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During the late night of the 7th of April 1990, a devastating blaze broke out aboard the MS Scandinavian Star, a car and passenger ferry operating between Frederikshavn and Oslo. Insufficient staff training combined with jammed fire doors aided the spread of the flames, while deadly cyanide gas emitted from combusting materials led to the loss of 159 individuals. Initially, the tragedy was blamed to a traveler—a lorry driver with a record of arson. Given that this suspect too perished in the fire and was not able to refute the accusations, the complete facts regarding the event remained hidden for a long time. It wasn't until 2020 that a comprehensive documentary disclosed the blaze was probably set intentionally as part of an insurance fraud.

Asta Olivia Nordenhof's Scandinavian Star Sequence: A Glimpse

In the first volume of Asta Olivia Nordenhof's epic series, the preceding volume, an unnamed protagonist is riding on a public transport through the Danish capital when she observes an older man on the street. As the vehicle drives away, she experiences an “eerie sense” that she is taking a piece of him with her. Compelled to repeat the route in pursuit of him, the character enters a landscape that is both unfamiliar and deeply familiar. She introduces us to Maggie and Kurt, whose relationship is tested by the burdens of their conflicted pasts. In the concluding section of that book, it is suggested that the source of Kurt's discontent may originate in a poor financial decision made on his behalf by a man known as T.

This New Volume: A Unique Narrative Style

This second installment begins with an extended poetic passage in which the narrator explains her struggle to compose T's story. “Within this second volume,” she states, “we were meant / to follow him / from youth up until / the night / when he sat waiting for / the report that / the fire / on the Scandinavian Star / had successfully been / set.” Burdened by the undertaking she has set herself and disrupted by the global health crisis, she approaches the tale obliquely, as a form 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 erotic thriller / about businessmen and / the dark force.”

A tale slowly unfolds of a female character who experiences quarantine in London with a near-unknown person and during those days relates to him what happened to her a ten years earlier, when she accepted an offer from a figure who professed to be the devil to grant all her wishes, so long as she didn't doubt his motives. As the elements of the two stories 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.

Another blaze is present: a passionate, magnetic commitment to writing as a form of activism

Pacts and Consequences: A Thematic Examination

Classic stories teach us that it is the dark figure who does deals, not God, and that we engage in them at our peril. But suppose the protagonist herself is the malevolent force? A additional storyline eventually emerges—the account of a young woman whose early years was marred by mistreatment and who spent time in a psychiatric hospital, under duress to comply with social expectations or suffer further harm. “[This entity] knows that in the game you've set for it, there are a pair of results: surrender or remain a beast.” A third way out is finally revealed through a series of poems to the darkness that are also a rallying cry against the forces of capital.

Connections and Readings: From Fiction to Real Events

Numerous UK audience members of Nordenhof's series books will think right away of the Grenfell Tower tragedy, which, though unintentional in origin, shares parallels in that the ensuing disaster and fatalities can be linked at least partly to the dangerous trade-off of putting financial gain over people. In these initial volumes of what is planned to be a seven-book sequence, the fire on board the ferry and the chain of fraudulent business deals that ended in multiple deaths are a ominous background presence, showing themselves only in brief glimpses of detail or inference yet projecting a deepening influence over all that occurs. Some individuals may doubt how far it is feasible to interpret this volume as a independent piece, when its aim and significance are so deeply bound into a larger whole whose ultimate shape, at present, is unknowable.

Innovative Prose: Art and Morality Fused

There will be others—and I include myself as one of them—who will fall in love with Nordenhof's project purely as written art, as truly innovative literature whose ethical and artistic purpose are so profoundly entwined as to make them inextricable. “Write poems / for we require / that as well.” There is another fire here: a passionate, attractive devotion to the craft as a political act. I intend to persist to follow this literary journey, wherever it leads.