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The Ancient Device
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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 Buy the paperback (£16)
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The Fiction of the Self, Theory Fiction, and Magic:
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Review by Phil Smith
"This is not a novel in the sense of being a representation of events we might recognise or something made of novelties we imagine for a first time. This book is a process. Any description I give here of The Ancient Device is in part beside-the-point because it is, as it says on the tin, a device: a fiction for doing stuff with. Interpretation is largely irrelevant because it is a blatant subtext. Its text repeatedly subverts itself without losing narrative shape. The ‘id’ of its fiction is literalised and ritualised. Its plasma comes out of its shell and is here to play. The reader is much closer to a partisan participating-audience than an impassive literary appreciator.
Yet, the parts of a fiction are all in place. Character emerges at a place where masks and props meet; there is “a kind of set up” (a “situation” as Kierkegaard might have it), other processional fictions pass by the one we are in and there are recognisable landscapes – markings on almost every surface encountered – and events: the Long Man of Wilmington, the Convoy and the Battle of the Beanfield, camp fires, ubiquitous cairns.
The novelistic ‘voice’ or ‘point of view’ is everything here; the entire subject of the text. ‘The Ancient Device’ is a drama of subjectivity to rehearsals for which we are invited. The novel calls us to a pilgrimage of sorts, a road trip often on foot punctuated with the romance of small-scale theatre, mumming, early rave and crusty counter-culture.
The characters are masks for the reader to wear: scruffy alcoholic Ribbonhead, bluff King John, frail Hare and the complex Fox-Owl who seems to consist only of masks it conjures and dismantles. All things fall apart. The fragile performance the characters journey to ‘put on’ is also what a reader ‘puts on’; a dramatherapy of role playing without a therapist, caring without ‘carers’, support as an agency of independence, art making and fabricating fiction-action as a sharing of roles. At times characters elide one into another.
The Ancient Device is a rare example of a hyperstition: “a strange kind of retro-causality in which the fiction works back on its conditions of emergence, bringing about its own reality”.[Simon O’Sullivan, From Magic and Myth-Work to Care and Repair, Goldsmiths Press, 2024]. To read the book is to go on its journey; this is not unique in fiction, but ‘The Ancient Device’ is unusually intense in its invitation to the reader to subject parts of themselves to the performance under preparation; here “to be” is “to be also”, to read ‘The Ancient Device’ is to be inside and outside its dance at the same time.
On a quest for existing, Ribbonhead, John, Hare and Fox-Owl approach a black lake on the shore of which silver can be found, but where the surface is bathed in reflections that distract and draw a pilgrim in; an attraction that is both vital and perilous. While the writing here is of a different order of sophistication, there is something of the “hump of darkness” at sea in C. S. Lewis’s The Voyage Of The Dawn Treader; a landscape that is both symbolic and absent. In The Ancient Device it leads the characters (and readers) to a sea marsh, shrouded in mist, to a dark pole and a jetty at the end of which a dark ship passes. We are in the land of the dead self; coming back means bringing with us a wound that is a facility, a shareable diagram, loss as a compass, a secret knowledge in sadness…. these are treasures. Once gathered, every reader must make with them what they will of the final ‘putting on’ of costumes and ready themselves to face their own dragon on an improvised ‘stage’. I leave those extraordinary final pages to you.
Yet, the parts of a fiction are all in place. Character emerges at a place where masks and props meet; there is “a kind of set up” (a “situation” as Kierkegaard might have it), other processional fictions pass by the one we are in and there are recognisable landscapes – markings on almost every surface encountered – and events: the Long Man of Wilmington, the Convoy and the Battle of the Beanfield, camp fires, ubiquitous cairns.
The novelistic ‘voice’ or ‘point of view’ is everything here; the entire subject of the text. ‘The Ancient Device’ is a drama of subjectivity to rehearsals for which we are invited. The novel calls us to a pilgrimage of sorts, a road trip often on foot punctuated with the romance of small-scale theatre, mumming, early rave and crusty counter-culture.
The characters are masks for the reader to wear: scruffy alcoholic Ribbonhead, bluff King John, frail Hare and the complex Fox-Owl who seems to consist only of masks it conjures and dismantles. All things fall apart. The fragile performance the characters journey to ‘put on’ is also what a reader ‘puts on’; a dramatherapy of role playing without a therapist, caring without ‘carers’, support as an agency of independence, art making and fabricating fiction-action as a sharing of roles. At times characters elide one into another.
The Ancient Device is a rare example of a hyperstition: “a strange kind of retro-causality in which the fiction works back on its conditions of emergence, bringing about its own reality”.[Simon O’Sullivan, From Magic and Myth-Work to Care and Repair, Goldsmiths Press, 2024]. To read the book is to go on its journey; this is not unique in fiction, but ‘The Ancient Device’ is unusually intense in its invitation to the reader to subject parts of themselves to the performance under preparation; here “to be” is “to be also”, to read ‘The Ancient Device’ is to be inside and outside its dance at the same time.
On a quest for existing, Ribbonhead, John, Hare and Fox-Owl approach a black lake on the shore of which silver can be found, but where the surface is bathed in reflections that distract and draw a pilgrim in; an attraction that is both vital and perilous. While the writing here is of a different order of sophistication, there is something of the “hump of darkness” at sea in C. S. Lewis’s The Voyage Of The Dawn Treader; a landscape that is both symbolic and absent. In The Ancient Device it leads the characters (and readers) to a sea marsh, shrouded in mist, to a dark pole and a jetty at the end of which a dark ship passes. We are in the land of the dead self; coming back means bringing with us a wound that is a facility, a shareable diagram, loss as a compass, a secret knowledge in sadness…. these are treasures. Once gathered, every reader must make with them what they will of the final ‘putting on’ of costumes and ready themselves to face their own dragon on an improvised ‘stage’. I leave those extraordinary final pages to you.
