Bearing and shifting blame

Bearing and shifting blame names the distinction between owning a decision to use lethal force and refusing to serve as a convenient bearer of guilt for decisions made or concealed by others. Through Ewert Grens, the novel makes responsibility neither a clean acquittal nor a burden that can simply be passed along: his own choice remains his, even as he resolves to identify those who should answer for more than his part.

Personal responsibility and the first shot

The conflict begins with the weight of an irreversible act. Ewert Grens had never before fired a lethal shot at a person. The narration makes the decision his, then gives its consequence a stark second emphasis: it was his responsibility. That sequence does not allow him to treat the act as something done to him by circumstance. The decision belongs to him, and so does the guilt attached to it.

The distinction matters because the novel does not present responsibility as a single, undivided substance. Grens can acknowledge his own choice without conceding that every consequence, or every hidden decision surrounding it, should be laid at his door. His later refusal to carry guilt for others therefore does not erase his earlier admission. The two positions are held in tension: he accepts the responsibility that is his and resists the transfer of responsibility that is not.

Evidence that changes the burden

That tension sharpens when Grens listens to a recording and recognizes Göransson’s deep, resonant voice. The meeting is identified as having taken place at Rosenbad. Grens stops the recording and drinks coffee that is still too hot in one go; he is shaking, and the heat does not displace the rage. His physical reaction marks a change in what guilt means to him: it is no longer only an inward reckoning with his own act, but a response to evidence that points beyond him.

He draws a rectangle and five circles on his blotter. The recording has given his anger a concrete object to work on, though the evidence does not specify whom each mark represents. The gesture is significant in its restraint: Grens begins to arrange what he has heard rather than letting rage remain formless. The meeting and the voice he recognizes become part of an inquiry into responsibility, not a reason to pretend that his own decision never happened.

The reports and the “useful idiot”

Grens’s search through documents on a computer takes him back exactly one year. He finds 302 secret intelligence reports describing how an informant’s work to uncover one crime had given rise to another. He recognizes several reports from other investigations that collapsed even though the relevant knowledge was already held within the system. The contrast is central: information existed, yet its presence had not prevented investigations from failing.

In response, Grens names his own position with two blunt judgments: “I was a useful idiot.” and “I carried out legitimate murder.” The first describes a person made useful to others without fully controlling the purpose his actions serve; the second refuses to soften the lethal act behind a respectable label. Together, the phrases hold two kinds of responsibility in view. Grens sees himself as an actor in a killing and as someone whose actions could be used within a larger arrangement. The reports deepen that conflict, but they do not make him claim that he was merely an instrument with no agency.

His reckoning also extends across time. He says that he has carried the guilt throughout his adult life and deserved it, but rejects being forced to carry it for anyone else. The admission preserves the weight of his past rather than revising it into innocence. What changes is the boundary he draws around that weight: self-imposed accountability for his act is not, in his view, a license for others to offload theirs.

Refusal and the direction of blame

When Grens explains himself to public prosecutor Lars Ågestam, he says, “I have no intention of carrying the guilt.” Asked about guilt, he clarifies that Ågestam has nothing to do with it, then states that he will make sure the people responsible carry it for him. He wants to solve a murder, and he asks whether the report can be used to do so. The exchange joins moral purpose to investigative method: the documents are not simply a record of past failures but material Grens intends to use in pursuing responsibility.

The phrase “carry it for me” might sound like a reversal of blame, but the surrounding statements set a limit on that reading. Grens has already said that he deserved the guilt for what he himself did. His demand is not that another person take that guilt in his place; it is that the responsible people bear guilt for their own actions. The distinction makes the concept more exact: accountability can be shared across a chain of actions without being transferred wholesale from one person to another.

The movement from a solitary memory of the shot, through the recording and the 302 reports, to a direct appeal to Ågestam gives the idea its shape. Guilt begins as something Grens accepts inwardly; evidence reveals a wider field of responsibility; and his refusal to carry guilt for others turns remorse outward into an investigation. The novel leaves the moral problem intact: his choice remains his, while the question of who else must answer cannot be settled by making him bear everything alone.