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During the late night of April 7 1990, a devastating fire broke out on board the ferry Scandinavian Star, a passenger ferry traveling between Oslo and Frederikshavn. Insufficient crew preparedness combined with malfunctioning fire doors aided the propagation of the fire, while toxic hydrogen cyanide gas released from combusting materials led to the deaths of 159 people. At first, the disaster was blamed to a passenger—a truck driver with a history of fire-setting. Since this individual too perished in the fire and was not able to defend the accusations, the complete truth regarding the disaster remained hidden for many years. Only in 2020 that a detailed documentary disclosed the blaze was probably started deliberately as part of an fraud scheme.

Nordenhof's Scandinavian Star Series: An Overview

In the initial book of Asta Olivia Nordenhof's epic series, the preceding volume, an unnamed narrator is traveling on a public transport through the Danish capital when she notices an older man on the street. As the vehicle moves away, she experiences an “uncanny feeling” that she is carrying a part of him with her. Driven to repeat the route in search of him, the character enters a setting that is both alien and deeply familiar. She presents readers to Maggie and Kurt, whose connection is tested by the pressures of their troubled histories. In the concluding section of that book, it is suggested that the root of the character's disaffection may stem from a poor investment made on his account by a individual known as T.

This New Volume: An Unconventional Narrative Style

The Devil Book begins with an lengthy poetic passage in which the writer describes her struggle to compose T's narrative. “In this volume, two,” she writes, “we were meant / to trace him / from childhood up until / the evening / when he sat waiting for / the report that / the blaze / on the Scandinavian Star / had effectively been / ignited.” Burdened by the undertaking she has set herself and derailed by the global health crisis, she tackles the story indirectly, as a type of allegory. “It occurred to me / that I / can do / whatever I want / so this / is my work / this is / for you / this is / an erotic thriller / about businessmen and / the devil.”

A tale slowly unfolds of a woman who experiences lockdown in London with a near-unknown person and during those days tells to him what happened to her a ten years before, when she agreed to an offer from a man who claimed to be the devil to grant all her wishes, so long as she didn't question his intentions. As the elements of the two stories become more interwoven, we begin to suspect that they are one and the same—or at minimum that the nature of T is legion, for there are demonic forces everywhere.

There is another fire here: an ardent, compelling commitment to writing as a form of activism

Deals with the Devil: A Thematic Examination

Literature teach us that it is the devil who makes deals, not God, and that we enter into them at our peril. But suppose the narrator herself is the devil? A additional narrative eventually emerges—the story of a young woman whose childhood was scarred by mistreatment and who spent time in a psychiatric hospital, under duress to conform with social expectations or endure further harm. “[This entity] understands that in the game you've created for it, there are a pair of results: surrender or remain a beast.” A third way out is finally revealed through a collection of poems to the darkness that are simultaneously a call to arms against the forces of capital.

Parallels and Readings: From Literature to Real Events

Numerous UK audience members of Nordenhof's Scandinavian Star novels will reflect right away of the London tower fire, which, though unintentional in origin, shares similarities in that the ensuing disaster and loss of life can be linked at least partly to the dangerous trade-off of putting financial gain over human lives. In these first two volumes of what is planned to be a multi-volume sequence, the blaze aboard the ship and the series of fraudulent transactions that culminated in multiple deaths are a ominous background element, showing themselves only in fleeting glimpses of detail or inference yet projecting a deepening shadow over everything that transpires. Some individuals may doubt how much it is possible to interpret The Devil Book as a independent piece, when its purpose and significance are so deeply bound into a larger whole whose final form, at this stage, is unknowable.

Innovative Prose: Ethics and Aesthetics Fused

There will be others—and I include myself as among them—who will fall in love with Nordenhof's project purely as written art, as properly experimental writing whose ethical and creative intent are so deeply interlinked as to make them inseparable. “Write poems / for we need / that too.” Another kind of blaze exists: a passionate, magnetic devotion to writing as a statement. I intend to continue to follow this literary journey, wherever it goes.