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During the late night of April 7 1990, a devastating fire broke out on board the MS Scandinavian Star, a car and passenger ferry operating between Oslo and Frederikshavn. Insufficient staff training combined with jammed fire doors accelerated the spread of the flames, while deadly hydrogen cyanide gas released from burning materials led to the deaths of 159 people. Initially, the tragedy was attributed to a traveler—a lorry driver with a history of fire-setting. Given that this individual too perished in the fire and was not able to defend the accusations, the complete facts regarding the event stayed concealed for many years. It wasn't until 2020 that a detailed investigation disclosed the blaze was probably started deliberately as part of an fraud scheme.

Nordenhof's Literary Series: A Glimpse

Within the first volume of Nordenhof's epic sequence, the preceding volume, an unidentified protagonist is traveling on a public transport through Copenhagen when she notices an older man on the street. As the vehicle drives away, she experiences an “uncanny feeling” that she is carrying a part of him with her. Driven to retrace the journey in search of him, the narrator finds herself in a landscape that is both alien and strangely known. She introduces readers to a couple named Maggie and Kurt, whose relationship is strained by the pressures of their conflicted histories. In the concluding section of that volume, it is implied that the root of the character's disaffection may originate in a disastrous financial decision made on his account by a man known as T.

The Devil Book: An Unconventional Approach

This second installment opens with an lengthy prose poem in which the writer explains her struggle to compose T's story. “In this volume, two,” 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.” Burdened by the task she has assigned herself and disrupted by the pandemic, she approaches the tale obliquely, as a form 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 entrepreneurs and / the dark force.”

A narrative gradually emerges of a woman who spends quarantine in the UK capital with a near-unknown person and during those weeks relates to him what occurred to her a ten years earlier, when she accepted an proposal from a man who claimed to be the devil to grant all her desires, so long as she didn't doubt his motives. As the elements of the two stories become more intertwined, we start to believe that they are identical—or at the very least that the nature of T is multiple, for there are devils everywhere.

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

Deals with the Devil: A Thematic Exploration

Literature teach us that it is the devil who makes deals, not a divine being, and that we enter into them at our peril. But what if the narrator herself is the malevolent force? A additional storyline eventually emerges—the story of a young woman whose early years was scarred by abuse and who spent time in a psychiatric hospital, under pressure to conform with social expectations or suffer further harm. “[The devil] knows that in the game you've set for it, there are a pair of outcomes: submit or remain a monster.” A third way out is ultimately revealed through a collection of poems to the night that are simultaneously a call to arms against the forces of capital.

Connections and Readings: From Fiction to Real Events

Numerous UK readers of Nordenhof's Scandinavian Star novels will think right away of the Grenfell Tower fire, which, though accidental in origin, shares parallels in that the resulting tragedy and loss of life can be attributed at in part to the dangerous trade-off of prioritizing financial gain over human lives. In these initial volumes of what is projected to be a seven-book series, the blaze aboard the ferry and the series of fraudulent transactions that culminated in multiple deaths are a sinister background presence, revealing themselves only in brief flashes of detail or implication yet projecting a growing influence over everything that transpires. Certain readers may question how far it is feasible to interpret The Devil Book as a stand-alone work, when its purpose and meaning are so deeply bound into a broader narrative whose ultimate shape, at this stage, is unknowable.

Experimental Writing: Art and Morality Fused

Some individuals—and I count myself as one of them—who will fall in love with Nordenhof's endeavor purely as written art, as properly experimental writing whose moral and artistic purpose are so deeply interlinked as to make them inextricable. “Compose verses / for we need / that too.” Another kind of blaze exists: an intense, attractive commitment to writing as a political act. I will continue to pursue this series, wherever it goes.