Backlisted - Red Shift by Alan Garner

Episode Date: February 6, 2017

Critic and author Erica Wagner and novelist S.F. Said join John and Andy to discuss 'Red Shift', the fifth novel by Alan Garner. Also discussed: 'Brave New Weed' by Joe Dolce (no, not that one) and 'Nomad' by Alan Partridge (yes, that one).Timings: (may differ due to adverts)8'05 - Brave New Weed by Joe Dolce10'01 - Alan Partridge: Nomad by Steve Coogan18'03 - Red Shift by Alan Garner* To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops.* For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm*If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Discover more value than ever at Loblaws. Like Fresh Promise. Produce is carefully selected and checked for freshness. And if it's not fresh, it's free. Yes, you heard that right. From the crispest lettuce to the juiciest apples, Loblaws is committed to fresh. So you get the best fruits and veggies.

Look for new value programs when you shop at Loblaws, in-store and online. Conditions may Loblaws, in-store and online. Conditions may apply. See in-store for details. Make your nights unforgettable with American Express. Unmissable show coming up? Good news. We've got access to pre-sale tickets so you don't miss it.

Meeting with friends before the show? We can book your reservation. And when you get to the main event, skip to the good bit using the card member entrance. Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by card. Other conditions apply. so i'll tell you what i did last week i went to this is pete and duff

what did you do last week andy i'll tell you what i'll tell you what, John. I went to my friend Neil's 50th birthday party and Neil surprised me by saying that he was a regular backlisted listener. And he really enjoys listening to backlisted. I was really chuffed, right? So happy birthday, Neil. You'll hear this. But he had two specific requests

if we were able to help him. He said, John, could you and I stop saying extraordinary? Can we find a new superlative? I know, it's terrible. It's terrible. He said, if I hear you say extraordinary again, I'm going to come round your house and deal with you.

I know, that's worse. Well, I used to say fantastic a lot, until Herman Healy said, don't use that word. Please don't use that word. Please don't use that word. Everything is fantastic. I can't promise it. I suspect that in today's episode the word extraordinary probably will come up. We'll give it a go.

The other thing that Neil said, and I... We could get Matt to, you know... Cut it out. Ring a little bell. Ring a little bell. Or just put it... And the other thing that he said, he said that when he, in the year 2000,

having read rave reviews, he bought a novel called House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski, we think. Danielewski, Danielewski. You're looking at me. I'm looking at you. I offered a suggestion. Yeah, I think that's, okay,

the House of Leaves is a very well-reviewed novel, experimental novel. And so he bought it in 2000 when it was published and he couldn't get on with it. And then he came to see me do my talk, Read Yourself, Fitter, in which I try and motivate people to read books they've always meant to read. And it just didn't work. The magic didn't work. He wasn't able to get on with it. And he said, I'm 50.

I'm going to read this sodding book. Do any of your listeners have tips about how to tackle it? So if anyone listening to this has read House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski, they can tweet us through the backlisted site or they can get us on Facebook or you can tweet Neil at Sarge06 S-A-R-G-I-E 06 and copy backlisted in, right, S-A-R-G-I-E

06. If you can offer any reader's advice on House of Leaves, he and we would be very grateful. That is a public service. I'm impressed. We like to help our listeners on a case-by-case basis. So I've done that public service announcement. Shall we kick on?

Yes, go on. Hello and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast that gives new life to old books. We're gathered cosily around the lichen-covered and slightly spooky kitchen table in the underground cavern of our sponsors Unbound, the website which brings authors and readers together to create something, frankly, special. I'm John Mitchinson, the publisher of Unbound, the website which brings authors and readers together to create something frankly special. I'm John Mitchinson, the publisher of Unbound. And I'm Andy Miller, author of The Year of Reading Dangerously. And joining us around the table, and this is becoming a habit, are not one but two special guests. SF Saeed is the award-winning author of books for readers of all ages, such as the Varjak Paw books about a Mesopotamian warrior cat, and Phoenix, most

recently Phoenix, which was described by The Guardian as a space epic. And I have to say to SF, hello SF. Hello Andy. SF and I have known one another for approximately 25 years. No way, I didn't know that. Yeah, so since the 1990s. And SF, tell backlisted listeners what you used to call call me what my nickname was in the 1990s well in the early 90s which is of course a very remote historical period as far away from us now as the Romans and he was known as Mr. Pink Mr. Pink because he looked like Steve Buscemi in Reservoir

Dogs when Reservoir Dogs came out I had like a beard. I had a little goatee beard. And this is absolutely true. For about three to six months, I could not walk down the street in London without somebody coming up to me and going, you're not the, are you the guy from, it used to happen on buses. People would go, yeah, I'm on a bus. Because you wore a suit and tie. I'm researching the life of a bitter bookseller. Let me tell you this, SF.

