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During the late night of April 7 1990, a devastating fire broke out aboard the ferry Scandinavian Star, a car and passenger ferry operating between Oslo and Frederikshavn. Inadequate staff training combined with jammed safety doors accelerated the spread of the flames, while toxic cyanide gas emitted from combusting materials caused the deaths of 159 people. Initially, the tragedy was blamed to a traveler—a truck driver with a history of fire-setting. Since this individual also perished in the fire and was not able to defend the accusations, the full truth about the disaster stayed hidden for many years. Only in 2020 that a comprehensive documentary revealed the blaze was probably set intentionally as part of an fraud scheme.

Nordenhof's Scandinavian Star Sequence: An Overview

Within the first volume of Asta Olivia Nordenhof's epic series, the preceding volume, an unnamed protagonist is traveling on a bus 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 retrace the journey in search of him, the narrator finds herself in a landscape that is both alien and deeply familiar. She presents us to Maggie and Kurt, whose relationship is strained by the pressures of their troubled histories. In the final pages of that book, it is implied that the source of the character's discontent may stem from a poor investment made on his account by a man referred to as T.

This New Volume: A Unique Narrative Style

This second installment begins with an lengthy prose poem in which the writer explains her struggle to write T's narrative. “Within this second volume,” she states, “we were supposed / to follow him / from youth up until / the night / when he sat waiting for / the news that / the fire / on the Scandinavian Star / had effectively been / ignited.” Overwhelmed by the undertaking she has assigned herself and disrupted by the pandemic, she approaches the tale indirectly, as a type of parable. “I came to think / that I / can do / anything I want / so this / is my book / this is / for you / this is / an erotic thriller / about entrepreneurs and / the devil.”

A tale gradually unfolds of a female character who spends lockdown in London with a near-unknown person and during those days tells to him what occurred to her a decade earlier, when she accepted an proposal from a figure who claimed to be the evil entity to fulfill all her desires, so long as she didn't doubt his motives. As the threads of the two stories become more interwoven, we begin to believe that they are identical—or at the very least that the identity of T is legion, for there are demonic forces everywhere.

There is another fire here: a passionate, magnetic dedication to literature as a political act

Pacts and Consequences: A Literary Exploration

Classic stories instruct us that it is the devil who makes bargains, not a divine being, and that we enter into them at our peril. But suppose the protagonist herself is the devil? A third narrative eventually emerges—the account of a young woman whose early years was marred by abuse and who spent time in a psychiatric hospital, under pressure to conform with social expectations or suffer more of the same. “[The devil] knows that in the game you've created for it, there are two outcomes: submit or stay a monster.” A alternative path is finally unveiled through a collection of poems to the night that are also a call to arms against the forces of capital.

Parallels and Readings: From Literature to Reality

Many UK audience members of Nordenhof's Scandinavian Star books will reflect immediately of the Grenfell Tower fire, which, though accidental in origin, shares similarities in that the resulting disaster and fatalities can be linked at least partly to the dangerous trade-off of prioritizing profit over people. In these first two volumes of what is planned to be a seven-book sequence, the fire aboard the ship and the series of deceptive business deals that culminated in mass murder are a ominous underlying presence, revealing themselves only in fleeting flashes of information or inference yet casting a deepening shadow over everything that occurs. Some readers may doubt how much it is possible to read this volume as a independent work, when its aim and meaning are so intricately bound into a larger whole whose ultimate shape, at this stage, is unknowable.

Innovative Prose: Ethics and Aesthetics Fused

Some individuals—and I count myself as among them—who will become enamored with Nordenhof's project purely as text, as truly experimental writing whose moral and artistic purpose are so deeply entwined as to make them inseparable. “Compose verses / for we require / that as well.” There is another fire here: an intense, magnetic devotion to the craft as a political act. I will persist to pursue this series, no matter where it leads.