Red Shift

"I first read Red Shift when I was 15. I’d first read his earlier (and much more accessible) books The Weirdstone of Brisingamen and The Moon of Gomrath . What I remember about reading Red Shift is that it was completely unlike any book I’d ever read, in that it trusted the reader to make sense of things without holding one’s hand at all, or explaining anything ever. There’s no info dump; there’s no narrator; there’s no Dumbledore figure who in the last chapter plods in and says ‘Harry, I’m going to tell you everything.’ None of that ever happens. And at 15, I was so flattered by this book that seemed at once very exciting but unwilling to explain itself. So I read it over and over and over again. (I know lots of people who are driven back by its difficulty, but I really wasn’t.) One reason for that is that it’s emotionally very clear, even though there are stumbles about what’s really happening and who’s speaking. It’s about three couples in three different periods. The oldest story concerns the lost ninth legion in Roman Britain. A member of the legion, whose name is Macey, eventually gets involved with a local tribal girl. The second couple are of the English Civil War era, and the third couple are modern. It starts with the modern couple, who are really the voice of the story. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . All the men are called Tom, which is also kind of interesting. Some of the women are called Janet, and some are called Marjorie or Meg. What Garner is doing there is drawing on the Tam Lim ballad; in different versions, the girl’s called Meg, and in other versions, she’s called Janet. It’s like all these different figures are incorporated into a single story. The Tom characters start having glimpses of one another’s thoughts. One character—the modern character—is saying goodbye to the modern Jan on the bus, and the bus is blue and silver, and the Roman Macey starts seeing blue and silver in his epileptic fits. I was fascinated by this idea that time and context, though totally meaningful, could be abrogated or ripped away. That seemed to me to be a pretty good definition of what magic is: that magic is about being able to remove the constraints on a person. But Garner’s really quite pessimistic about the results of that. He really makes it clear that particularly the modern couple can’t cope with what happens to them. Eventually, it ends with—as if to make things just a tiny bit trickier, but I love this, too—a letter in code. You can find a translation of it now on the internet, but that’s not very interesting. So I sat there with a complete Lewis Carroll trying to work out what the keyword was. Interestingly, I had a student who worked it out from scratch a few years ago by working out that the first sentence must be ‘I love you’. Absolutely. That’s right. It’s actually really touching. It’s also potentially a suicide note, but the novel is open-ended. If Janet in the 20th century manages to read the letter, she can prevent the suicide, but you don’t ever know whether that’s going to happen. So it feels like it’s on you, as the reader. “I was fascinated by this idea that time and context, though totally meaningful, could be abrogated or ripped away. That seemed to me to be a pretty good definition of magic” The other recurring character that I absolutely loved is this , pictured on the cover. Even though this isn’t the edition I first read it in, I love it, because it features the Neolithic hand-axe. All three of the couples possess this hand-axe and use it in different ways; it’s the unity of power between them. Artifacts, things, actually last much longer than people, and can be passed on from one person to another—reused, reinterpreted, redeployed. So it feels really magical that you might come across such an object, as the modern Tom and Jan do, hidden in a fireplace. I was incredibly drawn to the idea of the very old item that you might suddenly come across one day, with nobody knowing it was there at all. One of my very favorite witches uses what’s described as a dried piece of flesh for fortune-telling. It’s not very clear how she uses it, nor do we ever learn in the course of the trial what the flesh was. Was it animal flesh? Was it human flesh? What was it, actually? But it’s an interesting emblem—as is the hand-axe, I would suggest—of the fact that witches necessarily have to have dealings with the dark and the dead. Even if they don’t say they do, that’s actually what supernatural thinking nearly always comes down to. It’s nearly always about birth and copulation and death, the big human preoccupations. And the greatest of these is death . So an object that can transcend time is intrinsically very powerful. Yes! But particularly the special artifact of an individual codex. The fairy tale collection that I own originally belonged to my mother, and it now belongs to my daughter. That sort of transmission of an individual item down the generations is in a way a denial of death, and an affirmation of human beings’ power to make things—which is also a big part of writing, obviously."