I was in the Sainsbury's where I live with a terrible hangover. And I was buying, like, meal for one in a box. And the lady at the checkout went, sorry, love, you don't mind me asking, do you? Are you him? I went, no, I'm really not, I'm not. And she went, no, I thought you weren't, but everyone else here thinks you are.

That's brilliant. Well, our other guest making a second appearance on Backlisted is the writer and author Erica Wagner, whose book Chief Engineer about Washington Roebling, the man who built the Brooklyn Bridge, is out later this year. And I think we've known each other for 20 years. I believe we have. But we don't yet have any nicknames.

No, we've managed to. We'll have to work on that. Welcome back, Erica. Thanks for coming in again. It's a pleasure to be here. And the book that SF and Erica have come in to talk about is Red Shift by Alan Garner. Now I'm just going to say here that we have actually assembled an expert panel because my colleague John Mitchinson knows Alan Garner and has published Alan Garner and Erica has edited a volume for Unbound called First Light of people paying tribute to Alan Garner and SF is a top

fantasy author who is a huge fan of Alan Garner and whose work is influenced by Alan Garner and you've also got me who until a month ago had read nothing by Alan Garner but fortunately as we know the public have had enough of experts so you'll find

that it's my opinions. The man on the Wichita Bull Omnibus. Now Mr Gove. Thank you so much. Well, we'll be looking for your startling insights into the work of one of our greatest living writers in a moment. But first this, some housekeeping. If you manage to get to the end of one of our greatest living writers in a moment. But first this. Some housekeeping. If you manage to get to the end of these podcasts, you'll be aware that we

point you in the direction of our Facebook page and also our iTunes presence. Some of you, in fact rather more than we expected because we haven't been checking quite as regularly as we ought to, have been so kind as to post stuff on them. So we wanted to thank Denise Fowler, Anne Murphy and

Rosie Clark who've left us very kind messages about the Georgette Heyer show on Facebook. And Nigel Bailey who as well as listening to A State of Denmark the Derek Raymond book we did a few podcasts ago, was also given a copy of Andy's The Year of Reading Dangerously by

his wife as a birthday present. Oh dear. No feedback so far but I'm sure he's loving it. Thank you very much, Nigel and Mrs Nigel. That's very kind of you. We'd also like to thank E.E. Leach, Richard in Ham and Book Nibbler, amongst others, for their very kind reviews on iTunes. We'd particularly like to thank Hughes Books.

Hughes Books, worryingly accurate. When he describes Batlisted as men with clearly far too much time on their hands, select an old book every fortnight, and then infuse at length while drinking coffee and making obscure references to the fall. You know,

as SF... That's the band rather than the biblical work. As SF, that's basically hanging out with Andy Miller for 25 years. That's your life, that is. So I don't know whether Hugh actually works at Unbound, but if you do, well, sports. Somebody also said you had the best dirty laugh they'd ever heard, Andy. I can't remember who that was.

The connoisseur of the dirty laugh. But, John, that's all by the by of this self-regarding nonsense. What have you been reading this week? I've been reading, rather unexpectedly, I find, a book called Brave New Weed, Adventures into the Uncharted World of Cannabis by Joe Dolce. Not that Joe Dolce. No, not shut up your face, Joe Dolce,

but Joe Dolce, magazine editor in New York, and until recently partner of Jonathan Burnham, a publisher, who has a fantastic idea for a book, which isn't this one. But I was reading it because I wanted some background, because they're connected. And it's just a brilliant bit of non-fiction about a subject I knew, apart from the obvious, you know, being at university and never inhaling like Bill Quentin,

I knew next to nothing. But it's fascinating. It's a fascinating story of a plant that has been with us for thousands and thousands of years and has had an important role to play in all kinds of civilisations. But what he really does is gives you an up-to-date what's happening, medical marijuana, what's happening about the legalisation in the States. He goes to talk to growers, he talks to users, he talks to people who come lauded with praise from people like Barbara Ehrenreich.

