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During the late night of April 7 1990, a devastating blaze erupted on board the MS Scandinavian Star, a car and passenger ferry traveling between Oslo and Frederikshavn. Insufficient staff preparedness along with jammed fire doors accelerated the spread of the fire, while deadly hydrogen cyanide gas emitted from combusting laminates led to the loss of 159 people. At first, the tragedy was attributed to a traveler—a lorry driver with a history of fire-setting. Since this suspect too perished in the fire and was unable to refute himself, the complete facts about the event remained hidden for a long time. Only in 2020 that a detailed documentary disclosed the fire was probably set deliberately as part of an insurance fraud.

Nordenhof's Literary Sequence: An Overview

Within the first volume of Nordenhof's epic sequence, Money to Burn, an unnamed protagonist is riding on a public transport through the Danish capital when she observes an older man on the sidewalk. As the vehicle drives away, she experiences an “eerie sense” that she is carrying a piece of him with her. Driven to retrace the route in search of him, the character finds herself in a landscape that is both alien and deeply familiar. She introduces us to Maggie and Kurt, whose connection is tested by the pressures of their conflicted histories. In the final pages of that book, it is suggested that the source of Kurt's disaffection may originate in a disastrous investment made on his behalf by a man referred to as T.

This New Volume: A Unique Narrative Style

This second installment begins with an lengthy prose poem in which the writer explains her challenge to compose T's story. “In this second volume,” she states, “we were meant / to follow him / from youth up until / the evening / 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 tale obliquely, as a type of parable. “I came to think / that I / can do / anything I want / so this / is my book / this is / for you / this is / an erotic thriller / about entrepreneurs and / the devil.”

A tale slowly unfolds of a woman who experiences quarantine in London with a near-unknown person and over the course of those weeks relates to him what occurred to her a decade earlier, when she accepted an offer from a figure who professed to be the evil entity to fulfill all her desires, so long as she didn't question his intentions. As the elements of the two stories become more interwoven, we start to suspect that they are one and the same—or at the very least that the identity of T is legion, for there are devils everywhere.

There is another fire here: a passionate, compelling dedication to literature as a political act

Deals with the Devil: A Literary Exploration

Literature instruct us that it is the dark figure who does bargains, not God, and that we enter into them at our risk. But suppose the narrator herself is the devil? A additional storyline comes finally to light—the account of a girl whose early years was scarred by mistreatment and who spent time in a mental health facility, under duress to conform with social expectations or endure more of the same. “[The devil] understands that in the scenario you've set for it, there are a pair of outcomes: submit or stay a monster.” A alternative path is finally unveiled through a collection of verses to the darkness that are also a rallying cry against the forces of wealth and power.

Connections and Readings: From Literature to Reality

Numerous British readers of Nordenhof's Scandinavian Star books will think right away of the Grenfell Tower tragedy, which, though unintentional in cause, bears parallels in that the resulting disaster and fatalities can be attributed at in part to the devil's bargain of prioritizing profit over human lives. In these initial books of what is projected to be a seven-book sequence, the blaze aboard the ship and the chain of fraudulent business deals that culminated in mass murder are a sinister background element, showing themselves only in fleeting flashes of information or inference yet projecting a growing shadow over everything that occurs. Some readers may question how far it is feasible to interpret The Devil Book as a independent piece, when its aim and significance are so deeply bound into a larger whole whose final form, at present, is uncertain.

Experimental Writing: Art and Morality Intertwined

Some individuals—and I include myself as among them—who will fall in love with the author's endeavor purely as written art, as properly innovative writing whose ethical and creative intent are so profoundly entwined as to make them inseparable. “Write poems / for we require / that too.” Another kind of blaze exists: a passionate, magnetic commitment to the craft as a statement. I intend to continue to pursue this literary journey, wherever it leads.