🔗 Share this article

During the early hours of the 7th of April 1990, a devastating fire broke out on board the MS Scandinavian Star, a passenger ferry operating between Frederikshavn and Oslo. Insufficient crew preparedness combined with jammed fire doors accelerated the propagation of the fire, while deadly cyanide gas released from burning laminates led to the deaths of 159 individuals. Initially, the tragedy was blamed to a passenger—a lorry driver with a record of fire-setting. Given that this suspect also perished in the incident and was not able to refute himself, the full facts about the event stayed concealed for a long time. It wasn't until 2020 that a comprehensive documentary revealed the blaze was probably started intentionally as part of an insurance fraud.

Nordenhof's Literary Sequence: A Glimpse

In the first volume of Nordenhof's Scandinavian Star sequence, the preceding volume, an unidentified protagonist is riding on a bus through Copenhagen when she notices an older man on the sidewalk. As the vehicle drives away, she experiences an “eerie sense” that she is carrying a part of him with her. Compelled to retrace the route in search of him, the character enters a landscape that is both alien and strangely known. She presents readers to a couple named Maggie and Kurt, whose connection is tested by the pressures of their troubled pasts. In the concluding section of that volume, it is suggested that the source of Kurt's disaffection may stem from a disastrous investment made on his behalf by a individual referred to as T.

The Devil Book: A Unique Approach

This second installment begins with an lengthy prose poem in which the narrator explains her struggle to write T's narrative. “Within this second volume,” she writes, “we were supposed / to trace him / from youth up until / the night / when he sat waiting for / the news that / the fire / on the ferry / had effectively been / set.” Burdened by the task she has set herself and disrupted by the global health crisis, she tackles the story indirectly, as a type 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 erotic thriller / about businessmen and / the dark force.”

A tale slowly unfolds of a female character who experiences lockdown in the UK capital with a virtual stranger and over the course of those days relates to him what happened to her a decade before, when she accepted an offer from a figure who professed to be the evil entity to grant all her desires, so long as she didn't doubt his intentions. As the threads of the two stories become more interwoven, we begin to suspect that they are identical—or at the very least that the nature of T is multiple, for there are demonic forces all around.

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

Deals with the Devil: A Thematic Examination

Classic stories teach us that it is the dark figure who does deals, not God, and that we enter into them at our peril. But suppose the narrator herself is the devil? A additional storyline eventually emerges—the account of a young woman whose childhood was scarred by abuse and who spent time in a psychiatric hospital, under pressure to conform with social expectations or suffer more of the same. “[The devil] knows that in the game you've set for it, there are a pair of outcomes: surrender or remain a beast.” A alternative path is finally revealed through a series of verses to the darkness that are simultaneously a rallying cry against the influences of wealth and power.

Parallels and Readings: From Fiction to Real Events

Numerous British audience members of Nordenhof's series novels will reflect right away of the London tower fire, which, though accidental in origin, bears similarities in that the resulting tragedy and fatalities can be attributed at in part to the dangerous trade-off of putting financial gain over people. In these first two volumes of what is planned to be a multi-volume sequence, the fire aboard the ship and the chain of deceptive business deals that ended in mass murder are a ominous underlying presence, revealing themselves only in brief glimpses of detail or inference yet casting a deepening influence over all that occurs. Certain individuals may question how far it is possible to interpret this volume as a stand-alone piece, when its aim and significance are so deeply tied into a broader whole whose ultimate shape, at this stage, is uncertain.

Innovative Prose: Art and Morality Fused

There will be others—and I include myself as one of them—who will become enamored with the author's endeavor purely as written art, as truly innovative literature whose ethical and artistic purpose are so deeply interlinked as to make them inextricable. “Write poems / for we require / that as well.” Another kind of blaze exists: an intense, magnetic commitment to the craft as a political act. I intend to persist to follow this literary journey, no matter where it goes.