It's a great read it's fascinating it makes the case so absolutely and completely brilliantly for the decriminalizing does it yeah and i it's again i i'm i'm i'm being quick because we've got so much to talk about with alan garner but if you wanted a book which intelligently explored how do you have substances that expand consciousness and how do you manage that how do you market it he's not a stoner, that's the thing this is not coming from the position of special pleading

he's genuinely going out there and trying to understand and I have to say some of the new product and the new delivery systems sound extraordinary it made me want to oh my god that's one the new delivery systems, shall we call it, sound extraordinary. I mean, it made me want to... Oh, my God!

That's one. Oh, yeah. Interesting. Whatever. Remarkable. No, that's an even worse quote. What was I going to say? Oh, that's right. Andy, what have you been reading? What have I been reading this week? So I've been reading this week the personal memoir

and nature writing work Alan Partridge Nomad. It's a work of psychogeography. It is a work of psychogeography. It manages to actually, you know what's so interesting? It brings together the worlds of Ian Sinclair and Robert McFarlane in a hitherto unimagined way. It's a book called Alan Partridge Nomad. It's by a book called Alan Partridge Nomad. It's by a guy called Alan Partridge, who is a radio DJ in Norwich. And I listened to it on the audiobook, and they've let him read his own audiobook. And we've just got a clip here of...

This is Alan Partridge reading from Alan Partridge Nomad. I think this will give you a flavour of it. Prologue. What I talk about when I talk about rambling. Pumph! A foot is dolloped onto the ground. In under a second it is load-bearing, locking in place to become a willing pivot for the body as a whole. It accepts the load dutifully, bending a little at the knee in a small act of genuflection. Above it a roll of the hips tells the trailing leg to scramble, and it responds by hoisting itself aloft and catapulting

its cargo, the other foot, forwards. This foot reaches out and finds land. Pumph! Then it too locks in place and takes the weight of its owner before silently passing the centre of gravity back to its counterpart like an Olympic torch made of physics. This transaction is repeated back and forth, back and forth, and it's soon clear that this tandem act is propelling the whole unit forwards in fluid locomotion. What I've just described might sound complex, but it's not a newly invented dance or a corporate team-building activity. It's something we all do every single day. Give up? I'm talking about walking, because this book is about walking.

Yes, walking. Oh, some of you are saying, I don't walk, I'm not a walker. Oh, really? Then how did you get to the bathroom for your morning toilet? How did you make it from your house to your car? How did you get from the door of the newsagents to the freezer where they keep the magnums? Magna. perhaps you slithered there or was it teleportation no you walked mate accept it because we all walk all of us footnote with some exceptions so okay so basically i read this because i'd absolutely love when alan partridge's autobiography i partridge came out a few years ago have you read it?

I have, yes and I've listened to it as well God, so the audio book is the greatest audio book of all time have you heard it? Yes indeed, and my son especially would concur with this. And the same thing is happening in Nomad where

it's sort of, you've got, first of all it's really well written, it's sort of, first of all it's really well written, it's really funny, Neil Gibbons and Rob Gibbons, the brothers who've been writing for Partridge for the last ten years they write all this stuff with Coogan editing and Coogan contributing it's so good in terms of how it plays

on the page, but then when Steve Coogan performs it he doesn't just read it in his Alan Partridge voice he does it in what I call his Alan reading voice right that he's doing a kind of as though this is the thing I'm it's a proper book and I have to deliver appreciation appreciation I have to deliver it properly did you see the advert where it was just brilliant in where he even goes into you know in p and e available he's he's got the nuances are just brilliantly done and the cover is a thing of beauty he's he's got is it one of the sort of the jilaba kind of thing around his neck yeah he's

looking at it just says nomad like a sort of vestiture so what i loved about it is first of all it's really it's a brilliant performance it's not just a really it's a performance but the other thing that i loved about it is, you know, this is a thing we've talked about a few times. We talked about it with Joel and Jason when they came in to talk about the Lady Bird books and about Bert Fegg. That often, actually funny writing doesn't get a fair crack of the whip, critically. That Nomad got, I believe, one broadsheet review.

