Alices Derives in Devonshire

Book excerpt: World of Fact: The novel draws on the author's longtime exploration of psychogeography, Situationism, drift and derive, and fleshes out his practice of mythogeography through the curious mind of a young girl exploring the gaps between her parents' respective worlds and her own; between the city that she sees and the one that she finds when she walks out into it; between the layers of possible experience. It's a quite remarkable journey for anyone interested in those subjects, in what it's like to upgrade (whether as an adolescent or as an adult), or in the tears in the fabric of things that we mostly manage to ignore. World of Dream: "e;Can a city fall to bits one day and put itself back together the next? I think so, but I am crazy. So why should you believe me? Dad says it's OK to be mad. Bad is the problem. And the city is bad. I saw its badness. For one day its glass was everywhere like broken teeth after a fight between lions and sharks. Big buildings leaning on each other like drunk dinosaurs. The new shopping centre was a cave full of smoke. And everyone was frightened of each other. But I wasn't frightened. I could see that between the pieces of glass were shining gaps. And in the biggest building were passageways and tunnels and I could see that that was the good city. The city of holes and caves. Between the bad was the good, but only if you knew that before you looked. A little while later - I'm not sure how long because that was when I was ill again - the bigger cities burned for real; life had a really bad dream. By then, though, I knew that the cities were always ruins, no matter what they looked like. And that you had to know how to see fire to find warmth."e;