The Magic Circle combines the adventures of Ariel Behn,
who receives a mysterious, coded manuscript in 1989 and is hurtled into a
fierce family conflict that literally has the fate of humanity at stake, with a
backstory that spans the last two thousand years and includes Jesus, Pontius
Pilate, Tiberius, Genghis Khan, Alexander the Great, Aleister Crowley, and
Adolf Hitler in its cast. It's often described as a millennial or New Age thriller,
but Neville's insistent that it's not a "New Age" book. "Even though it's about
about the New Age thing," she explains, "it doesn't have any of the New Age
consciousness in it. I missed most of that when it happened here, because I was
living in North Africa, but I've read stuff subsequently and the New Age
philosophy was exactly what Ariel's relatives in the book are warning her
against--utopians who believe in a golden age somewhere in the past, who
move into private communes to separate themselves from the rest of the globe
just when we're moving more and more toward a global society." In that sense,
she compares them to the medieval monks and the Puritans. Instead of
adopting an isolationist attitude, she advocates involving oneself in the world,
opening oneself to the changes that are taking place at every level of our
being--and the book is as much about that message as it is about the
cliffhanger plot.
RH: You were in the middle of another project when you decided
to switch to this one instead.
KN: The Magic Circle is actually the first book I tried to write,
when I was working at the nuclear site in Idaho in the 1970s. Then I stopped
and started on The Eight, but I stopped again because I didn't think that
that any publisher was going to buy them. Finally I got to San Francisco and
wrote A Calculated Risk and we sold that and the first half of The
Eight to Ballantine, and it turned out they wanted to publish The
Eight first. After that, they said they wanted another book that was
somewhere between that and A Calculated Risk. I had this book about
painters that I had been wanting to do for a long time, but I couldn't get any of
the research done and it just went on and on for two years. So they finally said,
"Let's just publish A Calculated Risk now." So I polished that up, brought
the computers and stuff up to date, and they published it, then I went back to
the painters book again and the same kinds of things happened. So finally I
took The Magic Circle out of the drawer. The minute I started on it, the
research became so easy; everything started connecting and falling into
place.
RH: How has the project changed from what you started nearly
two decades ago?
KN: The only new thing I brought into it was something that was
predicted... I have to think of a better word than predicted, but it was
described, I should say, in all the ancient texts when they talk about the last
days before the next transition. That was the Berlin Wall coming down--it said
that all societies that are rigid and build walls and that prevent people from
commingling with other people, they are the ones that are going to be swept
away by this wave and it will happen very suddenly and unpredictably. So
when we were living in Germany and the Berlin Wall came down, my partner,
Karl, said, "Well, obviously this is where you have to end the book. You have to
bring it up to today because this is actually happening now."
RH: The Eight is now considered one of the first books in
the current wave that combines fiction with a spiritual theory
about the path of history, of mankind's destiny. In a way, it seems
to have laid the groundwork for the genre.
KN: All my books are really about the alchemical process and
transformation,connecting spirit and matter. We shouldn't just all float up into
the sky or meditate on a mountaintop; we need to bring that spirit back into
the banking industry and nuclear fields, all these fields, so the material world
is transformed in some positive way. In the ancient legends and myths that I
bring into this book and that I've studied all my life, all of them say that at this
particular time, this is what would happen--people would start opening their
eyes and saying, "Maybe I can do something for other people, instead of just
for myself."
MaybeThe Eight had a role to play in that, because it's been translated
into fifteen languages in twenty-two countries and it's still selling
everywhere like crazy ten years later, but I purposefully wrote it the way I did
to sugarcoat... I mean, I didn't want people to feel that they were having to
take a history lesson or a philosophy lesson. I wanted them to feel like they
were on an adventure. And I felt I didn't have to do that as much this time. So
far, I've gotten really good reactions about people saying, "Now I see what you
were trying to say in The Eight." Back then, the adventure sometimes
got a little bit in the way of the message, so you had to toss the message in here
and there where you thought people wouldn't notice it.
RH: This book looks at several historical eras over the last two
thousand years, and some of the most iconic figures in mankind's
history. Did you have any anxieties about taking on some of these
figures?
KN: What I was used to doing was to hammering my characters into
place, getting them to behave themselves and do what I wanted them to do. As a
novelist, you can't let your characters run away in different directions and
just carry off the book, because you have to always stick to a plot but with
The Magic Circle, I started to really let myself go a little. I knew where I
was going. I always know the end of the book before I start writing. I know
what all the threads are that have to be pulled together by the end; you can't
pull them all together in the last three pages; you have to be pulling them
together all along as you go. But with this particular book, I really felt like I
should let certain things happen.
Things wanted to drop in, for example one character would become more
important than another, or took command, if you will, of the book. Like Jesus,
who I had planned to mention because, after all, that was the beginning of the
last aeon, but I didn't expect him to take on such an important role in the
book. I had planned to use the god Dionysus as one of the main roles, but he
wasn't a major player in the final book. And Hitler; I had done all the
research on Stalin, Ho Chi Minh, Mussolini, and was going to use all of them,
and Hitler just took over, even though he only has a small walk-on part.
I kept saying that I was letting myself dissolve a little, like an alchemical
fermentation, and I think it was really good for me. It changed me, and I think
it made me a better writer. It enabled me to have a form and a structure for
the books that I'm writing that I'll be able to use for all the subsequent books
that I write from now on. Before I started to write this book, I really was a
control freak, and I think the book sort of hammered me into submission, you
know, and just let me relax a little and say, "Okay, I'm a writer. I know where
I'm going. I'm able to handle this. So let's just let it happen."
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