Sam Leith reviewed it, gave it a great review. But it deserved to be reviewed widely as a really funny book. And it made me think that quite often literary fiction, it can be all sorts of things, but it shies away from being funny. You know, it can be witty and it can be ironic. It made me think about when you see on book jackets descriptions of how funny a book is. So I'm just going to go through a few of these

and explain them for listeners. Wickedly ironic. Not funny. Delightfully irreverent. Not funny. Deliciously witty. Not funny. Gleeful satent, not funny. Deliciously witty, not funny. Really not funny.

Gleeful satire, not funny. Laugh out loud funny, mildly amusing. So the point with this book is this book is properly funny. I kept having to stop while I was listening to it to laugh at it so I didn't miss the next bit that was going to be funny. Don't you think the problem is that a lot of comedy, a lot of comedy, there's nothing worse than aiming for funny and not getting it.

I mean, there's so much stuff that's so weedy and just doesn't, I mean, for every... Well, it's really hard to do really well. It just is. And I think it's because we laugh and laughing is pleasurable and easy, we don't think about how hard. It's the same reason why Jack Lemmon never won the Oscar

for Best Actor in a Comedy Film, although he was a great actor and a great comedian. It was both those things. Because it's funny, so it can't be serious. We've done, to my certain memory, only two authors that I would say were properly comic martin amos i mean the information is a properly funny book and i think muriel spark is a yeah genius her comic timing and writing is spot on but they're not many of them but well i guess what i'm saying as well is

the is the books that are produced for the christmas market because that's when most members of the public will buy them yeah lest we forget they are often not always sometimes they don't work at all but when they're really great like this is it kind of gets shunted off to the human section of the bookshop and and which is ridiculous never gets appraised as it should be i think that's something it perhaps shares with children's literature which is very seldom taken seriously in those kinds of venues and is often presented in newspapers when it is presented as here's a christmas present where in fact you could be looking at a life-changing work of literature you should mention this sf because you're running a campaign aren't you at the moment i am it's called cover kids books uh on twitter the hashtag

is cover kids books uh and it's it's all about this that children's literature is routinely underrepresented in the media three percent of of review space in national newspapers goes to children's books, which account for 33% of the UK market. Amazing. How is that possible? When you were at the Times, was that a pressure you felt? I mean, how do you cover it properly? Well, I like to think that we always covered it properly.

I was fortunate most of my tenure at the Times, I think all of my tenure at the Times, to have a really wonderful reviewer of children's books, Amanda Craig, who is a great champion of children's books. And she was also someone, she was effectively my children's books editor. Not always, but more often than not, she would come to me saying, there's this author you've probably never heard of called Philip Pullman.

I think his next book is going to be really big. She had a wonderful eye and she wrote for me every week. So I think we did cover them well, but absolutely they go into, they were still in a separate slot. It wasn't just part of literature. We'll pick this up again after some marvellously witty and interesting adverts. Maybe we should go get into a discussion of what the tls called the most difficult book ever published on a children's list so we're talking red shift by alan red shift by alan garner so sf you and i had talked about um doing alan garner here on backlisted and it was your decision to focus

on redshift when did you first read redshift or when did you first encounter redshift well i have to say i encountered redshift along with a lot of alan garner books in childhood but i didn't read them when i was a child i was a horrible horrible little pretentious child who thought children's literature or anything relating to childhood was beneath me. And I wanted to read Voltaire and Salinger. You were like that. I was like that, as you all remember. Then in university, along with some friends, I discovered that the children's literature I'd been looking down on actually was the place where the most exciting writing I could imagine was taking place. Far, far more sophisticated and rich and meaningful than anything I could find on a booker prize list at the time.

