The circle of twilight
The Twilight Circle is a four-part series of novels ( tetralogy ) by the German author Ralf Isau . In it, the twilight circle of twelve tries to destroy humanity during the 20th century in order to found a new, pure human race afterwards. Only the child of the century David Camden can prevent the twelve conspirators from doing so.
The books were published by Thienemann Verlag between 1999 and 2001 .
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Part I - The child of the century
The first book begins from the perspective of Jeff Fenton, a simple kitchen boy who lives in Tunbridge Wells . Unexpectedly, a black shadow appears to him that offers him a job as a kitchen boy for one night. Jeff agrees, although the work will take place in the rumored Weald House , as the Shadow wants to reward him royally. That night, Jeff witnesses a secret plan that is supposed to drive mankind to the end of the 20th century. Under the leadership of the homeowner Lord Belial, twelve powerful men from all over the world have gathered to decide this plan of the century. Jeff is almost discovered, but escapes with a stolen signet ring.
Twelve years later, David Camden was born in Japan to the Earl of Camden in the English embassy, who was one and the same person as the kitchen boy Jeff Fenton. Since David was born on January 1st, 1900 and has white hair, the midwife predicts a life as a seiki no ko , a child of the century . Such a thing would be sent by the forces of the Yang to restore the order of the world which is in danger. While David grows up and becomes friends with the grandson of Tenno Meiji , Hirohito , he notices a change in his father, who loses his nerve every time there is a report of an attack on an important political figure. For security reasons, after an unsuccessful attack by a swordsman, the Camdens move to Vienna and shortly before the outbreak of World War I on to London, the family's home country. In 1916 David's parents are murdered by Negromanus, the shadow of Lord Belial, and David, in his grief over his loss, decides to join the world war as a soldier. But he only realizes the real horror on site and gives up his original plan to find death in the war. Instead, he shifts to saving the lives of injured comrades, whereupon he is quickly promoted to war veteran status. When 16-year-old David and his company take a break at a court in northern France, he meets thirteen-year-old Rebekah, whom he takes to heart because of her openness. A few months later he involuntarily returns and has to watch a German officer try to rape Rebekah. He rushes to the girl's aid and is seriously injured. However, as soon as he wakes up from his faint, Rebekka makes his first marriage proposal, which will soon be followed by more. Nevertheless, David soon travels back to England, where he begins his studies and earns his living as a reporter. Rebekah finds her lover, and after much deliberation, David decides to take her as his wife. The wedding takes place in Scotland and the couple spends the wedding night at Blair Castle , the castle of Count Murray. Here Negromanus comes back on the scene, but David manages to cut off a hand from the shadow and drive him away. David then decides to hunt the circle of twilight himself; on the advice of the count, he begins with the "tail of the dragon" (the dragon means The Society of the Black Dragon ). With the help of his Japanese friend from childhood, Yoshi, he manages to track down a member of the circle, the head of the Toyama Mitsuru society . The influential man in Japan lives in a secluded rock palace, where he is visited by David, Rebekah and a few helpers. While trying to take out Toyama, the palace catches fire due to a mishap. The assumption that Toyama was killed in this fire later turns out to be wrong.
Part II - The Truth Finder
After his victory over Toyama, David travels to Tokyo with Rebekah, where Negromanus ambushes them. They then flee to Paris, where Rebekka's mother is staying, David killing him during an attack by Negromanus, and through Rebekka's mother they get to a certain Professor Leopardi, to whom they travel in Italy. Leopardi also advises David to set up an agent network through which he can obtain information. Impressed by the idea, David starts building the network. Thanks to his gift as the child of the century, he can easily find good and above all honest people by finding out about honesty and truth and convince them to help him. Since he was tracked down by the servants of the circle in his refuge with Professor Leopardi, he fled on to Rome with Rebekah, because there he met Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli (later Pope Pius XII. ) And Pope Pius XI. want to meet. He succeeds in doing this with the use of his strength and a good portion of luck. During this time he also met his future friend Lorenzo di Marco, a monk who, it turns out, works as the Pope's secretary. The Pope allows him to search the Vatican archives for clues to the Circle of Twilight. In this way he finally came to Germany, where in the Bibliotheca Palatina in Heidelberg he found a book by a certain Jason, who was himself a member of the Twilight Circle about 1900 years ago. Through the book, David finds out that he can use a trick and the help of the ring of princes to summon the prince himself. If the ring is then destroyed in the presence of the prince, the circle of twilight is destroyed. To get more information from the book, David and Rebekka go to Berlin.
