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In the late night of the 7th of April 1990, a devastating fire erupted on board the MS Scandinavian Star, a car and passenger ferry operating between Oslo and Frederikshavn. Insufficient crew training combined with malfunctioning fire doors accelerated the propagation of the fire, while deadly hydrogen cyanide gas released from burning materials caused the deaths of 159 individuals. Initially, the tragedy was attributed to a passenger—a truck driver with a history of fire-setting. Since this suspect also died in the incident and was not able to defend himself, the full facts about the disaster remained concealed for a long time. Only in 2020 that a detailed investigation revealed the blaze was likely started deliberately as part of an fraud scheme.

Nordenhof's Scandinavian Star Series: An Overview

In the first volume of Asta Olivia Nordenhof's epic sequence, the preceding volume, an unnamed protagonist is riding on a bus through Copenhagen when she observes an elderly man on the sidewalk. As the vehicle drives away, she experiences an “eerie sense” that she is carrying a piece of him with her. Driven to repeat the journey in pursuit of him, the character enters a setting that is both unfamiliar and strangely known. She introduces us to a couple named Maggie and Kurt, whose connection is tested by the burdens of their troubled pasts. In the concluding section of that book, it is suggested that the root of the character's disaffection may stem from a disastrous financial decision made on his account by a man known as T.

The Devil Book: A Unique Narrative Style

This second installment opens with an extended prose poem in which the narrator describes her struggle to write T's narrative. “In this volume, two,” she states, “we were supposed / to follow him / from childhood up until / the evening / when he sat waiting for / the report that / the fire / on the Scandinavian Star / had effectively been / set.” Overwhelmed by the task she has assigned herself and derailed by the pandemic, she approaches the tale obliquely, as a type of allegory. “I came to think / that I / can do / whatever I want / so this / is my book / this is / for you / this is / an sensational story / about entrepreneurs and / the dark force.”

A narrative gradually unfolds of a woman who experiences quarantine in the UK capital with a virtual stranger and over the course of those days relates to him what occurred to her a decade earlier, when she accepted an proposal from a man who claimed to be the evil entity to grant all her wishes, so long as she didn't doubt his intentions. As the elements of the two stories become more interwoven, we start to believe that they are one and the same—or at the very least that the identity of T is legion, for there are devils all around.

There is another fire here: a passionate, magnetic commitment to literature as a political act

Pacts and Consequences: A Thematic Examination

Classic stories instruct us that it is the devil who does bargains, not a divine being, and that we engage in them at our peril. But suppose the protagonist herself is the devil? A third narrative comes finally to light—the account of a girl whose early years was scarred by abuse and who was placed in a psychiatric hospital, under pressure to comply with societal norms or endure more of the same. “[The devil] knows that in the scenario you've set for it, there are two outcomes: submit or stay a beast.” A third way out is finally unveiled through a series of verses to the night that are also a call to arms against the forces of wealth and power.

Connections and Interpretations: From Fiction to Reality

Numerous British audience members of Nordenhof's series novels will reflect immediately of the Grenfell Tower tragedy, which, though accidental in origin, shares similarities in that the ensuing tragedy and fatalities can be linked at in part to the devil's bargain of putting profit over people. In these initial books of what is planned to be a seven-book sequence, the blaze aboard the ship and the chain of deceptive transactions that ended in multiple deaths are a ominous underlying presence, showing themselves only in brief flashes of information or implication yet casting a growing influence over all that occurs. Some readers may question how much it is feasible to read The Devil Book as a independent work, when its aim and meaning are so deeply bound into a larger whole whose final form, at present, is uncertain.

Innovative Prose: Art and Morality Intertwined

Some individuals—and I include myself as one of them—who will become enamored with Nordenhof's project purely as written art, as properly experimental literature whose ethical and creative purpose are so profoundly entwined as to make them inextricable. “Write poems / for we need / that too.” Another kind of blaze exists: a passionate, magnetic devotion to the craft as a statement. I intend to persist to pursue this series, wherever it goes.