And people were recommending to me at the time, writers like Alan Garner, Ursula Le Guin, Susan Cooper, none of whom I'd read as a kid. Which I now look back on with horror. Like, what did I miss out on? I had a terribly deprived childhood in that way. But, when I finally came to read Garner's work, well, my first reaction was slightly

baffled. I think The Owl Service was the first one, and I reached the end of The Owl Service and thought, what was that all about? I didn't really... The Owl Service is the book that precedes Redshift, and won the Guardian Children's Fiction Awards. And Light Redshift was adapted for TV in a version that many people remember.

So, yes, you read The Owl Service. The Owl Service, I enjoyed it word by word, line by line, but I had no idea, really, what it all added up to when I got to the end of it and then i thought okay well that's alan garner done and uh and then and then uh when boneland was published i think in 2012 maybe yeah ursula le guin wrote an amazing review of it uh in the guardian uh where she described it as something no other author could give us uh but she suggested you would have had to have read the weird stone of brazingaman and the moon of gomrath first so i thought okay i i want to do that and i i did i i read those books

i i enjoyed them very much and then i read bone lad and it just blew my head off i thought it was possibly the most extraordinary novel i'd ever read um i then thought well i have to read the rest of this alan garner now and so it was I worked my way through chronologically, rereading The Owl Service, thinking, my goodness, how did I miss? How did I miss? This is incredible. And then Redshift, which I had no problem with at all when I finally read it. It seemed very, very clear to me. I know it is regarded as one of the most difficult books ever written and has probably put a lot of readers off for that reason.

But I think there are ways into Garner and perhaps we can talk about that. I want to ask a similar question to Erica maybe not about Redshift, but where did you first, when did you first read Alan Garner? Well I first read Alan Garner as an adult. Not because I scorned children's

books as a child. My whole I grew up in the United States where his name is not very well known. It's still interesting to me that I think children's books, books published for children, cross the Atlantic less well than books for adults. I think there are huge books, Harry Potter, that make their way. But when I came to live in this country, there were books that I grew up with as classics, like E.B. White's books, Stuart Little, Charlotte's Web, that until there were films made of them, people in this country did not know. But so, I came to Alan Garner as an adult in the late 90s. The Stone Book Quartet was republished by Flamingo as a Flamingo classic.

And it came to my office. I was literary editor of the Times. I opened the jiffy bag, in which it was, saw a book, the Stone Book Quartet, Alan Garner, Flamingo classic. go classic and with the hubris of relative youth I thought who is this classic author of whom I've never heard yeah yeah I started to read it and I was completely blown away that's how I discovered Alan Garner so I didn't read him growing up and I want to ask John actually we've never asked you this about a book that we've done it When did you first read Alan Garner? OK, so I was a classic kind of child of the Puffin Club, 60s. I was brought up on any... I mean, I was obsessed.

Any new Puffin post that came out. And Garner was... By the time I was reading in the late 60s, Garner was one of the big stars. So I think the first one I read was was the Weird Stone and I read them in order I read Weird Stone and I read Moon of Gomrath and I read Elodore and I read the Owl Service which blew me away and then something remarkable happened when I was in my teens I read Red Shift and that was that was the most it's the most disorienting Adgana experience I had because it's really quite a complicated book.

It's definitely, for me, the pivotal book between what you might call early Garner and late Garner. It's definitely when he begins to do things that he hasn't done before. And the triple time scheme, I mean, it's extraordinary. There is no other word though it is extraordinary the triple

time scheme is challenging you know the whole thing about this book is he forces the reader to forge

the links yes I've we should ask you've come to this yeah yeah for the first time I have no idea

I've been reading Garner all my adult and as you say I went on I published Strandloper and Thursepitch I have no idea Voice of the Thunders I have no idea what coming to Garner all my adult... As you say, I went on, I published Strandloper and Thursbitch. I have no idea... Voice of the Thunders.

I have no idea what coming to Garner for the first time as an adult reader would be like. I'll give you my recent experience of it, which is that I had bought a copy of the DVD of Redshift, of which I had never heard, because it's sort of mentioned in the same... It's a play for today. It's a play for today. It was reissued by the BFI

and it's mentioned in the same breath as things like The Wicker Man... Pender's Fan. ...and Robin Redbreast and Pender's Fen. So it was very much at the cult TV end of things. And I watched it about three or four months ago. I was totally nonplussed by it. I think I tweeted with a Homer Simpson blank face

just going, what? No opinion. I couldn't make head nor tail of it. And so when I found out we were going to read Red Shift, I thought, OK, well, that's fine. I absolutely loved it, but it was almost like a second reading. And I was saying this week, in a sense, it is challenging. It's quite difficult.

