Rakel

Rakel, Harry Hole’s former partner and Oleg’s mother, is an absent yet decisive presence in the novel: after the Snowman case, she and Oleg leave Norway, and Harry’s longing for them becomes one of the measures of his grief and of the life he can no longer reach. Their relationship had already ended before the case began, but its emotional force persists in photographs, dreams, and the care Harry still feels for both of them. Rakel’s return near the end does not resolve that separation; instead, it brings the family’s unfinished business with Harry’s dying father into the open.

Identity and separation

Rakel is identified principally through her bond with Harry and their son, Oleg. By the time Harry’s earlier relationship with her is recalled, it had ended before the Snowman case began. Yet the case brought a new and devastating rupture: the killer nearly killed Rakel and Oleg, and, after the investigation concluded, they left the country immediately. Harry resigned and walked away from his job. Their departure is described to Kaja Solness as a move to an unknown place abroad, leaving Harry without a clear account of where they are or how they are rebuilding their lives.

In Hong Kong, Kaja finds Harry asleep in a cramped, makeshift room. When he stirs, he whispers Rakel’s name and falls asleep again. The moment is brief, but it establishes how readily her absence enters his consciousness: even disoriented and barely awake, Harry reaches for the person he has lost contact with. Later, as Kaja prepares to fly with him from Chek Lap Kok Airport, she expects him not to come. She knows from the case files and from Gunnar Hagen’s account that Rakel and Oleg were caught in the Snowman’s violence and that Harry quit after they left. Harry appears at the terminal just as she is about to board, carrying a small bag and a duty-free bag. His arrival allows the journey to proceed, but it does not restore the family he has left behind.

Images that keep them present

Back in Oslo, Harry’s private life is shaped by the traces Rakel and Oleg have left in his apartment. Awake at three in the morning, unable to sleep, he studies two photographs above the kitchen counter. In one, Rakel wears a light-blue summer dress, though the autumn leaves behind her make clear it was not summer. Her black hair falls over her bare shoulders, and she seems to be looking for someone behind the camera. Harry cannot remember whether he took the photograph himself. Its familiarity offers no certainty; even the image preserves a gap in his memory.

The second photograph shows Oleg at speed-skating practice at Valle Hovin Ice Stadium. Harry remembers giving him the red jersey he is wearing and wonders where he is now, whether Rakel has managed to make a new home, and whether Oleg still calls him Dad when tired or distracted. The questions do not produce answers. When Harry later leaves with Oystein Eikeland, he hesitates by the cupboard under the sink, then takes both photographs and puts them inside his coat. He carries the images with him rather than leaving them behind with the private reminders of his former life.

Rakel also enters Harry’s imagined and dreamlike images. Exhausted at home, holding her photograph and trying to sleep, he sees her in a wedding-like scene: she floats in black water, a veil is blown aside, and the imagery shifts toward a noose and a white-clad pastor. The sequence is not a real event in Rakel’s life; it is part of Harry’s troubled vision. Its movement between beauty, danger, and death gives visual form to the fear and loss that he cannot settle by looking at her photograph.

Influence on Harry’s choices

Rakel remains a source of attachment and restraint even when Harry is under immediate pressure. At the Frognerbadet crime scene, Mikael Bellman engineers a situation in which Harry understands that resisting arrest could lead to a serious charge. As Bellman touches him, Harry focuses on Rakel and lays his arms behind his back. The arrest proceeds without the violent reaction Bellman appears to be seeking. Harry’s memory of her redirects him at a moment when anger might otherwise have given his opponent what he wanted.

When Harry later speaks with Katrine Bratt in hospital, he recounts the events that have shaped his recent life, including Rakel and Oleg’s move abroad, his time in Hong Kong, his father’s illness, and the case he has taken on. He asks Katrine not to tell anyone. The conversation places Rakel’s departure alongside the other losses Harry is trying to live with, rather than treating it as a closed chapter. In another conversation, Kaja observes that Harry’s mother made his father a good person while she was alive. Harry answers that Rakel and Oleg made him good. The remark gives their place in his life a moral dimension: he remembers them not only as people he misses, but as people whose presence brought out something better in him.

The separation becomes most acute when Harry is forced to confront his own sense of being stranded. At the mountain hut, a panic attack and the sight of dead animals bring back the memory of being buried by snow. In the resulting collapse, his father lies in a respirator, while Rakel and Oleg appear as silhouettes against the light at an airport. Harry imagines returning to the damp room in Hong Kong and to the smoke that carried him toward them. He calls this condition transit: his father, Rakel, and Oleg are all elsewhere, and he cannot make the images become a shared present. The passage ties his longing to his escape into smoke without suggesting that he has found a way to reach them.

Renewed contact and unfinished family business

Rakel’s absence is not complete. Beate Lønn tells Harry that Rakel called and asked about him. Beate said that he was well, and Harry accepts that answer. After she leaves, his thoughts turn to where Rakel and Oleg are, what happens to them in the evening, and who watches over them. The questions show that even reassurance about Rakel’s concern cannot quiet his worry. His knowledge of the call is limited to what Beate has told him; he does not use it to claim that the separation has ended.

A later missed-call list leads Kaja Solness to ask whether she can come to Harry that night. The surrounding account also draws attention to the investigators’ failure to see the connection between Tony Leike and the boy in a photograph, but it gives no grounds to make Rakel part of that case connection. Her importance here remains personal: she is among the people whose absence defines Harry’s private life while he tries to understand what has happened to his father and to others around him.

After Olav Hole’s funeral, Harry travels to the familiar house at Holmenkollen and sees Rakel again. The meeting carries the force of recognition: her dark hair, brown eyes, and slender neck are familiar to him, and he finds her beauty painful to confront. She notices the injury to Harry’s face, which he dismisses by claiming it will heal. His lie makes the reunion both intimate and guarded: she can see that something has happened, but he does not tell her the truth about it.

Harry asks Rakel to come into the house and explains that his father wants to see her in hospital and ask her forgiveness. Rakel listens without interrupting, then questions why she should go. Harry answers that the choice is hers, while emphasizing that Olav has little time left. She counters that people can live a long time with his illness. In their later telephone conversation, she says she cannot meet Olav and acknowledges that she may be a bad person for refusing. Harry does not condemn her; instead, he suggests they try to do better next time and asks her to give Oleg his greeting. The exchange leaves the request unresolved, but it lets Rakel speak for herself rather than making her only the object of Harry’s memories. She remains concerned with her own limits and choices, while Harry tries to leave open a future effort at reconciliation.