Francis. Felidae II.
Francis. Felidae II. Is a crime novel by the German-Turkish writer Akif Pirinçci , which was published in 1993 by Goldmann Verlag . The second part of the Felidae series is structured according to the scheme of a thriller and deals with facets of detective history and horror literature .
content
shape
The book begins with a full title page . The dedication reads:
"Dedicated to cats - whether animals or humans."
Then a quote from the Book of Genesis introduces the plot:
“I do not want to curse the earth again for the sake of man, because the thought structure of the human heart is evil from youth. I do not want to destroy all living beings again as I did. "
The action begins on page nine. As in the first volume , the running text is interrupted several times by numbers, which refer to a total of eleven comments in an appendix between pages 303 and 318. These remarks shed a scientific light on those facets of the cats that Pirinçci was unable or unwilling to explain in the plot.
action
A few years after the events of Felidae , Francis lives happily with his "can opener" Gustav Löbel, who is now the author of successful archaeological non-fiction books , in the shared apartment on the ground floor of a renovated old building.
The peace of the house is suddenly disturbed when Gustav's new partner, the obnoxious Francesca, moves into the apartment and furnishes it to her taste. When she wants to have Francis neutered, Francis decides to flee. As soon as he is out of the house, a huge thunderstorm rises over him, which in some places even loosens gullies from their anchorages. The mighty floods wash Francis into the sewer system . When the downpour subsided and Francis was able to recover, he discovered an EKH corpse drifting in the sewer , whose head had been severed and could not be found. He decides to go down the shaft in search of a way out and then return to Gustav and Francesca. However, he quickly notices that he is being followed, but at first thinks his captors are rats . As it turns out, it is a flock of blind cats, led by the Carthusian Cat Safran, who orders the execution of Francis by the huge Persian Cat Rhodes. But without causing any further damage, Francis can easily kill his executioner. When Safran learns that Francis is the famous cat detective, he tells the story of the “People of the Merciful”. They are unwanted cats by their owners, flushed the toilet or crawled into the sewers of their own accord, blinded by the lack of sunlight. And the corpse that Francis saw is nowhere near the first. Once upon a time, a terrible creature raged among the blind, a mastiff , which horribly prepared the corpses and partially ate them up. At the same time, a beautiful young tomcat came down the sewer and, surprisingly, did not go blind. However, he was terribly brutal and was cast out by the People of the Merciful after several acts of violence, his name was Hugo. And when the mastiff had cornered almost the entire people one day and threatened to cause an unspeakable massacre, Hugo stopped them. He found his soulmate in her and left the sewers with her towards the forest, after which the two were never seen again. The blind suspect that the two kill the repeatedly stranded cats, and Francis promises them to take care of the case, but still secretly wants to go back to Gustav. Saffron brings Francis out of the sewer towards the forest.
Once there, Francis succumbs to the beauty of nature and immediately throws all plans to return to Gustav overboard. The joy of his new "home" does not last long because he is being shot at. In shock, he runs straight onto a six-lane motorway, which he can cross safely. In the forest on the other side, he meets the pretty wild cat mandrake, who has heard of a certain "black knight" who rides a huge wild animal and roams among the domestic cats on the surrounding farms. The wild cats would not have anything against it, since they could not stand the effeminate house cats. But Francis gives her the impetus to think differently, and she promises to talk to her tribal leader Aurelie about it. When she leaves, Francis goes to one of the farms, wanting to find a place to sleep there, and finds three more disfigured corpses, and he also sees a gigantic spotted “monster paw”. Frightened, Francis flees into the forest and falls asleep at the foot of a large rock. In the night he wakes up and sees two figures on the rock above. In the dark, however, he cannot make out whether it is a great dane mounted by a cat. When the apparition disappears, Francis falls asleep again.
When he wakes up again that night, he thinks what has happened is just a dream. He climbs up the rock and discovers a multi-story log house behind it with a light on. While examining the surroundings, he first discovers a huge satellite system in front of the hut that bears the inscription "ARCHE". In front of the hut there are still some sheep , including a black one. The house itself is secured by a security system wired with motion detectors , so Francis has trouble getting to the house undetected. But he can do it and explores the outer wall, where, among other things, old paints and brushes, but also numerous empty drug cans are. Through a window he can see the ground floor, where an elderly woman, apparently without any artistic talent, is working on a painting. Behind her are tall shelves filled with video cassettes , but only a small television set is available for viewing. Francis climbs up to the upper floor, where a beautiful, but wet, Somali cat is writing. To do this, he dips a claw in ink and writes with it like a person with a pen. Francis takes the terrified tomcat by surprise, who obviously suffers from chronic stuttering . He introduces himself as Ambrose and shows Francis his work, which (from treatises on ASW A xcept s innliche W ahrnehmung ; ie divination and the like) is in cats. He explains that his mistress Diana is a forest scientist who uses the satellite system that receives images from the “Arche” satellite to observe the increasing destruction of the forest areas there. But she's getting crazier. Ambrosius himself shows himself to be a good friend of the wildcats and wants to help Francis with his investigations. He proposes to interrogate all forest dwellers tomorrow whose languages he has learned over time. As an experiment for his studies, Ambrosius hyponitizes Francis, who sees his future in this way and witnesses his imminent, violent death.
