🔗 Share this article

In the early hours of the 7th of April 1990, a catastrophic fire erupted on board the MS Scandinavian Star, a car and passenger ferry traveling between Frederikshavn and Oslo. Insufficient staff preparedness along with jammed safety doors accelerated the propagation of the fire, while deadly hydrogen cyanide gas released from burning materials caused the deaths of 159 individuals. Initially, the tragedy was blamed to a passenger—a lorry driver with a record of arson. Given that this suspect too died in the incident and was not able to refute himself, the full facts about the disaster stayed hidden for a long time. Only in 2020 that a comprehensive documentary revealed the fire was likely set intentionally as part of an insurance fraud.

Nordenhof's Scandinavian Star Series: A Glimpse

In the first volume of Asta Olivia Nordenhof's Scandinavian Star series, the preceding volume, an unidentified narrator is riding on a public transport through the Danish capital when she notices an elderly man on the street. As the bus moves away, she experiences an “uncanny feeling” that she is taking a piece of him with her. Driven to repeat the route in search of him, the character enters a setting that is both unfamiliar and strangely known. She introduces readers to a couple named Maggie and Kurt, whose connection is tested by the pressures of their troubled histories. In the concluding section of that volume, it is suggested that the source of the character's disaffection may stem from a poor financial decision made on his account by a individual referred to as T.

This New Volume: An Unconventional Narrative Style

This second installment opens with an lengthy poetic passage in which the writer describes her challenge to compose T's story. “In 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 fire / on the Scandinavian Star / had successfully been / ignited.” Burdened by the undertaking she has assigned herself and disrupted by the pandemic, she approaches the story obliquely, as a type of allegory. “It occurred to me / that I / can do / anything I want / so this / is my work / this is / for you / this is / an sensational story / about businessmen and / the dark force.”

A narrative gradually emerges of a woman who experiences lockdown in the UK capital with a virtual stranger and over the course of those weeks relates to him what occurred to her a decade before, when she agreed to an offer from a figure who claimed to be the devil to fulfill all her desires, so long as she didn't question his intentions. As the elements of the dual narratives become more intertwined, we start to believe that they are identical—or at the very least that the nature of T is multiple, for there are devils all around.

There is another fire here: an ardent, magnetic commitment to writing as a form of activism

Deals with the Devil: A Literary Examination

Classic stories instruct us that it is the dark figure who makes bargains, not a divine being, and that we engage in them at our peril. But suppose the narrator herself is the devil? A third storyline eventually emerges—the story of a young woman whose early years was marred by mistreatment and who spent time in a mental health facility, under pressure to conform with social expectations or endure more of the same. “[The devil] knows that in the game you've set for it, there are a pair of results: submit or stay a monster.” A third way out is ultimately unveiled through a series of poems to the darkness that are also a rallying cry against the forces of capital.

Connections and Readings: From Literature to Real Events

Numerous British audience members of Nordenhof's series books will reflect right away of the Grenfell Tower tragedy, which, though accidental in cause, bears similarities in that the ensuing tragedy and fatalities can be linked at in part to the dangerous trade-off of prioritizing financial gain over human lives. In these initial books of what is planned to be a seven-book sequence, the fire on board the ship and the chain of fraudulent transactions that ended in multiple deaths are a ominous underlying element, showing themselves only in brief flashes of information or inference yet casting a deepening influence over all that occurs. Certain readers may doubt how far it is feasible to interpret this volume as a stand-alone work, when its purpose and significance are so intricately bound into a broader narrative whose ultimate shape, at this stage, is uncertain.

Innovative Prose: Art and Morality Intertwined

Some individuals—and I count myself as one of them—who will fall in love with Nordenhof's project purely as written art, as properly experimental writing whose ethical and artistic intent are so deeply entwined as to make them inextricable. “Write poems / for we require / that too.” Another kind of blaze exists: an intense, magnetic commitment to writing as a political act. I intend to continue to pursue this literary journey, no matter where it goes.