About This Book
Phil Smith, author of "Mythogeography," "On Walking" and the "Counter-Tourism" books, member of Exeter-based Wrights & Sites, well-known as Crabman, drifter and walker/performer and prolific playwright has written a modern fairy tale. It embodies his fascination with the inner and outer possibilities that offer themselves up to us when we walk, think and experience our surroundings on many levels at the same time - public and the private, fact and dream, admissible and inadmissible, forgotten and remembered, past and future. This is mythogeography. Anyone can do it. You can do it. Alice does it.
"Alice's Derives in Devonshire"follows a nine-year-old girl (Alice) as she walks her way into the layered and muddy underbelly of Devonshire, urban and rural. Her Dad, though a fireman, occupies a world-of-dream somewhere between here and madness and inspires her exquisitely chronicled wanderings. Her mum, though a 'cynical cyclist' who looks after people who are ill in their minds, occupies a world-of-fact where the cooking gets done and the ladder to the loft is always pulled up for safety.
As her Dad disappears into a sort of derangement, Alice sets out to look for him, first with Mandy and her brother and a list of ideas, then later, she has to set out on foot on her own, into the hill, into the underchalk, to find Wally Eager and Mister Binns and the Merry Men.
Just as magical realism capsized 20th-century fiction, mythogeography turns inside out the ways in which we perceive our-possible-selves-in-the-world. This is the first mythogeographical novel.. It's intended for urban explorers, imaginative walkers, ambulant youngsters, drifters, mythogeographers, psychogeographers, situationists, and all the restless."