Thus David comes under the rule of National Socialism, which he - apart from a few pranks - knows nothing to counter. He suspects a servant to Lord Belial in various places, such as behind the person of Kurt von Schleicher , but is always wrong until he realizes that Franz von Papen must be the one he is looking for. Meanwhile, the crisis in the Reich grew worse, the various presidential cabinets were deposed one after the other, and finally Hitler came to power. The Camdens have to watch how their Jewish housemates are first discriminated and later abducted. Since Rebekah is also of Jewish descent, they both try to escape, but the escape fails. Submerged in Hamburg, he looked for ways to flee Germany and was ambushed in the process. A lodge brother of Belial's, a monk by the name of Scarelli (who appears as Rasputin in reality ), confronts him and a fight ensues in which Scarelli dies. In the meantime, the Nazis search the Camden's apartment and take Rebekah prisoner. All David's efforts to bring her back fail. Only David manages to escape from Germany to England, where he withdraws to his property in Cornwall and mourns. An apparent hallucination (he sees his wife Rebekah and himself wandering over the cliffs of his estate) leads David to turn his grief into action. He tries to come to Germany as an agent to look for Rebekah, but is transferred to Bletchley Park , where he is supposed to help decipher the Enigma . There he also meets Alan Turing , who has made the greatest progress in this area. Through his contacts, David managed to get the code tablets for decoding the Enigma from the Germans in mid-1941, so that the Allies gained a strategic advantage. Rebekah, however, remains missing and David has an empty coffin buried.
He then flies to the Time magazine office in New York and begins to work there until he can fly to General MacArthur , the commander of the Allied forces in the Pacific, in the Pacific. When they slowly push back the Japanese, David goes to the mainland at his own request to ask his friend, Tenno Hirohito , to submit the surrender to avoid further victims, which succeeds. However, the emperor does not have the necessary assertiveness and the war continues. In addition, David has learned that Toyama is still alive, whereupon he wants to get rid of him for good. He finds him in Hiroshima and takes his ring from him. He escapes just in time before the city is destroyed by atomic fire . Back in Tokyo, he finally convinced the Japanese to submit the unconditional surrender in order to avoid at least further atomic bombs.
Part III - The White Wanderer
At the beginning of the third part, David Camden is in India, where he and his friend and former servant Baluswami Bhavabhuti witness the murder of Mahatma Gandhi . In search of the masterminds of the murder, he finds, as hoped, another lodge brother of Belial's, an Indian named Ben Nedal, whom he can kill.
In Nedal's documents, David finds evidence of a Korean and a Russian branch of the circle and decides to investigate the Korean first in Europe. In the meantime he searches in vain in Paris for the mother of his wife Rebekka, who, he learns, perished in a concentration camp during the Second World War. He is also trying to get information about the Qumran roles through an old Berlin friend, Zvi Aharoni, as he suspects that these documents contain references to the Twilight Circle. Since this investigation is all progressing slowly, he has enough time to continue writing articles for Time magazine. In this way he met Eleanor Roosevelt , whose commitment to human rights impressed him deeply. Another former friend from Berlin visits him in New York, the painter Ruben Rubinstein. From then on, he takes care of the finances and helps David out of financial bottlenecks. Upon request, the painter tells that someone sent him to David with a message. Through this mysterious message, David learns that the Korean he is looking for is called An Chung-Gun and he is going to Korea. There he gets caught up in the turmoil of the Korean War . However, with the help of a black market trader by the name of Kaedong, he manages to get to An Chung-Gun, where he is disappointed to find that he is not a lodge brother, but only a henchman of the district. On the way back from Korea, your ship gets caught up in the American naval maneuver when the Allied troops arrive. David meets up with General MacArthur again. He is then informed of the plans and, in order to prevent an expansion of the war, flies as envoy to President Truman in Washington, whom he can convince to refrain from using nuclear weapons.
