Alan Garner - Red Shift

[helrunar]

I first stumbled upon a copy of Red Shift and promptly read it many years ago--my memory is that I found it in a long gone local bookstore called Lorem Ipsum; quite a cool shop which also functioned as a kind of anarchist community center (and I also attended a meeting for the local zine library there). 

I have a 1981 printing of the US edition, published in Ballantine's "Del Rey Book" series. The American blurb reads:

In a superb fusion of fantasy and reality, this compelling novel moves back and forth among three young men, separated by time but bound together by a neolithic stone axe-head that each possesses for a brief time.

Tom comes from a twentieth-century world of trailer parks and high-speed motorways; Macey inhabits the second-century Britain of warring tribes and Roman legions; and Thomas is caught up in the seventeenth-century war raging between the King and Parliament. Each faces a critical moment of choice, when fundamental decisions must be made about love, responsibility, and faith. Each influences the destiny of the others as the barriers of time dissolve.

Technically a "young adult" book, I'm find it at times very hard going, though this time around I grasp more of the pattern of the book and his strategy in how he's telling these three intertwined stories than was the case with my first read years ago. 

The book is written in a very spare, rather experimental style, with long passages that are barely interrupted dialogue, often mimicking the oblique, incomplete manner of actual speech among people who know one another fairly well. It's quite idiomatic and to get through the initial pages, I had to accept that some of the time I simply had no idea what the hell the characters were on about. 

The axe-head is something of a cameo character; here's a rare descriptive passage:

Tom brushed the dirt with his sleeve. He held a stone axe head. It filled his palm. He rubbed with wet grass, and the axe shone grey-green, polished, flawless. It tapered to a thin edge at one end, and the other was a hammer shape, pierced for hafting. 

Macey's story, about a small band of Roman soldiers trying to survive in a hostile terrain by "going native," is the most interesting to me, and the Civil War parts are the least interesting. The "present day" bits are set around the time the book was written (published 1973). One of the most gut-wrenching moments for this reader is the mention of sandwiches composed of banana slices and spam--talk about "scarred for life." When not in the trailer park (I think it's called a caravan park in the book, but details such as this are thin on the ground--so much of it is very obliquely angled dialogue), a lot of the 1973 action takes place in a place called Crewe which seems as if it could have been a model for Scarfolk.

I'm on page 82 of 156, and reading on my commute home this evening, wondered if I'd get all the way through this time. I rather think I shall despite the difficulties.

H.

[andydecker]

Alan Garner - Red Shift (Collins, 1973, 158 pages; posted edition Lions 1975)

This novel always had kind of modest covers.

Bought it years ago in some lot with the rest of Garner's YA. (Which wasn't called like that back then of course. On the back text The Times called it 'teenage' fiction.) Unfortunately never read it.

Hm, sandwich with bananas and spam? Sounds quite interesting. :-)

[helrunar]

Thanks for the scan, Andreas. That's a very nice photo. The 1981 Ballantine edition cover features a painting by one Lawrence Schwinger. An image of the axe head with a landscape dramatically featuring Mow Cop, a natural feature whose name was given to a village. According to an online source, it is situated

upon a moorland ridge composed of sandstone and Millstone Grit rising eastwards above the Cheshire Plain. It is at the western edge of the Staffordshire Moorlands, forming the upland fringe of the southern Pennines, most of which are in the Peak District National Park to the east. On a clear day, the hill offers views extending to the West Pennine Moors, Welsh mountains (including Snowdonia), Shropshire Hills and Cannock Chase.

The three protagonists are also on view. The art makes less of an impression than it might have done because of the scale of the layout and the colors that dominate both background and foreground. A kind of blood scarlet fading into violet.

H.

[helrunar]

Finished re-reading last night. And I've put the book in my "to be moved along elsewhere" pile. While there are bits that are very moving, the overall strategy adopted by Garner for this experiment was ultimately more frustrating and baffling than enjoyable or illuminating. In the final part where the three people in the different time bands are sharing parts of the same experience, it's very unclear just what is happening or to whom because of the technique he's stuck himself with.

This book has garnered (ouch--no more of that please--ed.) rave reviews from some. For me, whenever I came across yet another "anyroad" or "plundered" in a time period that wasn't early 70s Cheshire, it threw me out of the narrative again into idiom-collecting terrain. I often simply had no idea what was going on. It was particularly disturbing in a massacre scene towards the end of the Civil War narrative--I knew I was supposed to be more in the picture, somehow, but all I got was a clip from a Sam Peckinpah film without a soundtrack or any faces shown.

I found some interesting things about this book on the interwebs; a paper discussing the relationship between the narrative and the old ballad "Tam Lin":

alangarner.atspace.org/tl.html#edn2

www.goodreads.com/book/show/307220.Red_Shift

There's supposed to be a very good discussion of Red Shift on a folk horror podcast, but I am unable to find this--it's mentioned by one of the Good Reads reviewers.

At one point in the story, Tom and his Mum (a character that starts out as a cliche, but over time you feel some compassion for her--though she exists barely beyond a sketch) work on a circular jigsaw puzzle of scenes from "historic Cheshire" and Tom says he loves doing the parts that are just blue sky. Reading the novel is more than a bit like that.

H.