Red Shift, by Alan Garner
Jun. 6th, 2019 07:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
scioscribeRed Shift is more music than literature. It's a fugue, following a single theme through three different variations which then interweave and influence each other, developing something remarkable and complex. There's a lot to parse out here intellectually, but I experience it emotionally first and foremost. Like poetry, like music, it has weight even when I'm not one hundred percent sure I understand it. The only other thing I can think of that's like it is--appropriately enough--Rumer Godden's A Fugue in Time (Take Three Tenses). I'd give a slight edge to Garner for sheer virtuosity and ambition. And weirdness.
The novel takes place in three different time periods connected by place, heartache, and a stone ax-head.
In Roman Britain, a legion deserts its responsibilities and "goes tribal," pretending (unconvincingly) to be a local tribe. They descend upon a village and slaughter its inhabitants except for one girl, whom they abduct and rape, setting her up to be the mother of their sons. The Roman soldiers get the names and dialogue of grunts from a thousand different war movies, utterly anachronistically, and that works interestingly alongside how Garner leaves their historical attitudes intact and suitably alien. History is strange, and it's stranger because of its familiarity, because of what changes and what doesn't.
The focal point of the legion is Macey, a younger soldier who is sent into berserker rages by visions of "bluesilver" and who kills with a sacred ax. Those visions are shared years later, during the English Civil War, by a man named Thomas, who is newly married to Madge. Thomas and Madge are caught up when the town is invaded, and they hole up in the church with the rest of the villagers to try to wait it out. In the process, Thomas finds the ax-head, which he thinks has been formed by lightning and will carry with it a kind of protective charm.
Years later, in approximately the seventies when the book was written, the same ax-head is found embedded in a chimney and passes into the keeping of teenagers Tom and Jan. They're in the middle of a sweet, faulty, contentious romance. Tom is poor and lives in a caravan park; Jan is upper middle-class and has slightly more bohemian parents, who are also slightly more emotionally detached. When the book starts, Jan is going off to London to study nursing, while Tom is still left behind. They're trying to keep up their relationship with train tickets and letters (some of which Tom's mother steals) and shared experiences.
The stories all reinforce each other and they all build in power towards the end.
Spoilers beneath the cut.
Garner uses spare, simple language, sometimes elliptically (describing around the event rather than describing the event) and when things get intense, that gives the prose that musical/poetic quality I mentioned before. This was especially striking to me in the Civil War plot, which would have been my least favorite of the three except for the magnificent plainness and weight of the long scene in which the soldiers interrogate the townspeople to find John Fowler, the Rector's son. No one particularly wants to conceal Fowler, but no one wants to give him up either; the Rector doesn't want his son to die, but he would rather his son have the courage to come forward. And the language is great:
The officer nodded, and a soldier killed Jim Boughey with a sword.
"You could see his age!" shouted the Rector.
"You make the rules, sir. Which is John Fowler?"
No one moved or spoke.
The Rector took off his vestments.
"What are you doing?"
"It seems that only beasts are clothed today."
and
Another man died.
"Was that John Fowler?" said the officer. "Come, sir, you know him. Will you see all your lambs slaughtered?"
"My son's conscience is his own."
"Very well: let him put you all to bed with a shovel."
"What are you doing, John?" Margery shouted at the sky. "He won't stop."
"Follow your conscience and God's will," said the Rector... "What does it prove, John? A martyr for Christ is his own man. Why make others answer for you?"
It all falls perfectly, from the way Margery pleads to the sky, begging John to identify himself so they won't have to do it for him, to the way it's finally the Rector who does signal his son, after requesting one last time that John come forward himself. And the same man, Thomas Venables, who makes sure John Fowler dies slowly--as repayment for an old injury--makes sure Thomas and Madge escape, because he loved her once. In Red Shift, the loyalties are always divided: Macey weeps for his dead mates, though they raped the woman he loved and though he mourns the people they (and he) killed. The priestess girl does not believe that her own people will necessarily forgive her: "The goddess ground the flour, but my hand gave death on the mountain. I may not be free... We've both betrayed. There will be a price." And Tom and Jan, intending to cleave to each other, arguably--in their own terms--betray each other to their parents, with Tom channeling his parents' beliefs of the "dirtiness" of sex (especially sex Jan has had with someone other than him) and Jan letting her parents psychoanalyze Tom in absentia.
Which brings us back to language, and the way Garner follows its evolution, from the starkness of the Romans--and poor Macey, who believes that only Greek would give him the words he lacks, though the girl tries to teach him otherwise--to the King James-inflected villagers to the self-conscious Tom and Jan. The conflicts get more apparently civilized--renegade soldiers and mass murder and retribution to a war crime that at least has a war to a boy who hurts a girl. Garner makes you feel the moral weight of all of it. The fact that all of this is significant, full of feeling and resonance, is basically the point of the novel, of pain and loss crossing time.
Tom and Jan's fates are uncertain. Her ability to deal with him--to cope with his whirlwind emotions, his judgment, his fixation on sex and quotes, his betrayal of selling the Bunty (the ax-head that was their symbol)--is fading. When they say goodbye at the train, they say, "See you," instead of, "Hello," which had been their glass-half-full farewell. As the graffiti in the book says, as the ending says, Not really now not anymore.
And whether or not there's hope--and whether or not that hope is fulfilled--is left in untranslated code at the back of the book. Even having looked up the translation (I'm too hopeless at that kind of thing to have broken it myself), it's still hard to know whether that hope leads onto more hope or just to a dead end.
