Materialistischer Monismus

Materialistischer Monismus is presented as a theory in which matter and force, rather than an independent free will, account for everything that happens. In Kaja Solness’s explanation to Harry Hole, even thought and action belong to an unbroken chain of causes; the idea becomes especially charged when they consider whether that chain could make future events predictable, and whether knowing the future might make murder preventable.

The Theory Kaja Explains

Kaja is reading a book on the philosophy while sitting on a cold terrace, where she says the air helps her take in information. Harry recognizes the title and asks what the subject means. Her answer is materialist and causal: everything is matter and force, and each event is part of a chain reaction, a consequence of something that has already happened. The chain, she says, can be followed back to the Big Bang, perhaps beyond it. The book’s existence and Harry’s thoughts in that moment are included in the same account; neither stands outside the sequence.

The account reaches human behavior through the brain. In Kaja’s description, actions depend on the brain’s chemical composition, which in turn depends on the people whose children became the person in question, and on the chemistry and history behind them. The regress makes individual conduct the latest link in a history that precedes the individual. Free will, in this framework, is not an independent power that interrupts causation but an illusion produced within it. The conversation presents this as the argument of the philosophy she is reading, not as a conclusion that the novel settles.

Prediction and the Possibility of Prevention

Harry recalls a meteorologist’s claim that the weather for the whole future could be predicted if all relevant variables were available. His example gives Kaja’s abstract account a practical test: if every cause could be known and calculated, prediction might extend beyond weather to human acts. Harry’s remark also introduces a limit implicit in their exchange. The forecast depends on having the relevant variables; the conversation does not establish that a person or institution can actually gather and process everything the theory would require.

Kaja carries the question from prediction into criminal justice. If actions could be forecast, she suggests, murders might be prevented before they occurred. That possibility unsettles the ordinary distinction between investigating a crime after it happens and intervening before it does. The discussion does not offer a method, a specific forecast, or proof that prevention would work. Its importance lies in the question it opens: if a violent act is the end point of causes already in motion, could knowing those causes change what follows, or would an attempted intervention itself belong to the same chain?

The exchange then turns comic and local. Harry jokes about predicting a policewoman who asks for cigarettes and sits with an expensive philosophy book on a cold terrace. Kaja responds that she borrowed the book rather than buying it, adding that she borrows books and steals them if necessary. The joke folds the grand claim of predictability back into the habits visible between them: a book, a cigarette, a terrace, and the exchange of small personal observations. The idea is not left as a remote metaphysical abstraction; it is tested against the ordinary details of how people behave and how well one person can anticipate another.

Harry’s Uneasy Problem of Control

The theory’s question of freedom has a parallel, though the novel does not identify Harry’s behavior as an illustration or proof of materialist monism. When asked why he uses drugs, Harry says he does so to avoid drinking and acknowledges that he is an alcoholic. Later, alone in his apartment, he faces the prospect of returning to alcohol and chooses opium as an alternative. He describes the need for a high he can control, and prepares a small amount using a spoon, a lighter, a glass, and a straw.

Harry treats this use as measured rather than indiscriminate. He says he has monitored his addiction in Hong Kong, can decide in advance how much alcohol to drink, and has sometimes gone a week or two without opium, using painkillers instead. At the same time, he recognizes that the boundaries between dependence, intoxication, and control are not clear. The scene therefore puts a lived contradiction beside the philosophical account: Harry makes decisions and imposes limits, yet those decisions arise amid addiction, the urge to drink, and the need for an alternative. The text preserves both sides rather than resolving them into either complete freedom or total compulsion.

Narrative Significance

The terrace conversation gives materialist monism its shape through disagreement and example rather than formal exposition. Kaja lays out the causal chain; Harry tests it first with a model of scientific prediction and then with the prospect of preventing murder. Their exchange exposes the ethical pressure inside the theory: if conduct is causally determined, the possibility of prediction raises questions about intervention and responsibility, but the conversation supplies no final answers.

Harry’s surrounding circumstances sharpen that uncertainty without making the philosophy a stated explanation for his choices. In a separate scene, he watches his father breathe at his bedside, leaves, and later prepares opium. He has also received a message from Gunnar Hagen that he assumes concerns Mikael Bellman’s pressure to keep away from the murder investigation and return to ordinary duty. Harry decides to set out rather than resume that work. These pressures make the question of agency concrete, but the narrative does not say that the theory dictates his conduct. Materialist monism remains a lens through which the reader can consider the forces shaping action, while Harry’s successive choices keep the boundary between determination and control unsettled.