🔗 Share this article

During the late night of the 7th of April 1990, a catastrophic fire erupted on board the ferry Scandinavian Star, a car and passenger ferry traveling between Frederikshavn and Oslo. Insufficient crew preparedness along with jammed fire doors aided the propagation of the flames, while deadly cyanide gas emitted from burning laminates led to the loss of 159 people. Initially, the disaster was attributed to a passenger—a truck driver with a history of fire-setting. Given that this suspect also perished in the incident and was unable to defend himself, the full truth about the event stayed concealed for a long time. Only in 2020 that a detailed documentary disclosed the fire was likely started intentionally as part of an insurance fraud.

Asta Olivia Nordenhof's Literary Sequence: A Glimpse

In the initial book of Nordenhof's epic series, the preceding volume, an unidentified narrator is riding on a public transport through Copenhagen when she observes an elderly 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 narrator finds herself in a setting that is both alien and deeply familiar. She introduces us to a couple named Maggie and Kurt, whose connection is strained by the pressures of their conflicted histories. In the concluding section of that book, it is implied that the root of the character's disaffection may originate in a disastrous investment made on his behalf by a individual referred to as T.

The Devil Book: An Unconventional Approach

This second installment opens with an extended poetic passage in which the narrator describes her struggle to write T's story. “In this volume, two,” she writes, “we were meant / to trace him / from youth up until / the evening / when he sat waiting for / the news that / the blaze / on the Scandinavian Star / had effectively been / ignited.” Overwhelmed by the task she has set herself and derailed by the pandemic, she approaches the story obliquely, as a type of allegory. “I came to think / that I / can do / anything I want / so this / is my work / this is / for you / this is / an erotic thriller / about entrepreneurs and / the dark force.”

A narrative gradually unfolds of a woman who spends lockdown in the UK capital with a near-unknown person and during those days tells to him what happened to her a ten years earlier, when she accepted an proposal from a figure who claimed to be the evil entity to fulfill all her wishes, so long as she didn't doubt his intentions. As the threads of the dual narratives become more intertwined, we start to believe that they are one and the same—or at the very least that the nature of T is multiple, for there are devils 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 teach us that it is the devil who makes bargains, not God, and that we enter into them at our risk. But suppose the protagonist herself is the devil? A third storyline eventually emerges—the story of a girl whose early years was scarred by mistreatment and who spent time in a psychiatric hospital, under pressure to conform with social expectations or suffer more of the same. “[This entity] knows that in the game you've set for it, there are two outcomes: surrender or remain a beast.” A third way out is ultimately unveiled through a series of verses to the darkness that are simultaneously a rallying cry against the influences of wealth and power.

Connections and Interpretations: From Fiction to Real Events

Numerous UK audience members of Nordenhof's series books will think right away of the Grenfell Tower fire, which, though accidental in origin, bears similarities in that the resulting tragedy and loss of life can be linked at in part to the devil's bargain of prioritizing financial gain over human lives. In these first two volumes of what is projected to be a multi-volume sequence, the blaze aboard the ferry and the series of deceptive business deals that culminated in mass murder are a sinister underlying element, revealing themselves only in brief glimpses of detail or inference yet casting a deepening shadow over everything that transpires. Certain readers may doubt how far it is possible to interpret The Devil Book as a stand-alone work, when its aim and meaning are so deeply tied into a larger narrative whose ultimate shape, at present, is unknowable.

Experimental Writing: Ethics and Aesthetics Intertwined

There will be others—and I count myself as one of them—who will become enamored with the author's project purely as written art, as truly innovative literature whose moral and creative intent are so deeply entwined as to make them inseparable. “Write poems / for we need / that as well.” Another kind of blaze exists: an intense, magnetic devotion to writing as a political act. I will persist to follow this series, wherever it goes.