The Ancient Device
Simon O'Sullivan   

The Ancient Device is the story of four somehow familiar, rather dishevelled, sometimes sympathetic characters: Hare, Fox-Owl, Ribbonhead and King John.

We meet this dysfunctional and longing band of players on their journey to a site in the English landscape where they are to give a performance of sorts.

Yet exactly who they are, where they are and what they are up to, becomes increasingly uncertain as the book draws us into the mist, exploring and experimenting with notions of narrative and plot, psychology and self, performance and place…

Like the characters themselves, readers are unlikely to come out as they went in.
 
The Ancient Device is both a novel and an exploration of what the author calls the ‘fiction of the self’. The title of the book refers to this fiction that we all necessarily inhabit, but also to performance as a kind of device (and, indeed, the book as a device too). At stake in this exploration is also the development of an idea of ‘myth-work’ and how narrative and the laying out of imaginary landscapes and figures can work as a form of repair.
Publication: 1st September 2024
List Price: £16.00 
Format: ~ Paperback - 180pp
Size: 14 x 21.6 cm
ISBN: 978-1-917251-01-3​
Tags: Performance, Walking, Pilgrimage, Mumming, Fiction of the Self, Myth-work, Fictioning, Art Writing, Theory-Fiction, Autofiction

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pdf ISBN: 978-1-917251-02-0
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Readership

The Ancient Device​ arises out of teaching the author has done at Goldsmiths, University of London around Art Writing and Theory-Fiction and, more generally, the increasing turn to fiction as method within the critical humanities.
​It will be of interest to those working in these fields of hybrid writing but may also inspire walkers, writers and performers of every stripe as they try to stay afloat in the choppy waters of 21st-century discoalescence.
​See our other books on Walking

Extracts from  The Ancient Device

'Sometimes it would feel to Hare that what they were doing together was somewhat a waste of time. There was, as it were, nothing to show for it. It could all feel so meaningless or trivial at any rate. But then, at other times, it would seem to Hare as if the four of them were part of something bigger. Or even as if that bigger thing was simply the group itself. At these times Hare would get the sense that each of them was somehow an instrument that was being used for some other more obscure purpose. Or even that they were each smaller parts of some larger device. The performances would sometimes allow a glimpse of all that. They would allow Hare to get a different kind of perspective.'
'Fox-Owl had grasped the method one day when walking back home from the pub. It was early evening and he had chanced upon a small performance happening on the village green. There was a travelling group of players who had set up there, pre-cursor, it often occurred to him, to his own sorry lot. Strangely, there was no one there witnessing that performance. It looked as if it had simply turned up—caravan and all—and begun its play. But watching it unfold Fox-Owl had had the uncanny sense that he was somehow part of the action or, at least, that the ground he walked on was part of the round that was being activated there. That play on the green—he could never quite recall the narrative—had prompted the thought that was also a feeling that his own being there and, indeed, his life up to that point was itself a performance and that he was himself a character that had been taken on (but by what? That was the question!).

Such a simple device, it would occur to Fox-Owl whenever he reflected on this moment—which was often—but so important in its implications. Indeed, he was still living out the implications of that particular event—and the particular perspective it had offered up—all these years later.’