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In the early hours of April 7 1990, a devastating fire erupted on board the ferry Scandinavian Star, a car and passenger ferry traveling between Frederikshavn and Oslo. Insufficient crew preparedness combined with jammed safety doors aided the propagation of the flames, while deadly cyanide gas released from combusting laminates caused the loss of 159 people. Initially, the tragedy was attributed to a passenger—a truck driver with a record of arson. Since this suspect too died in the incident and was not able to refute the accusations, the complete facts about the disaster remained concealed for a long time. Only in 2020 that a detailed documentary revealed the blaze was likely started deliberately as part of an insurance fraud.

Nordenhof's Scandinavian Star Sequence: An Overview

Within the initial book of Nordenhof's Scandinavian Star series, Money to Burn, an unnamed narrator is traveling on a bus through Copenhagen when she notices an elderly man on the street. As the vehicle moves away, she feels an “uncanny feeling” 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 unfamiliar and deeply familiar. She introduces readers to Maggie and Kurt, whose relationship is strained by the burdens of their conflicted histories. In the concluding section of that book, it is suggested that the root of Kurt's disaffection may originate in a poor financial decision made on his account by a man known as T.

The Devil Book: An Unconventional Narrative Style

This second installment opens with an extended poetic passage in which the narrator explains her challenge to write T's narrative. “In this second volume,” she states, “we were meant / to follow him / from childhood up until / the evening / when he sat waiting for / the report that / the fire / on the Scandinavian Star / had successfully been / ignited.” Burdened by the undertaking she has set herself and disrupted by the pandemic, she tackles the story indirectly, as a type of parable. “It occurred to me / that I / can do / whatever I want / so this / is my book / this is / for you / this is / an erotic thriller / about entrepreneurs and / the dark force.”

A narrative slowly unfolds of a female character who experiences quarantine in the UK capital with a near-unknown person and over the course of those days tells to him what happened to her a decade earlier, when she agreed to an offer from a man who professed to be the devil to grant all her wishes, so long as she didn't question his motives. As the threads of the dual narratives become more interwoven, we begin to suspect that they are one and the same—or at the very least that the identity of T is multiple, for there are devils all around.

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

Deals with the Devil: A Literary Exploration

Literature instruct us that it is the devil who does bargains, not a divine being, and that we engage in them at our peril. But suppose the narrator herself is the devil? A third narrative comes finally to light—the story of a girl whose early years was marred by mistreatment and who was placed in a psychiatric hospital, under duress to comply with societal norms or endure more of the same. “[The devil] understands that in the game you've set for it, there are a pair of results: submit or stay a beast.” A third way out is ultimately revealed through a series of poems to the night that are simultaneously a call to arms against the forces of wealth and power.

Parallels and Interpretations: From Fiction to Real Events

Numerous British readers of Nordenhof's series novels will reflect immediately of the Grenfell Tower fire, which, though accidental in origin, bears similarities in that the ensuing tragedy and fatalities can be attributed at in part to the dangerous trade-off of prioritizing financial gain over human lives. In these first two volumes of what is planned to be a seven-book sequence, the blaze aboard the ferry and the series of fraudulent transactions that ended in multiple deaths are a ominous background element, revealing themselves only in brief flashes of detail or implication yet casting a growing shadow over all that transpires. Certain readers may question how far it is possible to read this volume as a independent work, when its purpose and significance are so deeply bound into a larger whole whose ultimate shape, at present, is unknowable.

Innovative Prose: Ethics and Aesthetics Intertwined

There will be others—and I count myself as one of them—who will become enamored with the author's project purely as written art, as truly innovative writing whose moral and artistic purpose are so deeply entwined as to make them inseparable. “Write poems / for we need / that as well.” Another kind of blaze exists: an intense, magnetic devotion to writing as a political act. I intend to continue to follow this series, no matter where it leads.