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During the early hours of the 7th of April 1990, a catastrophic blaze erupted aboard the MS Scandinavian Star, a passenger ferry traveling between Oslo and Frederikshavn. Insufficient crew preparedness along with jammed fire doors aided the propagation of the flames, while toxic hydrogen cyanide gas emitted from combusting laminates led to the deaths of 159 individuals. At first, the disaster was attributed to a passenger—a truck driver with a record of fire-setting. Since this suspect too perished in the incident and was not able to defend the accusations, the full facts about the event stayed concealed for many years. Only in 2020 that a comprehensive documentary revealed the fire was probably set deliberately as part of an insurance fraud.

Nordenhof's Literary Sequence: A Glimpse

Within the initial book of Asta Olivia Nordenhof's epic series, the preceding volume, an unidentified protagonist is riding on a public transport through the Danish capital when she observes an older man on the street. As the vehicle drives away, she experiences an “uncanny feeling” that she is taking a part of him with her. Driven to repeat the journey in pursuit of him, the character finds herself in a landscape that is both alien and strangely known. She presents readers to Maggie and Kurt, whose relationship is tested by the burdens of their conflicted pasts. In the concluding section of that book, it is implied that the root of Kurt's discontent may originate in a poor investment made on his account by a man known as T.

This New Volume: An Unconventional Narrative Style

The Devil Book begins with an extended prose poem in which the writer describes her struggle to write T's narrative. “In this second volume,” she writes, “we were meant / to trace him / from youth up until / the evening / when he sat anticipating for / the report that / the blaze / on the Scandinavian Star / had successfully been / set.” Overwhelmed by the undertaking she has set herself and disrupted by the global health crisis, she approaches the tale obliquely, as a type of allegory. “I came to think / that I / can do / anything I want / so this / is my work / this is / for you / this is / an sensational story / about entrepreneurs and / the devil.”

A tale slowly unfolds of a female character who spends quarantine in London with a near-unknown person and over the course of those weeks tells to him what occurred to her a decade earlier, when she agreed to an offer 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 intertwined, we start to suspect that they are identical—or at minimum that the identity of T is legion, for there are devils everywhere.

Another blaze is present: a passionate, magnetic commitment to writing as a form of activism

Pacts and Consequences: A Thematic Exploration

Literature teach us that it is the dark figure who makes bargains, not God, and that we engage in them at our peril. But suppose the narrator herself is the devil? A additional storyline eventually emerges—the story of a young woman whose childhood was marred by abuse and who spent time in a mental health facility, under duress to comply with social expectations or suffer more of the same. “[The devil] understands that in the scenario you've set for it, there are a pair of outcomes: surrender or stay a monster.” A third way out is ultimately unveiled through a series of verses to the night that are also a call to arms against the influences of wealth and power.

Connections and Readings: From Fiction to Reality

Many British readers of Nordenhof's series novels will think right away of the Grenfell Tower fire, which, though accidental in origin, bears similarities in that the resulting tragedy and loss of life can be linked at least partly to the dangerous trade-off of prioritizing financial gain over human lives. In these initial volumes of what is projected to be a multi-volume series, the blaze aboard the ship and the series of fraudulent business deals that ended in multiple deaths are a sinister underlying element, revealing themselves only in fleeting glimpses of information or inference yet casting a growing influence over all that transpires. Certain readers may question how far it is feasible to read this volume as a independent piece, when its aim and significance are so intricately bound into a larger whole whose ultimate shape, at present, is uncertain.

Innovative Prose: Art and Morality Intertwined

Some individuals—and I count myself as among them—who will fall in love with the author's endeavor purely as written art, as truly innovative writing whose ethical and artistic intent are so deeply entwined as to make them inextricable. “Write poems / for we require / that too.” There is another fire here: a passionate, attractive devotion to the craft as a statement. I will persist to pursue this literary journey, no matter where it goes.