The Devil Book Analysis: A Danish Series Aflame with Purpose

During the late night of April 7 1990, a catastrophic blaze erupted aboard the ferry Scandinavian Star, a passenger ferry traveling between Oslo and Frederikshavn. Insufficient staff training combined with malfunctioning safety doors accelerated the spread of the fire, while deadly hydrogen cyanide gas emitted from combusting laminates led to the deaths of 159 individuals. At first, the disaster was blamed to a traveler—a truck driver with a history of arson. Since this suspect also died in the fire and was unable to defend himself, the complete truth about the event stayed hidden for a long time. Only in 2020 that a comprehensive investigation disclosed the fire was probably started deliberately as part of an insurance fraud.

Nordenhof's Literary Sequence: A Glimpse

In the initial book of Nordenhof's epic sequence, Money to Burn, an unnamed protagonist is riding on a public transport through the Danish capital when she notices an older man on the sidewalk. As the bus moves away, she feels an “eerie sense” that she is taking a part of him with her. Driven to retrace the journey in pursuit of him, the character finds herself in a landscape that is both unfamiliar and strangely known. She introduces us to a couple named Maggie and Kurt, whose relationship is strained by the burdens of their conflicted histories. In the final pages of that book, it is suggested that the source of Kurt's disaffection may stem from a poor financial decision made on his behalf by a man known as T.

This New Volume: An Unconventional Narrative Style

This second installment opens with an lengthy poetic passage in which the writer describes her struggle to compose T's story. “Within this second volume,” she writes, “we were supposed / to follow him / from childhood 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 task she has assigned herself and derailed by the pandemic, she tackles the tale indirectly, as a type of allegory. “It occurred to me / 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 London with a virtual stranger and over the course of those days tells to him what occurred to her a ten years earlier, when she accepted an offer from a figure who claimed to be the evil entity to grant all her wishes, so long as she didn't doubt his intentions. As the elements of the two stories become more interwoven, we begin to believe that they are identical—or at minimum that the identity of T is multiple, for there are devils all around.

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

Pacts and Consequences: A Literary Examination

Literature instruct us that it is the devil who makes deals, not God, and that we engage in them at our peril. But what if the narrator herself is the malevolent force? A additional storyline eventually emerges—the story of a girl whose childhood was scarred by abuse and who spent time in a mental health facility, under duress to conform with social expectations or endure more of the same. “[The devil] knows that in the scenario you've created for it, there are two outcomes: submit or remain a beast.” A alternative path is ultimately unveiled through a collection of verses to the darkness that are also a rallying cry against the forces of wealth and power.

Connections and Interpretations: From Literature to Real Events

Numerous British audience members of the author's Scandinavian Star novels will think immediately of the Grenfell Tower fire, which, though accidental in origin, shares parallels in that the ensuing disaster and fatalities can be linked at least partly to the devil's bargain of putting financial gain over people. In these first two 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, revealing themselves only in fleeting glimpses of detail or inference yet casting a growing influence over everything that occurs. Certain individuals may doubt how far it is feasible to read The Devil Book as a stand-alone piece, when its purpose and meaning are so intricately bound into a larger whole whose final form, at present, is uncertain.

Innovative Prose: Art and Morality Intertwined

There will be others—and I include myself as among them—who will fall in love with Nordenhof's endeavor purely as text, as properly experimental writing whose moral and creative purpose are so deeply entwined as to make them inseparable. “Write poems / for we require / that too.” There is another fire here: an intense, attractive devotion to the craft as a political act. I will persist to follow this series, no matter where it leads.