Alan Garner’s Red Shift is a book I have practically memorised, which makes re-reading it weird—it’s more like reading poetry than prose, because my brain keeps filling in the whole line from the first word. The reason I know it so well is because I like it a great deal, and also because it’s a very difficult book (again like poetry) and one that I first read as a teenager and kept coming back to and back to in an attempt to understand it. Garner’s previous books (The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, The Moon of Gomrath, The Owl Service, Elidor) were children’s books deeply rooted in place and mythology. Red Shift is all that, but it definitely isn’t a children’s book. It’s much too challenging and elliptical. Almost the whole book is dialogue, there’s practically no description and very little attribution of dialogue. It’s set in the same places in three distinct time periods—Tom and Jan in the contempory 1973, Thomas and Madge in the Civil War, and Macey and the remnants of the Ninth Legion at the borders of Roman Britain. They’re linked by location and by a paleolithic axe and by a vision they all share of something that is blue and silver and very bad. You don’t find out what the blue and silver thing is until the end of the book.
The story can be seen as a version of “Tam Lin.” It’s also a naturalistic story about a romance between young people with no money, and a story about some Roman soldiers trying to live on a hilltop, and a story about the kinds of betrayals you get in civil wars. It’s a story about the history of Cheshire, and about the way history has deep roots and happens right where you are. It’s about sex and love and longing and how hard it can be to hold on to connections between people. It’s full of beautiful imagery and language. It jumps between times that are linked thematically. It really is a lot more like poetry than prose, it makes more sense if you read it with the protocols of poetry.
“I’m not sure about the mean galactic velocity. We’re with M31, M32 and M33 and a couple of dozen other galaxies. They’re the nearest. What did you say?”
“I love you.”
“Yes.” He stopped walking. “That’s all we can be sure of. We are, at this moment, somewhere between the M6 going to Birmingham and M33 going nowhere. Don’t leave me.”
“Hush,” said Jan. “It’s all right.”
“It’s not. How did we meet? How could we? Between the M6 and M33. Think of the odds. In all space and time. I’m scared.”
If you like this, you will probably like the rest of it. Garner’s most recent book, Strandloper, is also written like this. I’ve recently read it, just once, and I think I liked it, I’m not sure yet.
If Red Shift is Tam Lin, then it is a Tam Lin where Janet does not hold on to Thomas as he changes. If it’s a thing like the motif in Guy Kay’s Ysabel and Fionavar where the pattern repeats and maybe somebody will hold on sometime, then that makes the mention of “next time” in the coded note even weirder. We also have three pregnant women, none of them pregnant by the men who love them, but it is the men who connect up through time, the men who see the vision of the train that parts Tom and Jan. It’s perfectly possible that the girl on Mow Cop and Madge are Tom’s ancestors, but Macey and Thomas Rowley are not. Yet Macey and Thomas are picking up Tom’s anguish back through time as it’s manifested in the blue-silver blur of the train. But the Tam Lin thing is actually reversed, it’s Tom who doesn’t hold on to Jan, he gives up the Bunty. Macey and Thomas do hold on to their women—Thomas seeing the lights on the cars on the motorway and thinking they are waves is one of the most impressive images in the book.
I understand the weirdness about Tom’s reaction to Jan’s previous relationship a lot better now than I did when I first read the book, where it was quite incomprehensible to me. I actually understand it better than I did even the last time I read it, because I have been reading Kathleen Norris in between. The whole obsession with female virginity still seems bizarre, but at least I see where it’s coming from. It seems particularly bizarre because it’s Tom that I identify with in Red Shift, and this, significant as it is for the story, is where I can’t follow him. Oh well.
All three partnerships, in their different times, are across barriers. With Tom and Jan it’s straight-up class, her parents are professionals, Tom’s parents live in a caravan and he is struggling to win a scholarship to university. With Madge and Thomas it’s that Thomas has fits, visions of Tom and the train. With Macey and the unnamed girl they’re from entirely different cultures, and he’s ridden by visions and the whole berserker thing.
The Romans talk like soldiers, in soldier slang and local dialect. Their names, Face, Magoo, Logan, Buzzard, Macey, are not Roman names. Yet they don’t at all feel like modern people, even with all of that. The lack of distancing in the language and names makes them more different. The things they do—the slaughter and rape in Barthomley especially—are horrific. There’s a wonderful line about Face, but it applies to all of them really: “He has lost Rome and is tribal, far from his tribe.”
The Civil War episode contains a lot of backstory packed into very few words. Madge has been involved with two men, both called Thomas, Thomas Rowley and Thomas Venables. She’s married Rowley. Venables comes back and rescues them from the general slaughter of Barthomley. John Fowler the Rector’s son has been fighting on the Parliament side. He’s also tangled up with Madge and the Thomases. He has been a thorn in the village’s side for a long time. Civil wars lead to people killing people they know, or sparing them, there aren’t any strangers.
