63 pages • 2 hours read
Jo NesbøThe Snowman
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2007A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 5, Chapter 33 Summary: “Wednesday, November 5, 1980: The Snowman”
Mathias waits for his mother, and he gets out of the car and begins packing snowballs. He is thinking about being teased at school for not having nipples. He begins building a snowman and, when it is finished, he sits on it and looks in the window. He sees his mother having sex with a man inside and notices that the man doesn’t have any nipples. The man sees Mathias looking in the window, and Mathias returns to the car and thinks about what he has seen—he knows that the man is his father. Mathias decides this man must never find out. He wants to die and wants his mother to die as well.
After his mother starts driving, he tells her that they are going to die. He hits her with the tire jack until she drives across the road and into the river. As the car begins to sink, Mathias smashes the window and climbs out. A man pulls him ashore, and Mathias tells him that there is no one else in the car. The police conclude that his mother’s injuries are from the impact.
Six years later, Mathias meets Idar Vetlesen at medical school. At a party one night, students are comparing blood types, and Mathias reveals that he is B negative. He has sex with another student, and afterwards they discuss Mathias’s lack of nipples, a result of Raynaud’s phenomenon and scleroderma, which causes the skin to tighten until you are suffocated by your own skin.
As a doctor, Mathias becomes sought after for consultation on genetic diseases. One day, he tests a child patient and realizes that her father could not be her biological father. He feels the old anger at his mother. Later in his career, Gert Rafto becomes Mathias’s patient. He makes a house call, and after Rafto falls asleep, looks at photos of crime scenes on the wall. He notices how sloppy the murders were, and when Rafto wakes up, Mathias asks how he would murder someone without getting caught. Rafto would get close to a detective before committing the murder, and then after the murder, kill the detective. In the weeks that follow, Mathias visits Rafto and they talk about his old cases, and Mathias makes a plan.
He calls Laila Aasen, the mother of his patient, tells her that he knows the father is not the biological father, and suggests that they meet. She agrees to meet him, by cable car, at the top of a local mountain. Once there, she tells him that she told a friend about their meeting. Before he kills her, she tells him her friend’s name, Onny Hetland. Two days later, Laila’s murder, and Onny and Rafto’s disappearances, are in the news.
Four years later, Mathias has killed four more women. He knows that his own genetic disease is progressing and feels the urgency of his time disappearing. He gets DNA swabs from all his patients, but Idar submits the requests for him, keeping Mathias’s name out of it. He has determined the perfect way to dispose of the bodies in the Anatomy Department and has found the perfect murder weapon with the cutting loop.
Mathias sees himself as an avenger, but when he sees Harry on television, the idea of killing him excites Mathias in the same way that killing Rafto had. When one of his doctor friends mentions that she is Oleg’s doctor, and he is not Harry’s son, a plan begins to take shape. Mathias arranges an accidental meeting with Rakel and, as their relationship progresses, he feels his disease progress as well.
He decides to kill Birte, Sylvia, and Eli in the same year. In addition, he plans to complete his project with Harry and Rakel. While Birte’s murder goes according to plan, Sylvia injures him with the hatchet, which necessitates killing the third chicken. He congratulates himself as his status as a serial killer, the Snowman, is revealed. However, when Idar tells him that Harry is asking questions about Arve, Mathias kills Idar and frames him for the Snowman murders. He also begins to plan the final murder, with the victim sitting atop the snowman, as he had so many years ago.
Part 5, Chapter 34 Summary: “Day 21: Sirens”
Harry calls and asks if he can come to Mathias’s house but is worried that Mathias is suspicious. He tells Gunnar not to resign, that Katrine is not the Snowman. He identifies Mathias as the Snowman, who Gunnar recognizes as the doctor who had been helping them.
Harry’s team arrives at Mathias’s place and find a dead woman in an armchair. She is wearing the same dress Rakel wore in Harry’s photo, as well as Rakel’s watch, but the woman is Birte Becker. Harry calls Rakel on the way to her house. He tells her not to let Mathias in the house and to look out the window. He asks if she sees a snowman outside, and Rakel begins to understand what is happening.
Part 5, Chapter 35 Summary: “Day 21: Monster”
Rakel locks the doors but remembers that Mathias has a key to the cellar. Harry has shown Oleg how to block a door with a chair, and he goes down into the cellar. She sees water dripping from the ceiling, and thinks she forgot to turn the shower off. When she gets upstairs, the bedroom door is closed. In the cellar, Mathias grabs Oleg, ties his hands and ankles, and puts him in the freezer, locking the door.
Upstairs, Rakel enters the bedroom and sees an enormous snowman, melting. Mathias comes up behind her and ties her hands. He tells her that Oleg is in the freezer. Harry arrives and sees that the cellar door is open. He runs downstairs and unlocks the freezer. Oleg springs out and cuts Harry with his skate before he recognizes him. Harry orders him to go to the neighbor’s house.
Harry can’t get into the bedroom through the door, and so goes out the bathroom window and grabs the bars that run across the bedroom window. Inside, he can see Rakel, in a red dress, sitting atop a snowman. There is a noose around her neck, and the wire is connected to the bedroom door handle. The snowman is melting, and she will soon be out of time.
Gunnar is waiting outside the house, and Harry tells him to attach a tow rope to the car and throw the end to him. They pull the iron bars off the window, and Harry climbs in just as the snowman melts. He holds Rakel up, and to prevent the noose from burning her neck, puts his fingers in the gap, and cuts one of his fingers off. When the other officers arrive, Rakel tells Harry what Mathias said before he left. Harry realizes that Mathias plans to end his life—he sees the ski jump out the window and knows where he has to go.
