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Alan Garner's novel Red Shift has been part of my life for
almost forty years now, ever since I picked up a copy of the Lion paperback
with its mysterious tower on the front back in the 70s. I gave that actual
copy away to a girlfriend, but have a replacement copy of the same edition, as well as first edition UK and USA
hardbacks, and the more recent New York Review of Books Classic edition.
Alongside my reading and rereading I've interviewed Alan Garner at his house,
attended his talk 'The Edge of the Ceiling' which Crewe & Alsager College
hosted whilst I was studying for my degree, been shown how to crack the code
in the endpapers, got hold of an unofficial timecoded copy of the TV play
that was made of the book, and for the last few years used the book as a set
text for my first year students at Falmouth University. More recently, I've
visited the Bodleian Library and been allowed to hold and read the original
draft manuscript and other documents, and with the help of one of our
university librarians (thanks Malcolm) finally tracked down a library copy
of one of ten 'Datapack Biographies' folders that was only ever published in
a
pilot/proof edition. Through the inter-library loan system I now have a PDF
of said datapack, which is full of interesting manuscript excerpts, notes,
Garner's research material and autobiographical fragments, as well as photos and poems.
Now, apparently on the back of an interest in 1970s science fiction,
children's TV and the wyrd-folk movement (which seems to link folklore,
horror, psychogeography and the occult), not to mention the success of the DVD reissue of Garner's The
Owl Service TV
series, the BFI have seen fit to issue Red Shift. How fantastic to have an
official, cleaned up digital copy, which I can use in a student lecture in a
few weeks.
Red Shift has
three stories in it: Tom & Jan in the 20th century, lovers in Cheshire
who are separated when Jan goes to study in London but meet up in Crewe and
the surrounding countryside
every few weeks; two Thomases and Madge in the Cheshire village of Barthomley
during the civil war; and Macey and his mates, deserters from the Roman
army's Ninth Legion, hiding out on Mow Cop, a ridge of millstone grit. The
stories jump from one to another without much warning, all sharing Cheshire locations, each
featuring some kind of love story and broken relationship, as well as a stone
axe which gradually moves in time from sacred weapon to good luck charm to
museum artefact.
That doesn't start to explain the webs of association, the subtext of ideas
such as sanctuary, place, love, boundaries, relationships, home, time and
history, which are still revealing themselves to me on what must be the thirtieth or so reading. There
is also a large amount of implied sexuality and violence, both personal and
social: rape, murder, adultery and abuse are all present in the book, though
often missed by first-time readers. Garner discusses his concept of violence
in the informative 'experimental autobiographical documentary', One Pair
of Eyes: Alan Garner - All Systems Go, which is one of the extras on this DVD.
(The others are a brief interview with an assistant director and film editor,
and an appallingly lightweight, twee travelogue, The Spirit of Cheshire, which seems totally misplaced
here.)
How does a TV version start to deal with this kind of complexity? Visually,
barring some rather primitive production values including rather am-dram
costumes and a laugh-aloud drug-induced suicide jump, the jump cuts work
well, especially the first time we move from Tom in a caravan pushing his
hands through a window, the shards becoming falling spears. The visual
element helps viewers quickly establish which time zone, which story, they
are now in; something the book, which often relies on unattributed speech, does not do so clearly. In the
Alan Garner papers in the Bodleian there is an undated letter from Garner to
his friend Peter Plummer, a TV director, about how the stories work together
on the page and will work for TV:
All three stories
interweave in a non-linear pattern, which
sounds intimidating,but
will come out as a simple, visual kick
in the crutch. It is
above all, a story of three experiences; if
they say anything
didactic it will be a constructional error.
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The film, like the book, certainly says
nothing didactic; like the book it leaves things unsaid and implied between
characters and time zones, but it does offer the viewer geographical
realities, since it appears to
be filmed at the Cheshire locations from the book. The church in Barthomley,
where you can see Civil War shot marks in the wall; the folly on Mow Cop and
the quarry behind where millstones were cut out of the rock; Crewe station;
even Jodrell Bank across the tracks from Garner's house, are all visitable
and real. All this helps anchor the stories for the viewer, allowing them to
concentrate on the dialogue and interaction between characters, the
tensions and violence which
punctuate the stories. It doesn't, however explain the themes any more
than the book does; and I was slightly startled to read in Garner's same letter
mentioned
earlier that 'An intelligent viewer should have a growing idea of what
we're doing, but in the final
episode it becomes clear to the dumbest that the reality is Macey's visions.
We, history and the TV set are being dreamt along with the story.'
Woah! That had
never occurred to me, and in the critical and review material available (much
of which is neatly linked to and gathered together on The
Unofficial Alan Garner Website) it does not
appear to have occurred to anyone else either. What has occurred to many is
the title signifying things (in this case, people) moving apart, and a sense
of what Garner (again, in his archived letter) calls 'time-awareness',
something flagged up not only by
the title but by the use of the star Orion as a communications device, a
fossil in the wall of Jan's house, not to mention the axe, or (in the book)
the way the same scene is repeated, in a kind of narrative and temporal
stutter.
The ending of both book and film folds the three narrative strands together.
In the book text from each time zone appears on the same page as the story
collapses towards the last line; in
the film, everything blurs into stripes of colour as a train moves out
of the station, although it is clearly more than this. In fact the blurring
more than ever allows for confusion and intuition: there is no visual or
narrative resolution to the film, it simply ends.
Despite failing relationships, hurt and argument, murder and violence, Garner
suggests to Plummer that the film is 'positive, optimistic - two out of three
[couples] come out OK. If there's
a Tom o'Bedlam in the modern version, perhaps it's because we deny
whatever the axe is'. This suggests that the axe has lost a very real power,
because we do not believe in it, not because such things can or do not exist
in contemporary society. Garner's fiction and non-fiction writing, his interest in archaeology,
geography and history, along with the formation of The
Blackden Trust, and
edited collections of folk tales, suggest that he believes myth and
local/family history to be potent, stories that can inform and underpin us
today, if we allow them to. We can prattle on all we like about postmodernity
and the loss of metanarratives, but Red Shift shows us just how locality and place are as
much part of our stories as our relationships and sense of self. Red Shift shows
us the same story happening again and again, gets to grips with the essence
of what it is to be human,
the struggle to love and be loved, the struggle to find or make ourselves at
home in a universe that is constantly expanding and changing.
© Rupert
Loydell 2014
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