🔗 Share this article

During the late night of April 7 1990, a devastating fire broke out aboard the MS Scandinavian Star, a passenger ferry traveling between Frederikshavn and Oslo. Inadequate crew preparedness combined with jammed safety doors accelerated the propagation of the flames, while deadly hydrogen cyanide gas released from combusting materials led to the deaths of 159 people. At first, the tragedy was attributed to a passenger—a truck driver with a history of arson. Given that this suspect also died in the incident and was not able to defend himself, the complete truth regarding the disaster remained hidden for many years. Only in 2020 that a comprehensive investigation revealed the fire was probably started deliberately as part of an fraud scheme.

Asta Olivia Nordenhof's Scandinavian Star Sequence: An Overview

In the first volume of Asta Olivia Nordenhof's epic series, Money to Burn, an unidentified narrator is traveling on a public transport through Copenhagen when she observes an elderly man on the sidewalk. As the vehicle moves away, she experiences an “uncanny feeling” that she is carrying a piece of him with her. Driven to retrace the route in pursuit of him, the narrator finds herself in a setting that is both unfamiliar and deeply familiar. She introduces readers to a couple named Maggie and Kurt, whose relationship is strained by the burdens of their conflicted pasts. In the concluding section of that book, it is implied that the root of the character's discontent may stem from a poor financial decision made on his behalf by a man referred to as T.

This New Volume: An Unconventional Approach

The Devil Book opens with an extended poetic passage in which the narrator describes her challenge to compose T's narrative. “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 fire / on the ferry / had effectively been / set.” Burdened by the undertaking she has assigned herself and disrupted by the pandemic, she approaches the tale obliquely, as a type of allegory. “I came to think / that I / can do / whatever I want / so this / is my book / this is / for you / this is / an erotic thriller / about businessmen and / the devil.”

A tale gradually unfolds of a female character who spends quarantine in London with a near-unknown person and during those weeks relates to him what happened to her a ten years earlier, when she accepted an offer from a figure who professed to be the devil to fulfill all her desires, so long as she didn't question his intentions. As the threads of the two stories become more interwoven, we start to suspect that they are one and the same—or at minimum that the identity of T is multiple, for there are devils all around.

There is another fire here: an ardent, magnetic commitment to writing as a political act

Deals with the Devil: A Literary Examination

Literature instruct us that it is the dark figure who does bargains, not God, and that we enter into them at our risk. But what if the protagonist herself is the devil? A additional storyline eventually emerges—the account 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 further harm. “[This entity] understands that in the scenario you've created for it, there are two outcomes: surrender or remain a beast.” A alternative path is ultimately unveiled through a series of poems to the darkness that are simultaneously a rallying cry against the forces of capital.

Connections and Readings: From Fiction to Reality

Many British readers of Nordenhof's series books will reflect immediately of the Grenfell Tower fire, which, though unintentional in cause, bears similarities in that the resulting tragedy and fatalities can be linked at in part to the dangerous trade-off of putting profit over people. In these initial volumes of what is projected to be a multi-volume series, the fire aboard the ship and the chain of fraudulent business deals that ended in mass murder are a ominous underlying element, showing themselves only in fleeting glimpses of information or implication yet projecting a deepening influence over everything that occurs. Some readers may question how much it is possible to read this volume as a stand-alone work, when its purpose and meaning are so deeply bound into a larger narrative whose final form, at this stage, is unknowable.

Innovative Prose: Art and Morality Fused

Some individuals—and I include myself as among them—who will become enamored with the author's endeavor purely as written art, as properly experimental writing whose moral and artistic purpose are so deeply entwined as to make them inextricable. “Write poems / for we require / that as well.” Another kind of blaze exists: a passionate, magnetic commitment to writing as a statement. I intend to persist to pursue this literary journey, no matter where it leads.