During the early hours of April 7 1990, a catastrophic blaze erupted on board the MS Scandinavian Star, a passenger ferry operating between Frederikshavn and Oslo. Inadequate crew training along with jammed fire doors accelerated the spread of the fire, while toxic cyanide gas emitted from burning laminates caused the deaths of 159 people. At first, the disaster was attributed to a traveler—a lorry driver with a history of fire-setting. Since this suspect too died in the fire and was not able to refute himself, the complete facts regarding the disaster stayed hidden for many years. It wasn't until 2020 that a detailed investigation revealed the blaze was probably set deliberately as part of an fraud scheme.
Within the initial book of Asta Olivia Nordenhof's epic series, the preceding volume, an unidentified narrator is riding on a bus through Copenhagen when she observes an older man on the street. As the vehicle drives away, she feels an “uncanny feeling” that she is carrying a part of him with her. Driven to repeat the journey in pursuit of him, the character enters a landscape that is both unfamiliar and strangely known. She presents us to a couple named Maggie and Kurt, whose connection is strained by the burdens of their conflicted pasts. In the final pages of that book, it is implied that the root of Kurt's discontent may stem from a disastrous financial decision made on his account by a man referred to as T.
This second installment begins with an extended poetic passage in which the narrator describes her challenge to compose T's story. “Within this second volume,” she writes, “we were supposed / to trace him / from youth up until / the night / when he sat waiting for / the news that / the fire / on the ferry / had effectively been / ignited.” Burdened by the task she has assigned herself and disrupted by the pandemic, she approaches the story indirectly, as a type of allegory. “I came to think / that I / can do / anything I want / so this / is my work / this is / for you / this is / an sensational story / about entrepreneurs and / the dark force.”
A tale slowly unfolds of a woman who spends lockdown in London with a near-unknown person and over the course of those days relates to him what occurred to her a ten years earlier, when she agreed to an offer from a figure who claimed to be the evil entity to fulfill all her desires, so long as she didn't question his motives. As the elements of the dual narratives become more interwoven, we begin to suspect 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: an ardent, compelling commitment to writing as a political act
Literature teach us that it is the devil who does bargains, not God, and that we engage in them at our peril. But what if the protagonist herself is the devil? A additional storyline eventually emerges—the account of a girl whose childhood was scarred by abuse and who was placed in a mental health facility, under duress to conform with societal norms or suffer more of the same. “[This entity] knows that in the game you've set for it, there are a pair of outcomes: surrender or remain a beast.” A third way out is finally unveiled through a collection of poems to the night that are also a call to arms against the forces of capital.
Numerous UK audience members of the author's Scandinavian Star books will think right away of the London tower fire, which, though accidental in cause, shares parallels in that the resulting disaster and loss of life can be attributed at least partly to the devil's bargain of prioritizing financial gain over human lives. In these first two books of what is projected to be a seven-book sequence, the blaze aboard the ship and the chain of fraudulent business deals that ended in multiple deaths are a sinister underlying element, revealing themselves only in brief glimpses of information or inference yet casting a deepening influence over all that occurs. Certain readers may question how far it is feasible to read this volume as a stand-alone piece, when its purpose and meaning are so intricately tied into a broader whole whose ultimate shape, at present, is uncertain.
Some individuals—and I count myself as among them—who will become enamored with the author's project purely as text, as truly innovative literature whose moral and artistic intent are so profoundly entwined as to make them inextricable. “Compose verses / for we need / that as well.” There is another fire here: an intense, magnetic commitment to the craft as a statement. I intend to continue to pursue this series, no matter where it leads.
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