Norway's unusually warm, wet winter

Norway's unusually warm, wet winter is a persistent seasonal condition that unsettles familiar expectations of cold, snow, and clear skies. Weeks of rain leave the ground saturated and the landscape unexpectedly green; the same unseasonable weather reaches beyond Norway, affecting travel in Hong Kong and giving the story a recurring atmosphere of dampness, fog, and disorientation.

A winter without snow

The rain has continued for weeks, and winter in Oslo looks unlike winter: its lawns are still green rather than snow-covered or even brown. European roads have been washed away, migratory birds have stopped travelling to warmer regions, and insects not previously seen so far north have appeared. The weather is not a passing shower but a sustained disruption that alters both the landscape and the seasonal routines built around it.

In Sogn, people in Bjorn-Deehlie jerseys jog on an artificial-turf field, resigned to the mild conditions but still hoping to ski at Sognsvann. Their effort captures the mismatch between the calendar and the weather: winter is officially present, yet the expected snow has not arrived.

Weather measured in habits and figures

On New Year's Eve, fog is so dense that fireworks can be heard from central Oslo to Asker but cannot be seen, even when launched from one's own garden. Norwegians nevertheless set off fireworks worth an average of six hundred kroner per person, according to a poll. The same poll finds that, over three years, the number of Norwegians fulfilling their dream of a white Christmas on Thailand's white beaches has doubled. The contrast links the altered winter at home with a familiar seasonal escape: the hoped-for whiteness is found abroad rather than in Oslo.

Unseasonable rain beyond Norway

The weather is unsettled in Southeast Asia as well, where threatening cyclones gather over the South China Sea. In Hong Kong, usually one of the driest places in February, heavy rain reduces visibility so severely that Cathay Pacific flight 731, arriving from London, must circle before landing at Chek Lap Kok Airport. The novel thus extends the winter's abnormal conditions across regions, turning weather into a practical obstacle to travel rather than merely a change in scenery.

Fog, memory, and the city

The winter's fog also brings back an older Oslo to Harry Hole. Outside the hospital, he looks from a pale-blue sky down at the city beneath a bank of fog spread between green hills. The view recalls childhood mornings when he and Øystein skipped their first school lesson, went to the Wehrmacht bunkers in Nordstrand, and watched pea-soup-coloured fog cover central Oslo. Harry remembers that morning fog gradually disappearing over the years along with industry and wood-burning stoves. The present fog therefore overlays the unusually mild winter with a recollection of environmental change: the city is obscured again, but the remembered cause of its earlier haze belongs to a different period.