a small screen for the burning hashish and hoses running beneath the ground. Bellman identifies carrying the dynamite there as his first step toward police school. The episode joins his rejection of the drug scene to the explosive material that would later become relevant to his work; the account does not say what he did with the dynamite after reaching the church.

The Past Reframed by the Investigation

Bellman’s memories surface during the search around the avalanche site, after a fragment of a detonator has been found. He tells Harry Hole that dynamite fishing is familiar in the area and recalls his own teenage encounters with explosives in Manglerud. The recollection supplies a basis for Bellman’s interest in how such material might be used, but it does not establish that the fragment came from his youth, that dynamite caused the avalanche, or who was responsible for it.

The decade therefore functions less as a detached historical setting than as Bellman’s personal frame for reading evidence. The same substance appears first as the residue of urban construction and a dangerous adolescent discovery, then as a possible clue in a remote criminal investigation. The connection is suggestive, not conclusive: the past explains the associations Bellman brings to the fragment, while the fragment itself still demands investigation.