When he wakes up from hypnosis, the alarm system goes off and the brutally murdered mandrake lies in the front courtyard of the hut, which is brightly lit by halogen spotlights . In his anger, Francis runs after some tracks and soon becomes the hunted himself through a trick of his "victims". He escapes his pursuers only thanks to the “monster paws”: an animal about 1.50 m long, which he was unable to recognize during the night, saves him from his unknown captors. Fearing the monster, Francis flees and collides with Ambrosius, who is following him, so that both end up in the stream. Ambrosius then says that he had to bathe in the stream twice that day.
As morning is already dawning, Francis and Ambrosius set out to interrogate the forest dwellers. They are busy with that for a long time, and afterwards Ambrosius wants to eat a wood shrew for lunch. However, his muzzle begins to speak between his teeth. The mouse is called Zaches and claims that wood shrews cannot get the cat's stomach. He also gives important tips about the case: he was able to observe the Black Knight up close, his fur was about as long as Ambrosius, only pitch black and strangely wet or greasy. But he was by no means riding a dog, but an animal that Zaches had only seen before near a human house in the forest: an animal that didn't look murderous at all, but had a good-natured face and was also black. At the human house, Zaches saw only one black one of these animals in a herd of white ones. His statement is suddenly interrupted by shots that target Francis again, but miss him. Francis flees across the forest and finds a huge overgrown cage with an adjoining barrack in the middle of a clearing . In the barracks he found a lot of bureaucracy, mostly files, all empty, with the inscription "Project Arche". When he enters the cage, he notices that a small landscape is modeled in it, as if one wanted to keep an extremely dangerous animal in it as appropriately as possible. But he is surprised by the tribe of wild cats, which apparently only consists of females. Her leader Aurelie explains to him that Mandrake would have been her favorite daughter and that the forest is slowly lacking prey, and that the Black Knight now also seems to assassinate their species, which is why they will set out for Scandinavia that night , where the hunting grounds should be more productive . She explains to Francis that the Black Knight lives in a cave in the north of the forest and sends him there.
After a while, Francis reaches a dead forest , in the middle of which a rock rises up with a gap in the middle. He enters the cave through the gap, which also has cave paintings . He also discovers two skeletons in it, which undoubtedly must have come from a mastiff and a cat. When he tries to figure it out, a Canadian lynx comes up to him. He says he's not doing anything to Francis and just wants to help him. The lynx named Eight was brought from Canada to Germany with seven other lynxes , where they were released into the wild. Soon some of the lynx died, the paths of the others parted and now Acht, like the wild ones, wants to Scandinavia to find others of his kind. However, the construction of the wildcats is by no means the cage of the lynx, as this was torn down after the release into the wild. Eight explains to Francis that something else has been released and leaves.
Now Francis recognizes everything. The savages are the murderers. Wildcats do not usually live in trunks at all, they are solitary animals. The wild ones here must have been released into the wild as well. Given their presumably underdeveloped hunting skills, they were threatened with extinction and had to feed on the blood and livers of domestic cats. To protect them, Ambrose maintained the myth of the Black Knight by smearing his ink on himself and riding the black sheep in front of Diana's house. After his “performances” he washed himself in the stream. Francis returns to Ambrosius' hut, where he first looks at the satellite images in Diana's study on the ground floor. It shows wildcats walking to the farm where Francis later discovered the three bodies at the time Francis was in the sewers. Francis then watches some videotapes. He sees that Diana was by no means a forest scientist, but the head of the wildcat reintroduction project. But soon the “Project Arche” was doomed to failure. A virus wiped out all male cats.