But the simplicity with which Garner finally, finally reveals the meaning of the vision the men have been sharing all along--it floors me. It's beautiful and painful all at once.
What a strange, beautiful, powerful book.
The novel takes place in three different time periods connected by place, heartache, and a stone ax-head.
In Roman Britain, a legion deserts its responsibilities and "goes tribal," pretending (unconvincingly) to be a local tribe. They descend upon a village and slaughter its inhabitants except for one girl, whom they abduct and rape, setting her up to be the mother of their sons. The Roman soldiers get the names and dialogue of grunts from a thousand different war movies, utterly anachronistically, and that works interestingly alongside how Garner leaves their historical attitudes intact and suitably alien. History is strange, and it's stranger because of its familiarity, because of what changes and what doesn't.
The focal point of the legion is Macey, a younger soldier who is sent into berserker rages by visions of "bluesilver" and who kills with a sacred ax. Those visions are shared years later, during the English Civil War, by a man named Thomas, who is newly married to Madge. Thomas and Madge are caught up when the town is invaded, and they hole up in the church with the rest of the villagers to try to wait it out. In the process, Thomas finds the ax-head, which he thinks has been formed by lightning and will carry with it a kind of protective charm.
Years later, in approximately the seventies when the book was written, the same ax-head is found embedded in a chimney and passes into the keeping of teenagers Tom and Jan. They're in the middle of a sweet, faulty, contentious romance. Tom is poor and lives in a caravan park; Jan is upper middle-class and has slightly more bohemian parents, who are also slightly more emotionally detached. When the book starts, Jan is going off to London to study nursing, while Tom is still left behind. They're trying to keep up their relationship with train tickets and letters (some of which Tom's mother steals) and shared experiences.
The stories all reinforce each other and they all build in power towards the end.
Spoilers beneath the cut.
Garner uses spare, simple language, sometimes elliptically (describing around the event rather than describing the event) and when things get intense, that gives the prose that musical/poetic quality I mentioned before. This was especially striking to me in the Civil War plot, which would have been my least favorite of the three except for the magnificent plainness and weight of the long scene in which the soldiers interrogate the townspeople to find John Fowler, the Rector's son. No one particularly wants to conceal Fowler, but no one wants to give him up either; the Rector doesn't want his son to die, but he would rather his son have the courage to come forward. And the language is great:
The officer nodded, and a soldier killed Jim Boughey with a sword.
"You could see his age!" shouted the Rector.
"You make the rules, sir. Which is John Fowler?"
No one moved or spoke.
The Rector took off his vestments.
"What are you doing?"
"It seems that only beasts are clothed today."
and
Another man died.
"Was that John Fowler?" said the officer. "Come, sir, you know him. Will you see all your lambs slaughtered?"
"My son's conscience is his own."
"Very well: let him put you all to bed with a shovel."
"What are you doing, John?" Margery shouted at the sky. "He won't stop."
"Follow your conscience and God's will," said the Rector... "What does it prove, John? A martyr for Christ is his own man. Why make others answer for you?"
It all falls perfectly, from the way Margery pleads to the sky, begging John to identify himself so they won't have to do it for him, to the way it's finally the Rector who does signal his son, after requesting one last time that John come forward himself. And the same man, Thomas Venables, who makes sure John Fowler dies slowly--as repayment for an old injury--makes sure Thomas and Madge escape, because he loved her once. In Red Shift, the loyalties are always divided: Macey weeps for his dead mates, though they raped the woman he loved and though he mourns the people they (and he) killed. The priestess girl does not believe that her own people will necessarily forgive her: "The goddess ground the flour, but my hand gave death on the mountain. I may not be free... We've both betrayed. There will be a price." And Tom and Jan, intending to cleave to each other, arguably--in their own terms--betray each other to their parents, with Tom channeling his parents' beliefs of the "dirtiness" of sex (especially sex Jan has had with someone other than him) and Jan letting her parents psychoanalyze Tom in absentia.
Which brings us back to language, and the way Garner follows its evolution, from the starkness of the Romans--and poor Macey, who believes that only Greek would give him the words he lacks, though the girl tries to teach him otherwise--to the King James-inflected villagers to the self-conscious Tom and Jan. The conflicts get more apparently civilized--renegade soldiers and mass murder and retribution to a war crime that at least has a war to a boy who hurts a girl. Garner makes you feel the moral weight of all of it. The fact that all of this is significant, full of feeling and resonance, is basically the point of the novel, of pain and loss crossing time.
Tom and Jan's fates are uncertain. Her ability to deal with him--to cope with his whirlwind emotions, his judgment, his fixation on sex and quotes, his betrayal of selling the Bunty (the ax-head that was their symbol)--is fading. When they say goodbye at the train, they say, "See you," instead of, "Hello," which had been their glass-half-full farewell. As the graffiti in the book says, as the ending says, Not really now not anymore.
And whether or not there's hope--and whether or not that hope is fulfilled--is left in untranslated code at the back of the book. Even having looked up the translation (I'm too hopeless at that kind of thing to have broken it myself), it's still hard to know whether that hope leads onto more hope or just to a dead end.
But the simplicity with which Garner finally, finally reveals the meaning of the vision the men have been sharing all along--it floors me. It's beautiful and painful all at once.
What a strange, beautiful, powerful book.