🔗 Share this article

In the early hours of April 7 1990, a devastating fire erupted on board the MS Scandinavian Star, a passenger ferry operating between Oslo and Frederikshavn. Insufficient staff preparedness combined with malfunctioning fire doors aided the spread of the fire, while toxic cyanide gas emitted from burning laminates led to the loss of 159 people. Initially, the tragedy was attributed to a traveler—a truck driver with a history of fire-setting. Since this suspect too died in the incident and was unable to defend the accusations, the complete facts about the disaster stayed concealed for a long time. It wasn't until 2020 that a detailed investigation disclosed the blaze was probably started intentionally as part of an fraud scheme.

Nordenhof's Scandinavian Star Series: An Overview

In the initial book of Asta Olivia Nordenhof's epic series, Money to Burn, an unnamed protagonist is riding on a bus through Copenhagen when she observes an older man on the street. As the bus moves away, she feels an “eerie sense” that she is carrying a piece of him with her. Driven to retrace the journey in search of him, the character enters a setting that is both unfamiliar and strangely known. She presents us to a couple named Maggie and Kurt, whose connection is strained by the pressures of their troubled pasts. In the final pages of that book, it is suggested that the source of the character's discontent may stem from a disastrous financial decision made on his account by a individual referred to as T.

The Devil Book: An Unconventional Narrative Style

This second installment opens with an lengthy prose poem in which the writer describes her struggle to write T's story. “In this volume, two,” she states, “we were supposed / to follow him / from youth up until / the evening / when he sat anticipating for / the report that / the blaze / on the ferry / had effectively been / ignited.” Burdened by the undertaking she has set herself and disrupted by the global health crisis, she approaches the story obliquely, as a form of parable. “It occurred to me / that I / can do / whatever I want / so this / is my work / this is / for you / this is / an sensational story / about businessmen and / the devil.”

A tale gradually unfolds of a woman who spends quarantine in London with a near-unknown person and during those weeks tells to him what happened to her a decade before, when she agreed to an proposal from a figure who professed to be the devil to fulfill all her wishes, so long as she didn't question his intentions. As the threads of the dual narratives become more intertwined, we start to believe that they are identical—or at the very least that the identity of T is legion, for there are demonic forces everywhere.

Another blaze is present: an ardent, compelling dedication to writing as a political act

Pacts and Consequences: A Literary Exploration

Literature instruct us that it is the devil who makes deals, not a divine being, and that we enter into them at our risk. But suppose the protagonist herself is the malevolent force? A additional storyline comes finally to light—the account of a girl whose early years was marred by abuse and who spent time in a psychiatric hospital, under duress to comply with societal norms or suffer more of the same. “[The devil] understands that in the game you've created for it, there are two results: surrender or remain a monster.” A third way out is ultimately revealed through a collection of poems to the night that are simultaneously a rallying cry against the influences of capital.

Parallels and Interpretations: From Fiction to Real Events

Numerous UK audience members of Nordenhof's Scandinavian Star novels will think right away of the London tower fire, which, though accidental in origin, shares parallels in that the resulting disaster and fatalities can be linked at least partly to the devil's bargain of prioritizing profit over human lives. In these first two volumes of what is projected to be a multi-volume sequence, the fire aboard the ferry and the series of deceptive transactions that ended in mass murder are a ominous underlying element, showing themselves only in brief glimpses of detail or inference yet casting a growing influence over everything that occurs. Some individuals may doubt how much it is possible to read this volume as a independent work, when its aim and meaning are so deeply bound into a broader narrative whose final form, at present, is unknowable.

Experimental Writing: Ethics and Aesthetics Intertwined

There will be others—and I include myself as one of them—who will fall in love with the author's project purely as text, as truly experimental writing whose moral and artistic purpose are so deeply interlinked as to make them inseparable. “Compose verses / for we need / that too.” Another kind of blaze exists: a passionate, magnetic devotion to the craft as a statement. I intend to persist to follow this series, wherever it leads.