🔗 Share this article

During the late night of the 7th of April 1990, a devastating fire erupted on board the ferry Scandinavian Star, a passenger ferry traveling between Frederikshavn and Oslo. Insufficient staff preparedness along with malfunctioning fire doors accelerated the propagation of the fire, while toxic cyanide gas emitted from burning laminates led to the deaths of 159 individuals. Initially, the tragedy was blamed to a passenger—a truck driver with a history of arson. Since this suspect too died in the incident and was unable to defend the accusations, the full truth regarding the disaster stayed hidden for many years. It wasn't until 2020 that a comprehensive investigation disclosed 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 unnamed protagonist is riding on a bus through Copenhagen when she observes an older man on the sidewalk. As the vehicle drives away, she experiences an “uncanny feeling” that she is taking a piece of him with her. Driven to retrace the journey in search of him, the character finds herself in a setting that is both unfamiliar and deeply familiar. She presents us to a couple named Maggie and Kurt, whose connection is tested by the pressures of their conflicted histories. In the final pages of that book, it is suggested that the source of the character's discontent may originate in a poor financial decision made on his account by a man referred to as T.

This New Volume: An Unconventional Approach

The Devil Book begins with an lengthy poetic passage in which the writer explains her challenge to write T's narrative. “In this volume, two,” she states, “we were meant / to follow him / from childhood up until / the night / when he sat anticipating for / the news that / the blaze / on the Scandinavian Star / had successfully been / ignited.” Burdened by the undertaking she has assigned herself and disrupted by the global health crisis, she approaches the tale obliquely, as a type of allegory. “It occurred to me / that I / can do / anything I want / so this / is my work / this is / for you / this is / an sensational story / about entrepreneurs and / the dark force.”

A narrative gradually unfolds of a female character who experiences quarantine in London with a virtual stranger and during those days relates to him what happened to her a decade earlier, when she agreed to 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 intentions. As the elements of the two stories become more interwoven, we begin to believe that they are identical—or at the very least that the nature of T is legion, for there are demonic forces everywhere.

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

Deals with the Devil: A Thematic Examination

Literature teach us that it is the dark figure who does deals, not God, and that we engage in them at our risk. But suppose the narrator herself is the malevolent force? A additional storyline comes finally to light—the account of a girl whose early years was scarred by abuse and who spent time in a psychiatric hospital, under pressure to comply with social expectations or endure further harm. “[This entity] understands that in the scenario you've created for it, there are two outcomes: submit or remain a beast.” A third way out is ultimately unveiled through a collection of poems to the darkness that are simultaneously a rallying cry against the influences of capital.

Parallels and Interpretations: From Literature to Reality

Many British audience members of the author's series novels will reflect right away of the Grenfell Tower tragedy, which, though accidental in cause, bears parallels in that the ensuing tragedy and fatalities can be attributed at least partly to the devil's bargain of putting financial gain over human lives. In these initial volumes of what is planned to be a multi-volume series, the blaze on board the ship and the series of deceptive business deals that ended in multiple deaths are a ominous underlying presence, revealing themselves only in brief flashes of information or inference yet casting a deepening shadow over everything that transpires. Some individuals may question how far it is possible to read The Devil Book as a stand-alone piece, when its purpose and meaning are so deeply bound into a broader whole whose ultimate shape, at this stage, is unknowable.

Innovative Prose: Ethics and Aesthetics Fused

Some individuals—and I count myself as one of them—who will become enamored with Nordenhof's project purely as written art, as truly innovative writing whose ethical and creative purpose are so deeply interlinked as to make them inseparable. “Write poems / for we require / that as well.” Another kind of blaze exists: an intense, magnetic commitment to writing as a statement. I will continue to pursue this literary journey, wherever it goes.