Back in New York, he continues to work for Time magazine and in this context meets Albert Einstein . The conversation deeply impressed David and helped him to use his powers in a new way: freezing by slowing down molecules. In addition, his attention is again captured by Franz von Papen and he decides to take the signet ring from him, which he does not succeed at first. While looking for the lodge brother, David heard the name of a certain Adolf Eichmann from Simon Wiesenthal . In the course of further investigations among the Nazis and Nazi friends in South and Central America (he heard that another lodge brother resides there) David finally comes across the name of another lodge brother: Justo Rufino Barrios Auyón . With renewed use of all his abilities, he succeeds in eliminating this lodge brother.
Another message from his secret friend lets him drive to Rome, where he looks for Franz von Papen and, via detours, finds his friend Lorenzo di Marco. In the meantime he has found out a lot about the circle of twilight and so the two men find out with which ritual Lord Belial can be called. In addition, they try to destroy the ring of princes by fire, as this is apparently the only force that can harm the ring, but it does not work.
Part IV - The Invisible Friend
The last part of the plot ties in seamlessly with the previous one. David is in Italy with his rediscovered friend Lorenzo. There he finally succeeds in tracking down Franz von Papen. David has to realize that this is no longer a lodge brother of Belial. Instead, the ring seems to have passed to Eichmann, who is hiding in Argentina. With the help of his friend Zvi Aharoni and the Israeli secret service Mossad , David hunts down Eichmann and takes the ring from him. When he returns to New York, the world is already shaken by the Cuba crisis. David suspects that this conflict could develop into a war between the power blocs and manages to avert further escalation in the conflict , not least by exerting direct influence on Kennedy . At the same time, he decides to resume the hunt for the American member of the circle, Lucius Kelippoth, as he has found some leads. However, he receives another "ace message" from his friend, which sends him to the valley of the sleeping wizard . On closer research on the monastery mountain Athos , he meets a young woman, Kim Tong, who turns out to be the daughter of the Russian lodge brother Golitsyn (in reality probably from the Galitzin family), whom David already had after his search want to seek out. Since a lackey from the district had preceded him on the monastery mountain, he decided to go to Russia with Kim.
He finally succeeds in locating Golyzin. When trying to take the signet ring from him, it falls into the fire and dissolves - Golitsyn suddenly ages and dies a few seconds later of old age. Since David and Golitsyn look extremely similar to each other, apart from a few details, David and Kim leave Russia disguised as Golitsyn and mistress in his helicopter. In the meantime, Lorenzo in New York has roughly located the location of the Valley of the Sleeping Wizard in Turkey. Kim and David make their way to where, as they learned from Golitsyn, a covenant meeting is to take place.
After locating the meeting place, the two go into hiding and observe the scenario. David tries, disguised as Golitsyn, to take part and in fact meets several other lodge brothers: a sheikh named Abufari, a black named Kamboto and a white named Bartolomé. Before the two missing lodge brothers appear, Kim Tong's hiding place is exposed and, a short time later, David's disguise. The two still manage to escape, while the three lodge brothers perish. This leaves only two living lodge brothers and the prince himself. David spends the following years researching the news organization Truth , which he founded before the trip to Russia . Financially, this had been made possible by the rediscovery of his old stocks, which David thought had become worthless during the Great Depression. Nevertheless, the wide-ranging search for the remaining two members of the circle does not lead to any result, although international politics seem to be slowly calming down, not least due to the fall of the iron curtain. David attributes this to the delicate weakening of the circle of twilight.
In the course of the investigation into the saring gas attacks in Matsumoto and Tokyo in 1994 and 1995, David returned to his native Japan, where he suddenly met a woman named Mia Rosenbaum, who turned out to be his great-granddaughter. She tells her grandfather that Rebekah is still alive, but is only very weak, whereupon David breaks off his research and flies to Rebekah in Germany with Mia. The reunion is short-lived, a few months later Rebekka dies in her husband's arms, and Mia, whose parents were killed in the Lockerbie attack , accompanies David to New York.