There are three locations that link all the times. Most significant is Mow Cop, the hill with its quarries where the Romans retreat, where Thomas Venables comes from, where Madge and Thomas Rowley end up (with the stone axe) and where Tom and Jan visit in trying to find somewhere real. Barthomley village, where everyone gets slaughtered twice in the two historical periods, is a haven of peace and tranquility for Tom and Jan. And Rudheath is where Tom’s parents live, and where the Romans begin and Thomas and Madge end up. Crewe, the city, is modern and unreal, although Jan and Tom spend time there it is constantly described in images of unreality, or being too real.
“Each of these shops is full of one aspect of existence. Woolworths is a tool shed; Boots a bathroom; British Home Stores a wardrobe. And we walk through it all but we can’t clean our teeth, or mend a fuse, or change our socks. You’d starve in this supermarket. It’s all so real we’re shadows.”
They find their way to Barthomley by finding a path “older than Crewe” that cuts through and across the city. Crewe is, of course, for most British readers, famous as a railway junction. I have changed trains there thousands of times without ever venturing out of the station. And this aspect of it is emphasised in the novel, not only with meeting and parting at the station but in the tracks they cross following the path and in the views of Mow Cop Jan gets from the train. (It’s actually only visible on the train from the North, not from the London train.)
The book is also seamed with graffiti—the inscriptions on the bells, the park benches, on the screen in Barthomley church (“Let there be no strife for we be brethren”) and the actual ungrammatical graffiti carved in the house on Mow Cop “I came back Mary” and “Pip loves Brian: not really now not any more.” These, with Tom’s constant quotations from Tom O’Bedlam in King Lear, serve to root the times and histories even deeper together.
Red Shift is a sad story of a love that doesn’t work, though the deeper historical stories have happier endings. It says something for the way it’s written that the beauty of the language and the landscape and the depth of resonance shines through that sufficiently to make it comfortable reading. I love it. I’m not sure I entirely understand it, even now, but that doesn’t matter.
Nice review, i will have to add it to the list of books i need to read.
I loved his younger books when i was a child.
Thank you! I _adore_ that book. Weirdly, when I was young and unlovable, it gave me hope.
I must get this, as I never read it or noticed mention of it; I’ve read most of his early books, I think.
It sounds thematically resonant with his beautiful (non-SFF) Stone Book Quartet, set across 4 generations in Cheshire. Garner has a sense of place and rootedness and deep time which I could choose to envy.
One of my favourite books, too.
One thing to add: Strandloper is not his most recent book – there’s also Thursbitch, which is similarly set in two periods and tied deeply into the landscape of Cheshire.
EmilyW: Well mash my brains for turnips and use them for pudding! Thursbitch is the one I recently read, not Strandloper which is the weird Australian one.
Thank you for that. I read all of Alan Garner when I was very young. Don’t think I understood them then. I vaguely remember references and allusions I didn’t understand. I’ll have to find them and re-read them, it seems. I don’t think his reputation is anything like high enough. I seem to remember that ‘The Owl Service’ was filmed for TV too.
“He has lost Rome and is tribal, far from his tribe.”
That’s always been my favourite line from this book.
Yours is the best discussion of Red Shift I have seen. I’d never thought there might be a next time. Are you sure Jan is pregnant? If not, does that mean the pattern has come to its end?
Frances White: I’m not absolutely sure, but it seems to be the likely interpretation. I was sure when I wrote this post. There’s “next time” in the coded note.
Thank you! I wanted to add that New York Review Books will be reissuing Red Shift next Fall (2011) in the NYRB Classics series.
That’s very good news indeed. The NYRB Classics series is a thing of beauty and a joy forever — seriously, the range of excellent things they’re doing in attractive and affordable editions is just stellar.
Hi, bluejo. I was thinking of it this way:
In The Owl Service, a centuries-old pattern comes to an end, and the sequence is terminated. I don’t understand exactly how, but the Gronw figure – Roger – somehow survives Lleu/Gwyn’s retaliatory attack and saves
Blodeu(w)edd/Alison from turning into an owl.
In Red Shift, a centuries-old pattern comes to an end, and the sequence is terminated. The Macey/Thomas/ Tom/ Tam Lin figure changes and the Girl/Margery/Jan/Lady Margaret or Janet figure does not hang on.
The difference is that one pattern is malign, so its termination is a triumph, while the other is benign, so its termination is a disaster.
If this is right, there wouldn’t be a next time in either case.
What do you think?
Frances White: I think it’s possible, and you make a good case for it. Thank you for making me think something new about it after all this time. It does fit, breaking the patterns.
The reason I think she’s pregnant is Tom’s mother saying that he shouldn’t let her pin a child on him, and then Tom saying she proved his mother right. We know she had sex with the Moselle guy. (It’s a really different story if you think of it from her point of view. And her point of view is in there to be seen.) I don’t know.
Marcel Proust would have us believe that – ‘Love is space and time made directly perceptible to the heart’
I think Red Shift is about heartbreak and loss. And how when we live through it, it may feel as if the pain must shatter back through time. The primary pain and splitting apart in the timeless unconscious of our own hearts causing the actual splitting of time and space around us. As if the moment of creation was triggered from the throwback of one moment of heartbreak.
