During the early hours of April 7 1990, a catastrophic fire broke out aboard the MS Scandinavian Star, a passenger ferry traveling between Frederikshavn and Oslo. Inadequate crew training along with jammed fire doors accelerated the propagation of the fire, while deadly hydrogen cyanide gas emitted from combusting laminates led to the deaths of 159 people. At first, the tragedy was blamed to a passenger—a lorry driver with a history of arson. Given that this individual also perished in the fire and was not able to defend the accusations, the full truth regarding the event stayed hidden for many years. Only in 2020 that a detailed investigation disclosed the blaze was probably set intentionally as part of an fraud scheme.
In the initial book of Nordenhof's Scandinavian Star series, Money to Burn, an unnamed narrator is riding on a bus through Copenhagen when she notices an elderly 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 repeat the journey in pursuit of him, the character finds herself in a landscape that is both alien and deeply familiar. She introduces us to a couple named Maggie and Kurt, whose connection is strained by the pressures of their troubled histories. In the final pages of that book, it is implied that the root of the character's disaffection may stem from a poor financial decision made on his account by a man known as T.
This second installment opens with an lengthy prose poem in which the narrator describes her struggle to write T's narrative. “Within this volume, two,” she writes, “we were meant / to trace him / from youth up until / the night / when he sat waiting for / the report that / the blaze / on the ferry / had effectively been / set.” Burdened by the task she has assigned herself and disrupted by the pandemic, she approaches the story indirectly, as a type of parable. “I came to think / that I / can do / whatever I want / so this / is my book / this is / for you / this is / an erotic thriller / about businessmen and / the dark force.”
A tale slowly unfolds of a woman who spends lockdown in the UK capital with a virtual stranger and over the course of those weeks tells to him what happened to her a decade before, when she agreed to an proposal from a man who professed to be the evil entity 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 believe that they are one and the same—or at the very least that the nature of T is multiple, for there are devils everywhere.
There is another fire here: a passionate, magnetic dedication to literature as a political act
Classic stories teach us that it is the dark figure who does bargains, not God, and that we enter into them at our risk. But what if the narrator herself is the malevolent force? A additional narrative eventually emerges—the story of a young woman whose early years was marred by abuse and who spent time in a psychiatric hospital, under pressure to comply with social expectations or endure further harm. “[The devil] knows that in the game you've set for it, there are two outcomes: surrender or remain a beast.” A alternative path is ultimately unveiled through a series of poems to the darkness that are also a call to arms against the influences of wealth and power.
Numerous British audience members of the author's Scandinavian Star books will think immediately of the Grenfell Tower tragedy, which, though accidental in origin, shares parallels in that the ensuing tragedy and fatalities can be linked at in part to the devil's bargain of putting profit over human lives. In these initial volumes of what is projected to be a seven-book sequence, the fire aboard the ship and the series of deceptive business deals that ended in multiple deaths are a sinister underlying presence, revealing themselves only in brief flashes of detail or implication yet casting a deepening influence over everything that occurs. Certain individuals may doubt how far it is possible to read The Devil Book as a stand-alone piece, when its purpose and significance are so deeply tied into a larger narrative whose final form, at this stage, is uncertain.
There will be others—and I count myself as among them—who will fall in love with Nordenhof's endeavor purely as written art, as truly experimental writing whose ethical and artistic purpose are so profoundly interlinked as to make them inextricable. “Compose verses / for we require / that as well.” Another kind of blaze exists: an intense, magnetic commitment to writing as a statement. I will persist to pursue this literary journey, wherever it leads.
A forward-thinking business strategist with over a decade of experience in market analysis and digital transformation, passionate about empowering entrepreneurs.
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