Francis finally goes up to Ambrose, who is lying in his blood on his papers. He explains to Francis that after some farmers complained, the savages were given up to hunt and Diana took up arms to erase the mischief she herself caused. He himself only wanted to help protect the savages who have already suffered so much. Ambrosius dies from his wounds. Since Diana is probably already on the way to keep the savages from their trip to Scandinavia, Francis races off. He can catch up with the savages in the place where the vision of death took place during hypnosis. Aurelie explains that through mandrake, the savages have seen that it is not right to slaughter the domestic cats. So they move north where they hope for more food. They killed Ambrosius so as not to leave witnesses, but they let the speechless Francis go. When the savages are gone, Francis is shot. He goes through a near-death experience and then wakes up in Gustav's apartment under a vet. He learns that Diana, who thought he was one of the savages due to the great resemblance, shot him, but then found his tattoo with Gustav's data. Thanks to her veterinary experience, she was able to save Francis from death and bring him back to Gustav. Francis can stay there without a problem, as the night Francesca slipped on cat food, hit the back of her head on the toilet and was dead on the spot the night he escaped.
main characters
Francis
- In this part of the series, one learns from the title person Francis that he looks like the European wildcat . He solves his second case with Francis .
Ambrose
- Somali cat Ambrosius belongs to Diana, who headed the “Project Arche”. He taught himself the languages of almost all forest dwellers and how to write. With the latter ability he writes treatises on the subject of ASW. He saw it as his job to protect the savages and uphold the myth of the "Black Knight".
Wild cats
The European wildcats in Francis were almost successfully released into the wild thanks to the action of Ambrosius' mistress Diana. However, all males died as a result of a virus infection and the females could not find enough food, which is why, supported by Ambrosius, they attacked and killed the domestic cats on the surrounding farms and fed on their blood and liver.
Aurelie
- Aurelie is the chief of the savages and is very remorseful to Francis about the atrocities that she and her fellow tribesmen did to the domestic cats.
Mandrake
- Mandrake is the first wildcat that Francis meets and initiates the rethinking of the wildcats, but is murdered for it.
People of the Merciful
The “People of the Merciful” is a group of blind cats who live in the sewers, rejected by society . Crazy Hugo comes from you.
saffron
- Chartreux Safran is the leader of the Merciful and once belonged to an artist. He flushed himself in the toilet and is the founder of the cat colony in the underground shafts.
Niger
- The Oriental Niger (lat. "Black") belongs to the people. It ended up in the sewers after being rejected by its owners.
Rhodes
- The red Persian cat Rhodes is the executioner of the Merciful, who was already very old before he was murdered by Francis.
Hugo
- Hugo is the only one of the Canal cats who actually did not go blind. He was extremely brutal and teamed up with the Great Dane that was furious in the sewer to get out of the sewer. In the forest, however, he quickly fell victim to the wildcats.
Forest dwellers
Most of the forest dwellers observed the Black Knight from a distance and said so when they were interviewed by Francis and Ambrosius.
eight
- Eight, a Canadian lynx , was flown from Canada to Germany with seven others of its kind and released there with no apparent success. He explains to Francis that he has been using the Black Knight's cave as a sleeping place for some time and that Hugo and the Great Dane were already dead when he arrived. He goes on to say that not only the lynx were released into the wild, but does not explicitly state that the others were the wild cats.
Zaches
- Wood shrew Zaches saw the Black Knight up close. His evidence tipped the scales that Francis was able to expose Ambrosius.
People
Diana
- Diana was the director of “Project Arche”, which was used to release wildcats. It failed and Diana started hunting the wildcats. At the end of the novel she shoots Francis, but carries out an emergency operation herself and brings him back to Gustav.
Gustav Löbel
- Gustav is Francis' master and archaeologist . He is the author of several non-fiction books and was in a relationship with Francesca, who dies in his apartment.
Francesca
- Francesca was in a relationship with Gustav before she had a fatal accident in his toilet. Before that, she had wanted to radically remodel the apartment and castrate Francis, with which she chased him away.
criticism
“The second Felidae novel is once again very well written. A flying change between humorous scenes in which I had to wipe the tears from my face (there is a scene with a little bird that "turns" Francis and his friend on the head, this paragraph is screaming ..), sadness, courage , Fear, horror (more like cat splatter) and the realization of how sad and cruel our world is. The second part, like its predecessor, is definitely worth reading and makes you want more ... "
background
The BUND is committed to protecting wild cats in Germany . Since 2002 the European wildcat has been considered no longer endangered, which was also ensured by the BUND's reintroduction campaigns. Since 2007, the existing areas with wild cat populations have been linked by green corridors and thus create a larger habitat for individual cats.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Francis on buchwelten.wordpress.com ( Memento of the original from September 5, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
