The Devil Book Review: A Scandinavian Series Aflame with Purpose

In the late night of April 7 1990, a devastating fire erupted on board the MS Scandinavian Star, a car and passenger ferry operating between Frederikshavn and Oslo. Insufficient staff training along with jammed safety doors aided the propagation of the fire, while toxic hydrogen cyanide gas emitted from combusting laminates caused the loss of 159 people. Initially, the disaster was blamed to a traveler—a truck driver with a history of fire-setting. Given that this suspect too died in the fire and was unable to defend the accusations, the complete truth regarding the event remained hidden for many years. Only in 2020 that a detailed documentary revealed the fire was probably started deliberately as part of an fraud scheme.

Asta Olivia Nordenhof's Literary Sequence: A Glimpse

In the first volume of Asta Olivia Nordenhof's epic sequence, the preceding volume, an unnamed protagonist is riding on a bus through Copenhagen when she observes an elderly man on the sidewalk. As the bus drives away, she feels an “eerie sense” that she is carrying a part of him with her. Driven to repeat the journey in search of him, the character finds herself in a landscape that is both alien and strangely known. She introduces us to a couple named Maggie and Kurt, whose relationship is tested by the pressures of their troubled histories. In the final pages of that volume, it is implied that the root of Kurt's disaffection may originate in a poor financial decision made on his account by a man known as T.

This New Volume: An Unconventional Narrative Style

This second installment begins with an extended prose poem in which the writer explains her struggle to write T's story. “In this volume, two,” she writes, “we were meant / to trace him / from youth up until / the evening / when he sat waiting for / the news that / the fire / on the ferry / had effectively been / set.” Burdened by the task she has assigned herself and disrupted by the global health crisis, she tackles the tale obliquely, as a form of allegory. “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 devil.”

A narrative slowly emerges of a female character who experiences lockdown in London with a near-unknown person and over the course of those days relates to him what occurred to her a decade earlier, when she accepted an proposal from a man who professed to be the evil entity to fulfill all her wishes, so long as she didn't question his intentions. As the elements of the two stories become more intertwined, we start to believe that they are identical—or at the very least that the nature of T is legion, for there are demonic forces all around.

There is another fire here: a passionate, compelling dedication to writing as a form of activism

Deals with the Devil: A Thematic Examination

Literature teach us that it is the devil who does deals, not a divine being, and that we engage in them at our risk. But what if the narrator herself is the malevolent force? A third narrative eventually emerges—the account of a girl whose childhood was marred by mistreatment and who was placed in a mental health facility, under pressure to conform with societal norms or endure more of the same. “[This entity] knows that in the scenario you've created for it, there are two results: submit or stay a beast.” A third way out is finally revealed through a collection of poems to the night that are simultaneously a call to arms against the influences of capital.

Parallels and Interpretations: From Literature to Reality

Many UK audience members of the author's Scandinavian Star books will reflect right away of the London tower fire, which, though unintentional in origin, bears similarities in that the resulting tragedy and loss of life can be linked at in part to the devil's bargain of prioritizing profit over human lives. In these first two volumes of what is projected to be a seven-book sequence, the fire aboard the ship and the chain of fraudulent business deals that ended in mass murder are a ominous background presence, showing themselves only in fleeting glimpses of detail or inference yet casting a deepening shadow over everything that transpires. Some readers may question how far it is possible to read this volume as a stand-alone piece, when its purpose and meaning are so intricately bound into a larger narrative whose ultimate shape, at this stage, is uncertain.

Experimental Writing: Ethics and Aesthetics Fused

There will be others—and I include myself as among them—who will become enamored with the author's project purely as text, as properly experimental literature whose moral and creative intent are so profoundly interlinked as to make them inseparable. “Write poems / for we need / that too.” There is another fire here: a passionate, magnetic devotion to writing as a statement. I intend to persist to pursue this series, wherever it leads.