Saul

Saul, first introduced to Harry Hole as Dr Duigame, is the English-speaking driver who carries him through Görna and its dangerous surroundings. He is more than hired transport: his local knowledge, caution, and willingness to keep driving place him beside Harry at the investigation’s most precarious moments, while his measured attention to payment and safety makes clear that trust in the city has practical limits.

Identity and Introduction

Harry finds Saul among the drivers waiting outside the airport after daylight has come. Rather than hire the first available taxi, he exchanges a few words with each driver until he finds one whose English is exceptionally good. Saul is small, with alert eyes, grey hair, and prominent veins at his temples and high forehead; his speech combines an unusual, Oxford-inflected English with a broad Congolese accent.

Saul introduces himself as Doctor Duigame and explains that he studied English literature. Since he and Harry will spend the day together, he invites Harry to use the name Saul. The exchange gives him a distinct presence from the outset: he is both a local working driver and a man at ease moving between languages and literary references. Harry hires him for the full day, they quickly agree on a price, and Saul counts the money in public after Harry pays one-third in advance.

Driving Through Görna

Saul opens the door of his battered Hyundai and takes Harry toward the street below the burned-out church. When Harry names the destination, Saul observes that he sounds as though he has been there before. Harry confirms that he has visited once. Saul responds with a warning, invoking Hemingway’s idea that Africa, once it has opened a person’s heart, can make every other place undesirable; Harry questions whether Hemingway actually said it. The moment joins Saul’s literary learning to his practical awareness of the place, without making the danger sound abstract.

The road itself quickly undercuts the airport’s smooth strip of asphalt: after they reach the main road, it becomes a landscape of craters and cracks, and the Hyundai’s undercarriage repeatedly scrapes as Saul steers around the worst holes. Saul also tells Harry that Joe has gathered his family, stolen a car, and fled toward Uganda. Görna is under siege, Saul says, and people will be killed; he too expects to leave soon. Joe’s car may give him a chance of getting away. Saul’s account makes the threatened city a lived condition shaping his own plans, not merely the setting for Harry’s work.

Harry recognizes the church tower left standing among the ruins by the Nyiragongo Volcano and asks Saul to wait while he goes the rest of the way on foot. Later, after a stop at a low building beside the lake, Harry smokes on a balcony above the water and watches sunlight glint on the lake and a distant extraction platform. The contrast between that quiet view and the damaged roads and besieged city does not remove the danger; Saul’s driving continues to bind these separate parts of the journey together.

Bargaining, Caution, and Trust

Saul’s slow manner appears to match the traffic: he drives slowly, speaks slowly, and moves his hands slowly. When he parks by the church wall, well away from Eddie van Boorst’s house, he switches off the engine and politely but firmly asks Harry for the second third of their agreed fee. Harry raises an eyebrow and asks whether Saul distrusts him. Saul distinguishes personal trust from practical judgment: he trusts Harry’s sincere intention to pay, but says that in Görna the money is safer with Saul than with Harry. The arrangement is neither a rupture nor a declaration of intimacy. Saul continues to do the job, while insisting on terms that reflect the risks and uncertainties around them.

That caution is consistent with his earlier warning about the city and his own announced intention to leave. Saul does not present himself as able to control Görna’s danger; instead, he navigates it through modest, concrete decisions—where to park, when to collect payment, and how to get a passenger across damaged roads. His steady pace and explicit bargaining give his scenes a counterweight to Harry’s urgency.

The Return Journey and Narrative Role

After Harry returns in the Range Rover, he finds Saul still waiting by the church wall, the glow of a cigarette visible inside the old Hyundai. Saul gets out, recognizes him, and immediately notices Harry’s face. Harry then gives Saul the wheel. When Saul asks whether the people they seek are really at their destination, Harry confirms that they are and explains that someone once told him it was the only place in Görna where people could reach heaven. Saul says he dislikes the place. As the car moves, Harry opens the case beside him and begins assembling the Märklin rifle, whose instructions are fixed to the inside of the case lid. Saul’s unease accompanies the armed journey without stopping it.

Saul is also driving when they leave the volcano after the confrontation with Lene Galtung. In the back seat, Harry holds Kaja Solness while she reflects that people disappear in Congo every day. The line becomes the cover for an unresolved ending: Lene will remain officially missing, with no body or formal closure, and the search for Tony Leike can appear to continue. Saul’s presence at the wheel places him within the physical passage away from the scene, though the account does not assign him a role in Harry’s decision about what to report. His final significance is therefore deliberately bounded: he is the driver who helps Harry move through Görna and away from the volcano, while the truth carried out of the city remains entangled with the story of disappearance.