🔗 Share this article

In the early hours of April 7 1990, a devastating blaze erupted aboard the ferry Scandinavian Star, a passenger ferry traveling between Oslo and Frederikshavn. Inadequate staff preparedness along with malfunctioning safety doors aided the spread of the fire, while deadly cyanide gas emitted from combusting laminates led to the deaths of 159 people. At first, the disaster was blamed to a traveler—a lorry driver with a record of arson. Given that this individual too died in the incident and was unable to refute himself, the complete facts about the event stayed concealed for many years. Only in 2020 that a detailed documentary disclosed the blaze was probably set deliberately as part of an fraud scheme.

Nordenhof's Scandinavian Star Sequence: A Glimpse

In the first volume of Asta Olivia Nordenhof's epic sequence, the preceding volume, an unidentified narrator is riding on a bus through the Danish capital when she notices an older man on the sidewalk. As the bus drives away, she experiences an “eerie sense” that she is carrying a piece of him with her. Driven to retrace the journey in search of him, the narrator enters a setting that is both alien and deeply familiar. She introduces readers to Maggie and Kurt, whose relationship is strained by the burdens of their troubled histories. In the final pages of that volume, it is suggested that the root of Kurt's discontent may originate in a poor investment made on his behalf by a man referred to as T.

This New Volume: A Unique Approach

The Devil Book begins with an extended poetic passage in which the narrator explains her struggle to write T's story. “Within this volume, two,” she states, “we were supposed / to follow him / from childhood up until / the night / when he sat waiting for / the news that / the blaze / on the Scandinavian Star / had effectively been / ignited.” Burdened by the undertaking she has assigned herself and derailed by the global health crisis, she tackles the story indirectly, as a form of parable. “I came to think / that I / can do / anything I want / so this / is my book / this is / for you / this is / an erotic thriller / about businessmen and / the dark force.”

A narrative slowly emerges of a woman who spends lockdown in the UK capital with a virtual stranger and over the course of those weeks tells to him what happened to her a decade earlier, when she accepted an offer from a man who claimed to be the evil entity to grant all her desires, so long as she didn't question his motives. As the threads of the dual narratives become more intertwined, we begin to believe that they are one and the same—or at the very least that the identity of T is multiple, for there are devils everywhere.

Another blaze is present: a passionate, magnetic dedication to writing as a form of activism

Deals with the Devil: A Literary Exploration

Literature teach us that it is the devil who makes deals, not a divine being, and that we engage in them at our risk. But suppose the narrator herself is the devil? A additional storyline comes finally to light—the story of a girl whose early years was scarred by mistreatment and who was placed in a mental health facility, under duress to comply with social expectations or endure more of the same. “[The devil] knows that in the game you've set for it, there are a pair of outcomes: surrender or remain a monster.” A third way out is ultimately unveiled through a series of poems to the darkness that are simultaneously a rallying cry against the influences of wealth and power.

Parallels and Readings: From Literature to Reality

Numerous UK audience members of Nordenhof's series books will think immediately of the London tower tragedy, which, though unintentional in cause, bears parallels in that the resulting disaster and fatalities can be linked at in part to the devil's bargain of putting profit over people. In these first two volumes of what is planned to be a seven-book sequence, the blaze aboard the ferry and the series of deceptive transactions that ended in mass murder are a ominous background presence, revealing themselves only in fleeting flashes of detail or implication yet projecting a growing shadow over all that transpires. Some readers may question how far it is possible to interpret this volume as a independent work, when its aim and significance are so intricately bound into a larger narrative whose final form, at present, is uncertain.

Experimental Writing: Art and Morality Fused

There will be others—and I count myself as among them—who will fall in love 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 inseparable. “Write poems / for we require / that as well.” Another kind of blaze exists: a passionate, magnetic devotion to the craft as a political act. I intend to continue to pursue this literary journey, no matter where it goes.