A short time later, David learns from the newspaper that his life story could be reconstructed by a hacker from Australia. Accompanied by Mia, he immediately went to see this man in Australia. The computer scientist and sheep farm owner Davy Pearson turns out to be an important resource in the search for Lucius Kelippott after David has convinced him to work for him. With his help and the help of another message from his invisible friend, David finds out that a Kelippoth front company has developed a poison called Vengeance Angel , which when exposed to a certain amount of radioactivity is activated and has a lethal effect. In 1999 David finally meets Lucius Kelippoth, who tells him that humanity has already been infected by this gas and that the dropping of a few atomic bombs by Concordes in the atmosphere in the New Year 2000 will destroy humanity. After eliminating Kelippoth, David succeeds in averting the launch and dropping of the atomic bombs, but lets a single Concorde launch with an atomic bomb because he has found out that atomic fire is the only way to destroy the Fürstenring and thus Belial. So, shortly before the bomb explodes in the plane, David calls the prince: The atom bomb tears the ring apart in his presence (and David, respectively Belial).
In the epilogue of the story, Davy and Mia, now married, travel to the Camden estate in Cornwall. There they surprisingly meet Mia's parents, who, contrary to what was assumed, were not killed in the Lockerbie attack, but were saved by David. It turns out that when the atomic bomb exploded, the latter undertook a journey through time by slowing down the light emitted by the bomb and thus flying at faster than light speed , which is why it existed twice for some time. It was also he who sent the secret messages to the second David and thus contributed to the destruction of Lord Belial.
Characters
David and his skills, names and allies
Among the many allies and friends David made in the course of his life, only a few of the most important are listed here.
David Camden
David Viscount of Camden (after his father's death Earl of Camden) is, as the Camden's midwife suspects due to his unusual birthday and his white hair (which is this color already at birth), a child of the century . These people get their name from their lifespan, which is exactly 100 years, i.e. a whole century. According to legend, if necessary, the forces of good will send such a child to restore world order and equip them with some special skills to be able to take up the fight against evil. David has a total of four valuable skills that he can use in various ways:
- Second Prophet: David anticipates events by a few seconds. So he can always be one step ahead of his opponents. Only when he is lost in thought does the prophecy of seconds stop.
- Color generator: David can give objects a new color. With the help of this ability he manages to kill the shadow of Belial's Negromanus by turning its blood black and thus making it disappear.
- Delayers: David can distort the time for certain objects. He is thus able to slow down clock hands, his heartbeat or projectiles, for example. It can also slow down individual molecules so that it can influence the temperature of objects.
- Truth Finder: David can help people to recognize the previously repressed truth.
Very often he uses his abilities of coloring and finding the truth in combination: the conditioned coloring . This means that something is only discolored if the specified condition is met.
Rebekka Rosenbaum
Rebekah is David's wife. She comes from a Jewish family in northern France. Growing up with her mother, who works as a doctor in a hospital ward near Paris (later in Paris itself), she meets David during the First World War and falls in love with him. David does not want to expose her to the danger that his fate brings, but he finally takes her as his wife. Your desire to have children remains unfulfilled for a long time; her first child is killed by Negromanus while she was pregnant, the second only born after she was separated from David in World War II. David didn't find her again until the 1990s when he ran into his granddaughter Mia Rosenbaum while researching the sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway in Japan. In retrospect, the meeting turns out to be a fictitious diversionary maneuver through the circle of twilight. Rebekka dies a few months later at an old age.
Ruben Rubinstein
Ruben Rubinstein is a German painter of Jewish descent whom David met during his time in Berlin (second book). But he lost sight of it again when National Socialism broke out in Germany. In the third part, Ruben Rubinstein, sent by David's “invisible friend”, suddenly appears in David's warehouse in New York and takes on the role of David's accountant. On the side, however, he was also successful as a painter.
Lorenzo di Marco
David also meets Lorenzo in the second part of the story when he is looking for clues to the circle of twilight in the Vatican. Lorenzo, a monk, is a confidante of the Pope at the time. In the third part he reappears when David is looking for clues again in Rome. In the meantime, however, Lorenzo has largely distanced himself from the institution of the Holy See, as he does not approve of its behavior during the Second World War. When the henchmen of the circle track down the two in Rome, David takes Lorenzo to New York, where he works from then on as one of David's closest confidants.
Davy Pearson
Davy is an Australian farmer and computer scientist who succeeds in reconstructing David's life story without having known David. Terrified that his cover is about to be blown, David meets him in Australia, accompanied by his granddaughter Mia. Davy then comes to New York, where his hacking skills are valuable in deciphering the last plan in the circle. In the last months before the end of the 20th century, he also recorded David's life story and married his granddaughter Mia Rosenbaum.