Part 5, Chapter 36 Summary: “Day 21: The Tower”
Harry remembers the conversation in which Mathias said he would jump off the ski tower and knows that Mathias remembers the conversation as well. When Harry reaches the top of the ski tower, Mathias is waiting for him. He admits to killing his mother. Harry holds his gun on Mathias, and has handcuffs on both wrists, prepared with the speed-cuffing technique he has practiced. Mathias asks Harry to kill him, but Harry gives him the gun and says to do it himself. Instead, Mathias turns the gun on him, but just as he is about to fire, Harry slaps a handcuff on him, attaching them. Mathias fires the gun, but it is empty. Harry tells Mathias that Rakel is alive, and, in response, Mathias jumps off the tower, dragging Harry with him. At the last second, Harry throws his second set of handcuffs, locking them to the railing.
Harry can see the action below, including the officers looking for them in the snow. Finally, they shine the light up, and see the two men dangling from the railing, linked together.
Part 5, Chapter 37 Summary: “Day 22: Dad”
Jonas wakes up in his bed to see his father crying over him. Filip tells him that they have found Birte’s body. Jonas comments that they are alone together now, and Filip hugs him, saying that he is his son and always will be.
Part 5, Chapter 38 Summary: “December 2004: The Swans”
Harry is at the hospital, visiting Ståle Aune. Beate is also there. He shows them his finger, which couldn’t be reattached. Oleg and Rakel are recovering, and Katrine will be returning to the police department in Bergen. He visited her, and she apologized, but he didn’t really see regret in her eyes.
Harry and Rakel meet, and he tells her that he had been sleepwalking, which explained the wet boot prints and missing photo in his apartment. Rakel wishes that they could start over, and erase their past, but they both know they can’t. He tells her that he is leaving and doesn’t plan to return.
At Harry’s apartment building, Ali and another man are talking to the mold man, who tells them that, even if you can’t see mold, it’s there.
Part 5 Analysis
At the beginning of Part 5, Nesbø returns to the scene in 1980 that the reader has previously seen from an omniscient point of view, in Chapter 1. This time, however, Nesbø immediately reveals that the boy waiting in the car is Mathias. With this revelation, Mathias, who has been in the background for the entire novel, suddenly moves into prominence. Even though Part 5 has stepped away from the investigation, the pieces finally come together.
Nesbø returns to this scene to show that Mathias is the Snowman and explain the origins of his career as a killer. The choice to step away from the investigation at a crucial juncture in the plot to return to the very beginning, stops the action, but provides the reader with the context they will need to understand events that are about to quickly unfold. Chapter 33 offers Mathias’s evolution into a serial killer from his point of view. All of the questions revolving around the investigation are answered and yet Harry is not privy to this information, as the reader is, in a bit of dramatic irony.
The remainder of Part 5 focuses on catching Mathias and Harry’s struggle to outwit him. Harry was right to think that the staging of Eli Kvale’s body was practice—Rakel is staged in the same way. The only difference is that Rakel is alive, showing that Mathias is still playing a game with Harry. In a nod towards the theme of What Makes a Father, Oleg goes down to the cellar, a fear that Harry has taught him to face, to prop a chair against the doorknob, a trick which Harry also taught him. In a final connection to this theme, when Harry unlocks the freezer, Oleg attacks him with a skate, which he keeps in the freezer because Harry had told him his skates should be kept cold. Oleg’s actions and decisions during this time reinforce Harry’s status as a father figure to Oleg.
The action rises rapidly in these chapters, to the climactic scene at the ski jump. As with Katrine, Harry knows where to find Mathias because of his methodology—he pays attention to what people say and the patterns in their behavior. However, this is not to say that Harry is in control of the situation; Mathias knows that he will remember the conversation and is leading Harry there. At this point in the story, it is clear that although Mathias had other reasons for his past killing, at some point, his focus turned entirely to Harry. Their standoff at the top of the tower is all about the game, and the reasons why he was killing these women are left behind. In the end, Harry’s practice with speed-cuffing, mentioned casually at the beginning of the novel, saves both his and Mathias’s lives.
In Chapter 37, Nesbø further addresses the theme of What Makes a Father, with a scene between Filip and Jonas Becker. Although Filip has been angry and resistant to Jonas, the result of discovering he is not Jonas’s biological father, in this short chapter, he shows a shift in his thinking. He understands that biology does not make a father, a theme that Nesbø highlights with the character of Arve Støp, Harry’s relationship with Oleg, and finally, with the arc of Filip and Jonas’s relationship throughout the novel.
The final chapter shows all of the important characters after the fact. In his return to the hospital and seeing Beate, Jack’s wife, Harry is given some closure about the loss of his partner with which, although it happened in the previous book, he is still struggling. Katrine will be returning to the police, and because Nesbø’s Harry Hole books are a series, there is a distinct possibility readers will see her in future books. The mold man, who has turned out to be only a mold man, has the final words of the novel. With them, he clarifies the metaphor that Nesbø was using the mold man for. His statement that you can’t see mold, but it’s there, connects back to the Nordic noir convention surrounding rot and corruption. In this case, the metaphor could be seen to apply to Mathias as well—he was, by all accounts, a well-respected doctor and an excellent partner for Rakel. However, beneath the surface, a killer with a disturbed mind lurked.
