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In the late night of April 7 1990, a devastating blaze erupted on board the ferry Scandinavian Star, a car and passenger ferry operating between Oslo and Frederikshavn. Insufficient staff training along with jammed fire doors aided the spread of the fire, while deadly cyanide gas released from combusting laminates caused the loss of 159 people. At first, the tragedy was attributed to a traveler—a truck driver with a history of fire-setting. Since this suspect too perished in the incident and was not able to refute the accusations, the complete facts about the event remained hidden for a long time. Only in 2020 that a comprehensive documentary revealed the fire was likely started deliberately as part of an fraud scheme.

Asta Olivia Nordenhof's Scandinavian Star Series: An Overview

Within the initial book of Asta Olivia Nordenhof's epic sequence, Money to Burn, an unnamed protagonist is traveling on a public transport through the Danish capital when she observes an elderly man on the street. As the bus moves away, she feels an “uncanny feeling” that she is taking a piece of him with her. Driven to repeat the journey in pursuit of him, the narrator finds herself in a setting that is both unfamiliar and strangely known. She introduces us to Maggie and Kurt, whose relationship is tested by the pressures of their troubled pasts. In the final pages of that book, it is suggested that the root of the character's disaffection may stem from a poor investment made on his behalf by a man referred to as T.

The Devil Book: A Unique Approach

This second installment begins with an extended poetic passage in which the writer explains her struggle to compose T's story. “In this second volume,” she writes, “we were supposed / to follow him / from youth up until / the evening / when he sat waiting for / the news that / the blaze / on the ferry / had effectively been / ignited.” Overwhelmed by the undertaking she has set herself and derailed by the global health crisis, she tackles 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 sensational story / about entrepreneurs and / the devil.”

A tale slowly unfolds of a woman who experiences lockdown in the UK capital with a virtual stranger and over the course of those weeks relates to him what occurred to her a ten years earlier, when she accepted an offer from a man who claimed to be the devil to fulfill all her desires, so long as she didn't doubt his intentions. As the threads of the two stories become more intertwined, we begin to suspect that they are identical—or at the very least that the identity of T is multiple, for there are devils everywhere.

There is another fire here: an ardent, compelling commitment to writing as a form of activism

Deals with the Devil: A Thematic Examination

Classic stories instruct us that it is the dark figure who does bargains, not a divine being, and that we engage in them at our peril. But suppose the protagonist herself is the devil? A additional storyline eventually emerges—the story of a young woman whose early years was scarred by mistreatment and who was placed in a psychiatric hospital, under pressure to comply with social expectations or suffer further harm. “[The devil] knows that in the game you've created for it, there are a pair of outcomes: submit or stay a monster.” A third way out is finally unveiled through a collection of poems to the night that are also a rallying cry against the influences of wealth and power.

Connections and Interpretations: From Literature to Reality

Many British audience members of Nordenhof's Scandinavian Star books will reflect immediately of the Grenfell Tower tragedy, which, though unintentional in origin, bears parallels in that the ensuing tragedy and fatalities can be attributed at least partly to the dangerous trade-off of prioritizing financial gain over human lives. In these initial books of what is projected to be a seven-book sequence, the blaze aboard the ferry and the series of fraudulent business deals that culminated in multiple deaths are a sinister underlying element, revealing themselves only in fleeting glimpses of information or inference yet casting a growing shadow over everything that transpires. Certain readers may doubt how far it is possible to read this volume as a stand-alone work, when its purpose and significance are so deeply bound into a broader narrative whose final form, at present, is uncertain.

Experimental Writing: Ethics and Aesthetics Intertwined

There will be others—and I include myself as one of them—who will fall in love with Nordenhof's project purely as written art, as truly innovative writing whose ethical and creative purpose are so profoundly entwined as to make them inseparable. “Write poems / for we need / that too.” There is another fire here: an intense, magnetic devotion to the craft as a statement. I intend to persist to pursue this literary journey, no matter where it leads.