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In the late night of April 7 1990, a devastating fire broke out aboard the MS Scandinavian Star, a car and passenger ferry operating between Oslo and Frederikshavn. Inadequate crew preparedness along with malfunctioning safety doors accelerated the spread of the flames, while deadly hydrogen cyanide gas released from burning materials caused the loss of 159 individuals. Initially, the disaster was blamed to a passenger—a lorry driver with a history of arson. Since this suspect also perished in the incident and was unable to defend the accusations, the full truth about the event remained concealed for many years. Only in 2020 that a detailed investigation disclosed the blaze was probably set intentionally as part of an fraud scheme.

Asta Olivia Nordenhof's Scandinavian Star Series: An Overview

In the initial book of Nordenhof's Scandinavian Star series, the preceding volume, an unidentified protagonist is traveling on a bus through Copenhagen when she observes an elderly man on the street. As the bus moves away, she experiences an “uncanny feeling” that she is carrying a piece of him with her. Compelled to repeat the journey in search of him, the character enters a landscape that is both unfamiliar and deeply familiar. She introduces us to a couple named Maggie and Kurt, whose connection is strained by the pressures of their troubled pasts. In the final pages of that volume, it is implied that the source of the character's disaffection may originate in a disastrous investment made on his behalf by a man known as T.

This New Volume: An Unconventional Approach

The Devil Book opens with an extended prose poem in which the writer explains her struggle to write T's narrative. “Within this second volume,” she writes, “we were meant / to follow him / from childhood up until / the evening / when he sat waiting for / the news that / the fire / on the ferry / had effectively been / set.” Burdened by the task she has assigned herself and derailed by the pandemic, 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 entrepreneurs and / the devil.”

A narrative slowly unfolds of a woman who spends lockdown in the UK capital with a near-unknown person and during those days relates to him what happened to her a decade before, when she accepted an offer from a figure who claimed to be the evil entity to fulfill all her desires, so long as she didn't doubt his intentions. As the threads 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 demonic forces everywhere.

There is another fire here: a passionate, compelling commitment to literature as a form of activism

Deals with the Devil: A Literary Exploration

Classic stories instruct us that it is the dark figure who makes deals, not God, and that we engage in them at our risk. But suppose the protagonist herself is the devil? A third storyline 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 suffer more of the same. “[This entity] knows that in the game you've created for it, there are two outcomes: surrender or remain a beast.” A third way out is finally unveiled through a series of verses to the night that are simultaneously a call to arms against the forces of capital.

Connections and Readings: From Fiction to Real Events

Many British audience members of the author's Scandinavian Star books will reflect right away of the London tower tragedy, which, though unintentional in cause, shares parallels in that the resulting disaster and fatalities can be linked at in part to the dangerous trade-off of putting financial gain over people. In these first two volumes of what is projected to be a seven-book series, the fire on board the ferry and the chain of deceptive business deals that ended in mass murder are a sinister underlying presence, revealing themselves only in fleeting flashes of information or implication yet casting a growing shadow over all that transpires. Certain readers may doubt how much it is feasible to interpret The Devil Book as a stand-alone piece, when its aim and meaning are so intricately bound into a larger narrative whose ultimate shape, at present, is unknowable.

Experimental Writing: Art and Morality Fused

There will be others—and I include myself as one of them—who will become enamored with Nordenhof's project purely as text, as properly experimental writing whose ethical and artistic intent are so profoundly interlinked as to make them inextricable. “Write poems / for we require / that too.” There is another fire here: a passionate, magnetic devotion to writing as a political act. I will persist to follow this series, wherever it leads.