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During the early hours of April 7 1990, a catastrophic blaze broke out aboard the MS Scandinavian Star, a car and passenger ferry operating between Frederikshavn and Oslo. Inadequate staff training along with jammed safety doors accelerated the spread of the flames, while toxic cyanide gas released from burning materials caused the deaths of 159 individuals. Initially, the disaster was attributed to a passenger—a truck driver with a record of fire-setting. Since this suspect too died in the fire and was unable to defend himself, the complete truth about the event stayed concealed for many years. Only in 2020 that a detailed investigation disclosed the fire was probably started deliberately as part of an fraud scheme.

Asta Olivia Nordenhof's Scandinavian Star Series: A Glimpse

Within the initial book of Nordenhof's Scandinavian Star series, the preceding volume, an unidentified protagonist is riding on a bus through Copenhagen when she notices an older man on the street. As the bus drives away, she feels an “eerie sense” that she is carrying a part of him with her. Driven to repeat the journey in pursuit of him, the narrator finds herself in a landscape that is both unfamiliar and strangely known. She presents readers to a couple named Maggie and Kurt, whose relationship is strained by the burdens of their troubled pasts. In the final pages of that book, it is implied that the source of the character's discontent may stem from a disastrous financial decision made on his behalf by a man referred to as T.

The Devil Book: An Unconventional Narrative Style

This second installment opens with an extended prose poem in which the writer explains her challenge to write T's story. “Within this second volume,” she writes, “we were supposed / to trace him / from childhood up until / the evening / when he sat anticipating for / the news that / the blaze / on the ferry / had successfully been / ignited.” Overwhelmed by the task she has assigned herself and derailed by the pandemic, she tackles the story obliquely, as a form 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 erotic thriller / about entrepreneurs and / the dark force.”

A narrative slowly unfolds of a female character who experiences quarantine in the UK capital with a virtual stranger and over the course of those weeks tells to him what occurred to her a decade before, when she agreed to an offer from a figure who claimed to be the evil entity to grant all her desires, so long as she didn't doubt his motives. As the threads of the dual narratives become more interwoven, we begin to suspect that they are identical—or at minimum that the identity of T is legion, for there are demonic forces everywhere.

Another blaze is present: an ardent, magnetic commitment to literature as a form of activism

Pacts and Consequences: A Thematic Exploration

Classic stories teach us that it is the devil who does bargains, not God, and that we enter into them at our risk. But suppose the narrator herself is the malevolent force? A third narrative comes finally to light—the account of a girl whose childhood was marred by mistreatment and who spent time in a mental health facility, under pressure to conform with social expectations or suffer further harm. “[This entity] knows that in the game you've set for it, there are a pair of results: submit or remain a beast.” A third way out is ultimately unveiled through a series of verses to the night that are simultaneously a rallying cry against the forces of capital.

Parallels and Interpretations: From Fiction to Real Events

Numerous UK readers of the author's Scandinavian Star novels will reflect right away of the Grenfell Tower fire, which, though accidental in cause, bears similarities in that the resulting disaster and loss of life can be attributed at least partly to the devil's bargain of prioritizing profit over people. In these first two books of what is projected to be a seven-book sequence, the blaze on board the ferry and the chain of fraudulent transactions that culminated in mass murder are a sinister underlying element, showing themselves only in brief glimpses of detail or implication yet casting a deepening shadow over everything that transpires. Some individuals may question how far it is feasible to interpret this volume as a independent piece, when its purpose and meaning are so intricately tied 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 among them—who will become enamored with Nordenhof's endeavor purely as text, as properly experimental literature whose ethical and creative purpose are so profoundly entwined as to make them inextricable. “Compose verses / for we need / that as well.” Another kind of blaze exists: a passionate, magnetic commitment to the craft as a political act. I will continue to pursue this literary journey, no matter where it leads.