Hirohito
David met Hirohito , the heir to the throne and later Emperor of Japan, during his childhood. The two are close friends, although David repeatedly criticizes Hirohito's political naivete and calls on him to act instead of delving into biological studies. This happens, for example, when, towards the end of the second part, David persuades Hirohito to follow his principles with deeds and to enforce the unconditional surrender of Japan in the Second World War.
The circle of twilight
This group of twelve conspirators wants to destroy humanity by the year 2000 in order to build up a new, pure human race afterwards. Each of the members is a person with great financial potential and receives a signet ring from Belial. The wearers of these signet rings combine their life force, so that each of them is theoretically entitled to twelve times the life span if all rings are preserved. In this context, the members of the circle often appear in other names or roles.
Lord Belial
He is the leader and most powerful of the conspirators. His life force is tied to the signet ring. If he does not wear it, his shadow loosens and walks around in the form of the Negromanus. A few comments at the end of the fourth part make it appear as a metaphor intended by the author for the devil himself or his servants. What is certain is that he is not a human being, but an immortal being who does not have blood unless it has separated from his shadow.
Negromanus
Negromanus is the shadow of Lord Belial who murders people with his black hand. The corpses are always found with a severely crooked back. David succeeds in destroying the shadow at the beginning of the 2nd part by coloring the blood of the shadow black and thus making it disappear. David has to pay a high price for his deed: Negromanus murders the unborn child of David and Rebekah. Negromanus (Latin: negro = black, manus = hand) simultaneously symbolizes the character of the black man , who in psychology appears as a figure of fear in many children.
Members of the circle
The members of the Circle of Twilight appear under different pseudonyms during the course of the plot. Many of these pseudonyms are actually historical persons. In addition, the members are spread across the globe, so they can wreak havoc on different fronts. The way the circle works is to stay in the background for as long as possible and exercise real power over straw men so that David has a very difficult time identifying the circle members.
Of the eleven members of the circle (with Belial there are twelve), seven appear as active characters: Mitsuru Toyama , Franz von Papen (later replaced by Adolf Eichmann ), Ben Nedal (a member living in India who, among other things, was responsible for the murder of Gandhi organized), Justo Rufino Barrios Auyón (acting under the guise of Manuel Barrios), Scarelli (acting under the code name of Grigori Jefimowitsch Rasputin ), the Russian Golitsyn and Lucius Kellipoth (who sometimes acts as a publisher, sometimes as the head of the Ku Klux Klan and later as owner of a company called Phosphorus). Another three members (a black man named Kamboto, a sheikh named Abufari, and another member named Batolomé) were killed by David at a meeting of the circle in Anatolia during the fourth volume. The last member remains unmentioned, but there are indications that the ring was no longer occupied after the departure of a Brazilian count named Zapata before the announcement of the plan of the century.
genre
Isau himself describes his work as a phantagon , a novel whose genre should be assessed differently for each individual. Two genre types in particular can be found in the book.
The fantastic part of the tetralogy is clearly recognizable , which is not only expressed in the fantastic abilities of the main character and his adversary Belials, but can also be found in the basic motifs. So the book is the description of the struggle “good against evil”.
On the other hand, the book has a well-researched historical-contemporary part. All of the events taking place in the background, such as the Lockerbie attack or the An Chung-gun assassination attempt on Japanese Prime Minister Itō Hirobumi actually took place in this form. The events in which the main characters are involved also happened in a similar way in reality. Furthermore, most of the people appearing in the book are not fictitious, even the members of the Circle of Twilight or their pseudonyms were real people who work in their actual fields of activity (for example, at the beginning of the 20th century there was a Mitsuru Toyama who with the "Society of the Black Dragon" in Japan, but - in contrast to the book - is not a member of this association).
Translations
Several translations of The Twilight Circle are currently in the works and the book will be published in the following languages: Hebrew, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Spanish, Hungarian.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ cf. “Ralf Isau”, The Circle of Twilight: Part 3 , 1st edition in Bastei Lübbe Taschenbuchverlag , p. 409
- ↑ Description of the work on Isau's homepage
- ↑ Planned translations