At Moon's End: Francis Ashton's 'The Breaking of the Seals'

The Breaking of the Seals, the first novel by Francis Ashton (1944), is an unusual timeslip fantasy. The dustwrapper flap notes: ‘A brief description cannot do justice to this astounding novel, which has an affinity of dimension with C.S. Lewis’s fiction, and makes the early chapters of Genesis and the Book of Revelations [sic] come alive. It is also distinctive in being set in a modern framework of the latest scientific knowledge.’

In his preface the author notes: ‘When H.G. Wells wrote The Time Machine he provided a precedent for using a novel as a vehicle for its author’s opinions about the nature of Time’. The reader may wonder, he continues, if this is the case here. Not so: the theories outlined ‘have been advance for the purposes of the novel and not as a contribution to the solution of metaphysical problems.’

However, he goes on, he is serious about some of the propositions in the novel. He distinguishes, if I follow him correctly, between time ‘as presented to consciousness’ and the Time ‘of physics and dynamics’. To the consciousness, Time and Space are intuitively different and cannot be merged in a four-dimensional world. But to physics, he avers, Time is Space. He discusses theories of time in both Einstein and J W Dunne, who had a great success with his An Experiment With Time (1927), a study of precognitive dreams. Dunne’s theory was that all time is simultaneous: our perception of past, present and future is an artificial construct of consciousness. As my physics teacher once remarked that a monkey would have performed better than me at the multiple choice exam paper by selecting answers at random, I may have got some of this wrong. However, as the author avers, it is not strictly necessary to tangle with it for the enjoyment of the yarn.

The novel has an entertaining beginning in which the narrator, a callow, lovelorn youth, joins a salon house-party. The tactless hostess has invited a former flame of his and her current beau, and equally awkwardly the guests include two rival scientists who are bitter rivals. Hot dinner-table debate is followed by the revelation of a recent archaeological find which puts a new light on prehistory.

Nettled by challenges to his theories, one of the scientists reveals that he is trialling a form of time travel and the young hero volunteers to undergo a journey under hypnosis into the antediluvian past, when the disintegration of the moon Bahste led to deluge and disaster on Earth. We are then plunged into an imaginary society before this catastrophe occurred and at this point the novel becomes similar to lost race or classical age fantasies, essentially a costume drama of power struggles, erotic rivalries and scheming priesthoods. Some relationships in the antediluvian world are presented as the precursors to those back in contemporary times, suggesting a reincarnation dimension too.

The chapters setting-up the time travel are entertaining, in an almost Wodehouse sort of way, with the obtuse hostess, the awkward social complications, and the bristling professors. The triumphant introduction of an object from the distant past is also neatly handled, and the method of access to deeply ancient time is deft and does not involve any elaborate scientific apparatus. The drama in the ancient society is perhaps a bit predictable, with the likely influence of Rider Haggard, and seems somewhat out of line with the thoughtful introduction: a more complex society or greater mystical elements would have enhanced this part. The book seems to belong with a cluster of novels in the Forties and Fifties involving reincarnation and/or Atlantis.

The idea that there is or was another moon orbiting Earth besides the one we now see occurs in various forms in occult and astrological circles. The astrologer Walter Gorn Old, known as ‘Sepharial’, claimed to have identified a second moon which he named Lilith. He said this was a 'dark' moon invisible for most of the time, but that he had observed it as it crossed the sun. He included Lilith in his star charts and prophecies.  Old was a friend of Yeats and Arthur Machen: the latter recalled that when Old and Yeats once speculated together on Machen’s star sign, they were both wrong (he was born under Pisces). 

According to online sources, Francis Leslie Ashton was born at Chapel-le-Frith, Derbyshire, on 24 June 1904 and died at Ely in July 1994. The Enyclopedia of Science Fiction describes him as an ‘analytical chemist, painter and author’. He also wrote Alas, That Great City (1948), set in Atlantis, with a similar theme, and, with his brother Stephen, Wrong Side of the Moon (1952), about space travel. Moons were evidently a preoccupation. Three short stories, by Francis Ashton only, are recorded in periodicals in 1950-51. The Breaking of the Seals is a lively tale evidently informed both by knowledge of occult thinking and scientific theories, which give it, as it were, extra dimensions. 

(Mark Valentine)