The ‘Big Bang’ didn’t happen somewhere else, it created space itself, it happened everywhere, inside us. It still is doing. The broken place where time returns endlessly, or is frozen; Tom’s a-cold.
What is the red shift; the heat death of the universe or its unstoppable movement towards rebirth? The red shift occurs not only in distant space but inside us all.
Space and time in eternal recurrence. This was next time, it always will be. Tom and Jan will always be there, on the station platform, on Mow Cop.
I suspect there is a lesson to be learned, but it’s certainly not in the book itself. Something about healing; about holding on whilst breaking away and how the greatest test of love may come at the very moment of the relationship’s fracture.
Dare I suggest, the lesson of forgiveness? The need to try to bring creation out of destruction, something out of nothing, change from fixation. But how to do this and how would we know we weren’t just repeating the old cycles?
What is left for us then? The compensations of supernatural pathetic fallacy and fairy stories? If this is ‘teenage ‘ fiction, then Garner does here, in characteristically brilliant and brutal fashion, what he did for children in Elidor. To paraphrase the last lines of that work; the unicorn is dead, the magic world has vanished and we are alone, staring through the broken windows of a slum.
Where’s your Mow Cop?
Hussain Ali Sheikh-Abdi says above, I suspect there is a lesson to be learned, but it’s certainly not in the book itself. Something about healing; about holding on whilst breaking away and how the greatest test of love may come at the very moment of the relationship’s fracture.
When I first read the book, there was no one to turn to to decode the book’s final message. I opened my family’s Encyclopedia Britannica and read first about Lewis Carroll, then the Vigenere cypher. Then, considering carefully which phrase Tom uses repeatedly that might serve as a codebreaker, I cracked his code. I’ll never forget reading those words, “If you can read this you must care…”
I believed then, and still do now, that the book’s ending is dependent on whether the reader (a stand-in for Jan) cares enough to read the note. If we do/she does, then Jan goes on to meet Tom at Crewe and the novel has a hopeful ending. If we’re too lazy to bother/Jan is too despairing to try, then the novel’s ending is filled with despair. The question is whether we have the commitment to see it through.
For me, the book has a bittersweet hopeful ending and, in my headcanon at least, Tom and Jan get their second chance – just as Macey & “the girl” and Tom & Margery do.
Terrific commentary on this sadly neglected classic (thanks againg to NYRB for ressurrecting) . There is a very good BBC dramatisation from the 1970s that available on YouTube. Well worth a watch
Thankyou for the perceptive review. Like you and a number of others I first read this in my late teens and have recently reread it. There was somthing about the scenery, the way the past echoed in the future, and the sensibility of the characters that I found difficult to forget.
I agree with Chamekke’s comment that the outcome of the novel depends on whether you care enough to read the encyrypted message … a sort of Shrodinger’s cat situation maybe?
I didn’t know how to go about decyrypting the message and went to the Wikipaedia entry on the Lewis Carroll code (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Alphabet_Cipher). According to Carroll’s example, as quoted there, the encryprypted version of the message comes from within the alphabet table, and is the intersection of the relevant key phrase letter and the relevant plain text letter.
I ploddingly used this method on the Red Shift code and after a few educated guesses about various phrases ended up with the recurring key phrase “h m o i a y m p x”.
Not “tomsacold” but its reciprocal in terms of the table.
So Alan Garner appears to have used a slightly different method to Lewis Carroll, in that he starts with the letters of the key word on the outside of the table (eg top row), finds the letter he wants to encrypt in side the table, then goes to the other outside edge (eg left had side) to get his encrypted version. So he goes “side track”?
I realised that when I found this web site and others while trying to work out what the ** “h m o i a y m p x” meant! (An accrostic, the name fo a galaxy, something Tom said when he was going all King Lear??!) I wa spretty annoyed with myself when I found out that the phrase was tom’s-a-cold and I’d been using the wrong method!
Anyway, it doesn’t matter, not really now not any more, beause whichever way you do it, you reveal the message which gives some hope (or an at least an indication of self-awareness … maybe the most important thing at any stage of one’s life) at the end of the novel.
“not really now not any more”
Thanks for that write up.
I read it, like many other back and school. It always haunted me even though I did not comprehend it.
I just re-read it and I still don’t understand it! :) Felt so sad for Tom. Theirs was a strange relationship.
One observation is that the female characters especially Jan, are strong characters and bring strength to their male partners.
I have just ordered the BBC play on DVD and I will read Red Shift again, for sure!
The chronology doesn’t support Jan being pregnant – (unless she’s continued her affair with the winegrower, which would put a very different slant on things.) She was au-pairing at Easter; the meeting where she buys Tom the cassette is “the end of winter, shoddy with cold,” which would be before Easter or very soon afterward (so, given elapsed time, the end of the next winter;) and the church tower episode is summer, so well over a year has passed.
Tom’s mother assumes not that Jan is pregnant but that she’s promiscuous and untrustworthy; and this is what Tom echoes when she tells him that she isn’t a virgin.