It's not unlike one of my favourite books, Under the Volcano, by Malcolm Lowry, in which you are, as Lowry would say, and I think I've said on here before, the first reading is merely a preparation for the second reading, and you won't understand it on first reading. You're not meant to understand it on first reading. It's supposed to sink in and the other thing I must just very quickly say is that I read uh the stone book quartet uh 48 hours ago I got up early on Wednesday morning and so from about five o'clock till seven o'clock I read it straight through I thought it was amazing the stone book I mean I really like Redshift, but the Stone Book Quartet, I seem to be drawing on so many things.

Like, there's bits of sci-fi, bits of Aikenfield, bits of mythology, bits of folk tradition. I just thought it's a brilliant... But also, there's a quote on the front of this copy of the Stone Book Quartet from the Times, which I reckon you wrote, Erica, which says the Stone Book Quartet has a symphonic quality, unique in fiction. And actually, whoever wrote that, if it was you...

I don't think it was. I think that's from the first review. But I agree with that, that what's holding it together, a bit like Redshift, is movements of rhythm and imagery, far more than narrative. It's the past, isn't it? These, to me, these books, and I think that, in a way, Stonebook is superficially simple,

in a way that Redshift is superficially difficult. What he's doing, they're very similar in what he's trying to do. He kind of, it's, we'll come on to code in a moment, his books are kind of encoded. I mean, what he's doing is creating these structures which you really have to work to see the patterns. The more you put into it, the more times you read a Garner, the more times you see it.

There's a brilliant bit from an essay of his, which I just read because it's just about precisely this. He says that literature exists at every level of experience. It is inclusive, not exclusive. It embraces, it does not reduce, however simply it is expressed. The purpose of the storyteller is to relate the truth in a manner that is simple to integrate without reduction for it is rarely possible to declare a truth as it is because the universe presents itself as a

mystery we have to find parables we have to tell stories to unriddle the world so i've always felt that what garner's doing is creating a kind of a riddle that you have to fiddle you have to solve yourself I'm just gonna say I'm gonna quickly because I think we need to for listeners who haven't read it yeah I just think we I'm gonna read the blurb now it's just to put just to get out there what the book is superficially about as I've got an edition that was published by in by yeah lions teen tracks it's got like the worst cover of all time the worst terrible edition that was published by yeah, Lions Teen Tracks. I'm up Teen Tracks. It's got the worst cover of all time.

That's terrible. That might be the worst Alan Garland cover I've ever seen. Anyway, so I'll read this and then maybe John you could read your blurb on the far better. Let's just say what it is. It's a far better edition published by NYRB I think. Anyway, here we go. Red Shift is a daring exploration

of a contemporary love story cut into by two violent fragments from the past. The result is one of the most profoundly imaginative, strange, controversial, and rewardingly demanding novels to have been published in recent years. Brilliant, Ursula Le Guin Le Guin now I suspect that when that was when that went past the marketing department the phrase rewardingly demanding

didn't have the word rewardingly attached to it no and what's even worse than that the best what she actually said okay Ursula who knows the thing was a bitter complex brilliant book which is which reminds me of that great I think it was a column to a bean quote that that was was was which if I had to if I had what was it out of a grim sense of duty it would be this if I had to name one of these books that I would recommend it would be out of that I read out of a grim sense of duty it would be this. If I had to name one of these books that I would recommend that I read out of a grim sense of duty, it would be this. And they took out of a grim sense of duty out of the phrase. I would recommend this book. That's hard, Sally.

So here's the egghead blurb. In 2nd century Britain, Macy and a gang of fellow deserters from the Roman army hunt and are hunted by deadly local tribes. Fifteen centuries later, during the English Civil War, Thomas Rowley hides from the ruthless troops who have encircled his village. And in contemporary Britain, Tom, a precocious, lovestruck, mentally unstable teenager, struggles to cope with the imminent departure for London of his girlfriend, Jan. Three separate stories, three utterly different lives, distant in time, yet strangely linked to a single place,

the mysterious looming outcrop known as Maukop, and a single object, the blunt head of a stone axe. All these come together in Alan Garner's extraordinary redshift, a pyrotechnical and deeply moving elaboration on themes of chance and fate, time and eternity, visionary awakening, and destructive madness. Yeah. That's pretty good. That's pretty good.

