Die Weitergabe der Gewalt zwischen Vater und Sohn

Die Weitergabe der Gewalt zwischen Vater und Sohn describes the novel’s intertwined account of family inheritance and violence: Odd Utmo’s history of jealousy and abuse reverberates in the life of his son, Tony Leike, and becomes both a personal legacy and a clue to the murders. The connection emerges gradually, as Harry Hole links family photographs, a shared illness, and DNA evidence to a story that had been mistaken for a haunting.

A violent family history

Odd Utmo had been imprisoned for eight years after killing a man out of jealousy. After his release, he moved to the remote Utmo farm, married Karen Leike, and had a son. Karen was deeply religious; she understood her marriage to a man who had found religion in prison as a chance to help redeem him and atone for her own sins. That belief did not prevent the household from becoming a place of strict prohibitions and physical punishment.

Tony later described a childhood in which his father treated ordinary freedoms as sins and responded to disobedience with violence. When Tony was about twelve, his father attacked him after objecting to his closeness with his mother. At fifteen, after another prolonged beating, Tony retaliated and threatened his father. The account marks a shift in their relationship: Tony understood that he could resist, while his father recognized in him a capacity for violence. The episode does not make their actions equivalent; it establishes how violence within the family shaped the terms on which Tony understood power and survival.

Karen appears to have tried to protect her son by secretly sending him away and leaving one of his shoes near the site of a recent avalanche, making his disappearance appear connected to the mountain. The evidence does not establish every detail of her intentions, but Harry reconstructs the act as an attempt to avert a tragedy in an isolated household containing a violent father, his wife, and their son. The effort delayed the consequences rather than ending the family’s history of violence. Karen was later found murdered, and Odd died near his snowmobile after being tortured.

The family link becomes a clue

The investigation initially fails to see the connection between the Leike farm and Ustaoset. Harry recognizes that the stories of a missing Utmo boy’s ghost and Tony’s claim to regard the surrounding mountains as his own landscape belong to the same history. A photograph found in a tourist hut is central to that recognition. Harry had first taken it for Tony’s family photograph; he realizes it depicts Odd Utmo’s family, including the boy Tony had been. The contrast between the boy’s conspicuous teeth and his father’s tightly closed lips becomes a visible trace of their relationship.

Other clues sharpen the resemblance without proving it on their own. Tony had mentioned that gout was hereditary; Harry recalls the illness in both men. A dark stone found on the bathroom floor of the hut also returns to his attention, and he asks Björn Holm whether it could be a tooth. The decisive confirmation comes from DNA analysis: material collected from the stove and Tony’s hair establishes that Odd and Tony were father and son. The genetic evidence turns Harry’s recognition into a demonstrated relationship, while the illness and photograph show how the case had been legible in fragments before anyone assembled them.

Tony’s account of inheritance

In recounting his family history to Lene Gabrielle Galtung, Tony explains that his father’s violence had a history of its own. Odd’s imprisonment followed a jealousy killing; after finding religion in prison, he made religious rules the measure of family life. Tony’s account joins that background to the restrictions and punishments he experienced as a child. It presents violence as something transmitted through example and power, not merely as an abstract trait passed through blood.

Tony also describes the point at which he began to recognize his father in himself. Years after his childhood, an encounter involving jealousy brought back the image of Odd attacking him and his mother. Tony responded violently, was arrested and sentenced, and learned through imprisonment what confinement meant to his father. He then concluded that he wanted Odd imprisoned for Karen’s murder rather than simply killed, and that he first needed to find evidence, including her body. His account therefore contains both repetition and distinction: he has adopted violence, but at this stage he describes a goal of exposing his father’s crime and securing his punishment.

Later, Tony says that committing murders awakened a capacity he believed had been in him all along. He came to recognize his father in his own reflection and to take pleasure in the power involved in making another person submit. This is Tony’s explanation of his development, not proof that heredity made his actions inevitable. The novel places that claim beside the specific conditions of his upbringing, his acts of retaliation, and the choices he makes as an adult.

Inheritance, responsibility, and narrative recognition

Harry’s investigation makes the father-son relationship a structural reversal. The suspected link is not simply that violence runs in a family: a presumed ghost is reinterpreted as a missing son, and a photograph, an inherited illness, and genetic testing expose the human history beneath the haunting. Earlier clues acquire new meaning once the investigators connect Odd’s past to Tony’s identity. The reveal also distinguishes resemblance from evidence: family likeness raises the question, but DNA confirms the relationship.

The novel’s opening murderer-narrator offers a broader, unsettling frame, arguing that the capacity to kill exists in everyone and interpreting murder as an act of mercy. Tony’s history gives that generalized theory a family setting without confirming that his philosophy is true. His father’s influence helps explain the language through which he understands power, but it does not erase his responsibility for his own violence. The concept’s force lies in that tension: violence can be inherited as family history, learned as a way of relating to others, and recognized in oneself, yet the story still follows the consequences of what each man chooses to do.