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In the late night of April 7 1990, a devastating fire erupted aboard the ferry Scandinavian Star, a car and passenger ferry traveling between Frederikshavn and Oslo. Inadequate crew preparedness along with malfunctioning safety doors accelerated the propagation of the fire, while toxic hydrogen cyanide gas emitted from burning laminates caused the loss of 159 individuals. Initially, the disaster was blamed to a traveler—a lorry driver with a history of fire-setting. Given that this individual too died in the fire and was not able to refute the accusations, the complete facts about the event stayed hidden for a long time. Only in 2020 that a comprehensive documentary disclosed the fire was probably set deliberately as part of an insurance fraud.

Nordenhof's Scandinavian Star Sequence: A Glimpse

In the initial book of Asta Olivia Nordenhof's epic series, the preceding volume, an unnamed narrator is traveling on a bus through Copenhagen when she observes an older man on the street. As the bus moves away, she feels an “uncanny feeling” that she is carrying a part of him with her. Driven to retrace the route in pursuit of him, the character enters a setting that is both unfamiliar and strangely known. She presents readers to a couple named Maggie and Kurt, whose relationship is tested by the pressures of their troubled pasts. In the final pages of that volume, it is suggested that the source of the character's disaffection may stem from a poor investment made on his account by a man referred to as T.

This New Volume: An Unconventional Approach

The Devil Book opens with an lengthy poetic passage in which the writer describes her challenge to write T's narrative. “In this volume, two,” she states, “we were supposed / to trace him / from youth up until / the evening / when he sat waiting for / the news that / the fire / on the ferry / had successfully been / ignited.” Overwhelmed by the task she has set herself and derailed by the global health crisis, she approaches the tale obliquely, as a type of parable. “I came to think / 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 devil.”

A tale gradually emerges of a woman who experiences quarantine in London with a near-unknown person and over the course of those days relates to him what occurred to her a decade before, when she agreed to an proposal from a man who professed 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 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 all around.

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

Pacts and Consequences: A Thematic Examination

Classic stories teach us that it is the devil who makes bargains, not God, and that we engage in them at our risk. But suppose the protagonist herself is the devil? A third narrative comes finally to light—the story of a girl whose early years was scarred by abuse and who spent time in a psychiatric hospital, under duress to conform with social expectations or endure further harm. “[The devil] understands that in the game you've created for it, there are two outcomes: submit or stay a beast.” A alternative path is ultimately unveiled through a collection of poems to the night that are simultaneously a call to arms against the influences of capital.

Connections and Readings: From Literature to Real Events

Numerous British audience members of the author's series novels will reflect immediately of the Grenfell Tower tragedy, which, though accidental in origin, bears similarities in that the ensuing tragedy and loss of life can be attributed at least partly to the dangerous trade-off of prioritizing financial gain over human lives. In these first two books of what is planned to be a seven-book sequence, the blaze aboard the ship and the series of fraudulent business deals that ended in multiple deaths are a sinister background presence, showing themselves only in brief flashes of information or inference yet casting a growing influence over everything that transpires. Some readers may doubt how far it is possible to interpret The Devil Book as a independent work, when its aim and meaning are so intricately bound 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 the author's endeavor purely as written art, as properly innovative literature whose ethical and creative intent are so deeply entwined as to make them inextricable. “Compose verses / for we need / that too.” Another kind of blaze exists: a passionate, magnetic commitment to the craft as a political act. I intend to persist to follow this literary journey, wherever it leads.