🔗 Share this article

In the late night of the 7th of April 1990, a catastrophic blaze erupted aboard the ferry Scandinavian Star, a passenger ferry operating between Oslo and Frederikshavn. Inadequate staff preparedness combined with jammed safety doors aided the spread of the fire, while toxic hydrogen cyanide gas emitted from combusting materials led to the loss of 159 individuals. Initially, the disaster was attributed to a traveler—a truck driver with a record of fire-setting. Since this individual also died in the incident and was not able to defend himself, the complete facts about the disaster stayed concealed for many years. It wasn't until 2020 that a detailed investigation revealed the fire was likely started deliberately as part of an fraud scheme.

Nordenhof's Literary Sequence: A Glimpse

Within the first volume of Nordenhof's epic sequence, the preceding volume, an unidentified protagonist is riding on a public transport through the Danish capital when she observes an elderly man on the street. As the bus drives away, she feels an “uncanny feeling” that she is carrying a part of him with her. Driven to retrace the route in search of him, the narrator enters a landscape that is both unfamiliar and deeply familiar. She introduces readers to Maggie and Kurt, whose relationship is tested by the burdens of their conflicted histories. In the final pages of that volume, it is implied that the source of the character's disaffection may stem from a poor financial decision made on his account by a man known as T.

This New Volume: An Unconventional Narrative Style

The Devil Book opens with an lengthy poetic passage in which the writer explains her challenge to compose T's narrative. “Within this volume, two,” she writes, “we were meant / to follow him / from childhood up until / the night / when he sat anticipating for / the report that / the blaze / on the ferry / had effectively been / set.” Overwhelmed by the task she has set herself and derailed by the pandemic, she tackles the story indirectly, as a form 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 sensational story / about entrepreneurs and / the dark force.”

A tale slowly unfolds of a female character who spends quarantine in the UK capital with a near-unknown person and during those days relates to him what occurred to her a decade before, when she agreed to an offer from a figure who professed to be the devil to fulfill all her desires, so long as she didn't doubt his intentions. As the elements of the two stories become more interwoven, we begin to believe that they are identical—or at minimum that the nature of T is legion, for there are devils everywhere.

There is another fire here: a passionate, compelling dedication 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 a divine being, and that we enter into them at our risk. But suppose the narrator herself is the devil? A additional storyline eventually emerges—the account of a young woman whose early years was marred by mistreatment and who spent time in a mental health facility, under duress to conform with social expectations or endure more of the same. “[This entity] understands that in the game you've set for it, there are a pair of outcomes: submit or stay a beast.” A alternative path is finally unveiled through a collection of poems to the night that are simultaneously a rallying cry against the forces of capital.

Connections and Interpretations: From Fiction to Reality

Many UK audience members of Nordenhof's Scandinavian Star novels will reflect right away of the Grenfell Tower tragedy, which, though accidental in origin, bears similarities in that the resulting tragedy and loss of life can be attributed at in part to the devil's bargain of putting profit over people. In these initial books of what is planned to be a multi-volume sequence, the blaze on board the ship and the series of fraudulent business deals that ended in mass murder are a sinister background presence, showing themselves only in brief flashes of detail or implication yet casting a deepening influence over all that occurs. Certain individuals may question how far it is possible to read this volume as a stand-alone piece, when its aim and meaning are so intricately bound into a larger whole whose ultimate shape, at this stage, is unknowable.

Innovative Prose: Art and Morality Fused

Some individuals—and I include myself as one of them—who will become enamored with Nordenhof's endeavor purely as written art, as truly experimental writing whose ethical and creative intent are so profoundly entwined as to make them inextricable. “Write poems / for we need / that too.” Another kind of blaze exists: a passionate, magnetic devotion to the craft as a political act. I will continue to pursue this literary journey, no matter where it goes.