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During the late night of April 7 1990, a devastating fire broke out aboard the ferry Scandinavian Star, a car and passenger ferry traveling between Frederikshavn and Oslo. Insufficient staff training combined with malfunctioning safety doors accelerated the propagation of the fire, while toxic cyanide gas released from combusting materials caused the loss of 159 people. At first, the disaster was attributed to a passenger—a truck driver with a history of fire-setting. Since this suspect too died in the fire and was unable to refute the accusations, the full facts about the event remained concealed for many years. Only in 2020 that a detailed investigation disclosed the blaze was probably set deliberately as part of an fraud scheme.

Nordenhof's Scandinavian Star Sequence: An Overview

Within the initial book of Asta Olivia Nordenhof's epic sequence, the preceding volume, an unnamed narrator is riding on a public transport through Copenhagen when she observes an older man on the sidewalk. As the bus moves away, she feels an “uncanny feeling” that she is taking a part of him with her. Driven to retrace the journey in pursuit of him, the character finds herself in a landscape that is both unfamiliar and deeply familiar. She introduces us to Maggie and Kurt, whose relationship is strained by the pressures of their troubled histories. In the final pages of that book, it is implied that the root of the character's discontent may originate in a poor investment made on his behalf by a individual referred to as T.

This New Volume: A Unique Approach

The Devil Book opens with an lengthy prose poem in which the narrator describes her challenge to write T's narrative. “In this second volume,” she states, “we were meant / to follow him / from childhood up until / the night / when he sat waiting for / the report that / the fire / on the Scandinavian Star / had successfully been / set.” Burdened by the undertaking she has assigned herself and disrupted by the pandemic, she tackles the story obliquely, as a form of parable. “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 tale gradually unfolds of a female character who spends lockdown in London with a virtual stranger and during those days relates to him what happened to her a ten years earlier, when she accepted an offer from a man who claimed to be the devil to grant all her desires, so long as she didn't question his intentions. As the elements of the dual narratives become more interwoven, we begin to believe that they are identical—or at minimum that the identity of T is multiple, for there are demonic forces all around.

Another blaze is present: an ardent, magnetic commitment to literature as a political act

Pacts and Consequences: A Literary 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 protagonist herself is the malevolent force? A third narrative eventually emerges—the story of a young woman whose early years was marred by mistreatment and who was placed in a psychiatric hospital, under pressure to conform with social expectations or suffer more of the same. “[The devil] knows that in the scenario you've created for it, there are two results: submit or stay a monster.” A alternative path is finally unveiled through a collection of verses to the darkness that are simultaneously a call to arms against the forces of capital.

Connections and Interpretations: From Fiction to Reality

Many UK audience members of Nordenhof's series novels will think right away of the London tower tragedy, which, though unintentional in cause, shares parallels in that the resulting tragedy and loss of life can be linked at least partly to the dangerous trade-off of prioritizing profit over human lives. In these initial volumes of what is planned to be a seven-book series, the blaze on board the ferry and the series of fraudulent business deals that ended in mass murder are a sinister underlying element, revealing themselves only in brief glimpses of information or implication yet projecting a deepening influence over everything that transpires. Some readers may doubt how far it is possible to interpret The Devil Book as a stand-alone piece, when its purpose and significance are so deeply tied into a larger narrative whose ultimate shape, at present, is unknowable.

Experimental Writing: Ethics and Aesthetics Intertwined

Some individuals—and I count myself as one of them—who will become enamored with the author's project purely as text, as properly experimental writing whose moral and creative purpose are so profoundly interlinked as to make them inseparable. “Write poems / for we need / that as well.” There is another fire here: an intense, attractive commitment to writing as a statement. I intend to continue to follow this series, wherever it goes.