🔗 Share this article

In the early hours of April 7 1990, a devastating fire broke out on board the MS Scandinavian Star, a passenger ferry operating between Frederikshavn and Oslo. Insufficient crew training along with malfunctioning safety doors aided the spread of the flames, while deadly cyanide gas released from burning materials caused the loss of 159 individuals. Initially, the tragedy was blamed to a traveler—a truck driver with a history of fire-setting. Since this suspect also perished in the incident and was not able to defend the accusations, the complete truth regarding the event stayed hidden for many years. It wasn't until 2020 that a detailed investigation revealed the blaze was likely set deliberately as part of an insurance fraud.

Nordenhof's Scandinavian Star Series: An Overview

In the first volume of Asta Olivia Nordenhof's epic sequence, the preceding volume, an unidentified protagonist is riding on a bus through the Danish capital when she notices an elderly man on the street. As the vehicle drives away, she experiences an “uncanny feeling” that she is carrying a piece of him with her. Compelled to retrace the route in pursuit of him, the narrator enters a landscape that is both unfamiliar and deeply familiar. She presents 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 volume, it is implied that the root of the character's disaffection may stem from a poor investment made on his behalf by a individual known as T.

This New Volume: A Unique Approach

The Devil Book begins with an extended prose poem in which the narrator explains her challenge to compose T's story. “Within this second volume,” she states, “we were supposed / to trace him / from childhood up until / the evening / when he sat anticipating for / the report that / the blaze / on the Scandinavian Star / had successfully been / set.” Overwhelmed by the task she has assigned herself and disrupted by the global health crisis, she tackles the story obliquely, as a form of allegory. “It occurred to me / that I / can do / whatever I want / so this / is my book / this is / for you / this is / an sensational story / about businessmen and / the devil.”

A narrative slowly emerges of a female character who spends quarantine in London with a near-unknown person and over the course of those weeks tells to him what occurred to her a decade earlier, when she accepted an offer from a man who professed to be the evil entity to fulfill all her wishes, so long as she didn't question his motives. As the threads of the two stories become more intertwined, 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 demonic forces everywhere.

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

Deals with the Devil: A Literary Examination

Literature instruct us that it is the dark figure who does bargains, not God, and that we enter into them at our peril. But suppose the protagonist herself is the devil? A third storyline eventually emerges—the story of a young woman whose childhood was marred by abuse and who was placed in a psychiatric hospital, under duress to comply with societal norms or endure more of the same. “[The devil] understands that in the scenario you've created for it, there are a pair of outcomes: surrender or stay a beast.” A alternative path is finally unveiled through a collection of poems to the night that are simultaneously a rallying cry against the influences of wealth and power.

Parallels and Readings: From Fiction to Real Events

Numerous British audience members of the author's Scandinavian Star novels will reflect immediately of the Grenfell Tower fire, which, though unintentional in cause, shares parallels in that the resulting tragedy and loss of life can be attributed at in part to the dangerous trade-off of putting profit over human lives. In these first two volumes of what is planned to be a seven-book sequence, the fire aboard the ferry and the series of deceptive business deals that culminated in mass murder are a ominous underlying element, showing themselves only in fleeting flashes of information or implication yet casting a deepening influence over everything that occurs. Certain individuals may question how much it is feasible to interpret this volume as a stand-alone work, when its purpose and meaning are so intricately bound into a broader narrative whose ultimate shape, at this stage, is unknowable.

Innovative Prose: Ethics and Aesthetics Intertwined

Some individuals—and I count myself as among them—who will fall in love with the author's endeavor purely as text, as truly experimental writing whose moral and artistic intent are so deeply entwined 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 will continue to pursue this series, wherever it goes.