At about 2am on the night of 7 April 1990, a fire broke out on board the MS Scandinavian Star, a car and passenger ferry operating between Oslo and Frederikshavn. Inadequate staff training coupled with jammed fire doors aiding the spread of the fire and the subsequent release of deadly hydrogen cyanide gas from burning laminates resulted in the deaths of 159 people. The disaster was initially blamed on one of the passengers – a lorry driver and convicted arsonist. The fact that this suspect was also one of the fire’s casualties and thus unable to refute the charges against him was almost certainly part of the reason why the truth about the tragedy took so long to come to light. In 2020, a six-hour documentary revealed that the fire had most likely been started deliberately as part of an insurance fraud.
In the first volume of Asta Olivia Nordenhof’s Scandinavian Star sequence, Money to Burn, an unnamed narrator is travelling on a bus through Copenhagen when she finds her attention drawn to an elderly man on the street outside. As the bus moves away, she has the “eerie sense” that she is carrying a part of him with her. Compelled to travel the same route again in search of him, the narrator finds herself in a landscape that is at once alien and deeply familiar. She introduces us to Maggie and Kurt, a couple whose feelings for each other are struggling to survive the pressures of their conflicted pasts. In that book’s final pages, we learn that the root of Kurt’s disaffection might possibly be found in the shattering effects of a bad investment made on his behalf by a man known as T.
The Devil Book opens with an extended prose poem in which the narrator informs us of her struggle to write T’s story. “In this volume, two,” she writes, “we were supposed / to follow him/ from childhood up until / the night / when he sat waiting for / the news that / the fire / on the Scandinavian Star / had successfully been / set.” Overwhelmed by the task she has set herself and thrown off course by the pandemic, she approaches the story obliquely, as a form 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 devil.”
A tale gradually emerges of a woman who spends lockdown in London with a virtual stranger and who over the course of those weeks relates to him what happened to her a decade before, when she accepted an offer from a man who claimed to be the devil to grant all her wishes, so long as she didn’t question his motives in doing so. As the threads of the two stories become more intertwined, we begin to suspect that they are one and the same – or at the very least that the identity of T is legion, for there are devils everywhere.
Literature teaches us that it is the devil who does deals, not God, and that we engage in them at our peril. But what if the narrator herself is the devil? A third narrative comes finally to light – the story of a girl whose childhood was marred by abuse and who spent time in a psychiatric hospital, under pressure to conform with societal norms or suffer more of the same. “[The devil] knows that in the game you’ve set for it, there are two outcomes: submit or remain a monster.” A third way out is finally revealed through a series of poems to the night that are also a call to arms against the forces of capital.
Many British readers of Nordenhof’s Scandinavian Star novels will think immediately of the Grenfell Tower fire, which although accidental in origin shares similarities in that the resulting tragedy and loss of life can be blamed at least partly on the devil’s bargain of putting profit over people. In these first two volumes of what is projected to be a seven-book series, the fire on board the ferry and the series of fraudulent business deals that ended in mass murder are a sinister background presence, revealing themselves only in brief flashes of detail or inference yet casting a deepening shadow over everything that occurs. Some readers may question how far it is possible to read The Devil Book as a stand-alone work, when its purpose and meaning is so intricately bound into a larger whole whose final form, at this stage, is unknowable.
There will be others – and I count myself as one of them – who will fall in love with Nordenhof’s project purely as text, as properly experimental writing whose moral and artistic purpose are so deeply entwined as to make them inextricable. “Write poems / for we need / that too.” There is another fire here: a passionate, magnetic commitment to writing as a political act. I will continue to follow this series, wherever it goes.
• The Devil Book by Asta Olivia Nordenhof, translated by Caroline Waight, is published by Jonathan Cape (£14.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