That's pretty damn good. SF, could you, would you be brave enough to read us a bit? To give people a flavour of the registry in which this book is written. Yeah, I'll read a bit there are three sections three parts this is from the modern part which i suppose is the 1970s part which now doesn't look modern at all uh as opposed to the roman or the civil war parts but this is a part where uh tom and jan the the teenage lovers uh a meeting in Crewe, which Tom describes as the most romantic city they could possibly go to, and they're trying to get out of the city at this point.

A brisk walk, said Jan. They set off at random. Away from the precinct of terraces became all the town, and the roads were full of noise. This is better, said Jan. They had crossed a railway bridge onto a piece of quiet land between houses. A boy on a bicycle overtook them and disappeared at the opposite corner of the space. There's a way through. The path ran down to another street but facing them was a break in the terraces. Two gables almost touched. I wonder why they don't, said Tom. There was room to pass, and beyond they came to an open square, backed by houses, most peculiar. From the square, the path continued, cobbled, and overgrown by hedges that met in a tunnel arch. That's old, said Tom, older than Crewe. The path dropped steeply through silence to a bridge across a

river rising beyond. Each time it met a road, there was a way, beckoning further, along gunwales and entries. If you kept to the streets, you'd never see this, said Tom. It always cuts at right angles, same as the alleys. Sometimes it was as wide as a road though only children seemed to own it but even their games were muted have you any idea where we are said jan i'm more uneasy about the when i think the thing about this book that really i love this in books but i really liked it with here and we mentioned this phrase in relation to Muriel Spark. It seems an appropriate time to bring it back. You remember, John, the reviewer of Spark,

he said, Muriel Spark does not suffer the lazy reader. And Alan Garner does not suffer the lazy reader. You have got to be on. You have got to pay attention. And if you pay attention, what you get back is this incredibly rich stew of ideas and imagery. But I think that's why, and having sat next to Alan, as I'm sure John has too, in signing queues,

and have people come up to him barely able to speak for how strongly his work affected their lives and I think that's partly because reading and writing it's always a communion between the reader and the writer

the reader is always working to create the text but particularly strongly in Garner's work, because just as you say, you really have to go there. But when you make the pictures, when you make that effort, it's so vivid and it becomes your book. I think that's absolutely right. As you say, all books do that.

Well, Garner says, I've got this little thing from his essay, Hard Cases. A book properly written is an invitation to the reader to enter, to join with the writer in a creative act, the act of reading. And it's profoundly democratic. It allows every single reader to make the book for themselves in their own heads, out of their own stock of experiences. And I think he said in a Guardian Q&A a few years ago, if I've done my job anything like right,

readers should be able to get things out of it that I never have because I don't have their experiences. And I think that is why people feel so personally invested. The response we got last night on Twitter. We should just mention this. I've got one here. Have you got any there? I've got one here of like,

one of our listeners, Faye Franklin. Hello, Faye. Said, some people have an hour tune. This was our book. A signed copy was my wedding present from the late Mr. F. The place that his work occupies in people's... And Jax.

Yeah, Jax Blunt. Live otherwise. Hello, Jax. She put an extraordinary thread. the place that his work occupies in people's and jacks yeah jack's blunt at live otherwise hello jacks uh she she put an extraordinary thread have a look where she talked about how there were no books at home there were no books in her local primary school a new teacher came one day and was horrified brought in his own books starting with the owl service she read that and she just put game changer that was it she was off yeah. And so many people, a whole generation, maybe two, three generations now. And I think this is the liberating thing about a writer like Alan because he has, I mean, we should say a little bit about his family have been stonemasons in Cheshire for 300 years.

He grew up at very working class Cheshire. He went to Manchester Grammar School. He went to Oxford and then famously stopped his studies at Oxford just he kind of had a had a breakdown decided he wanted to leave and and write a book and went and found this extraordinary house with his father's help he managed to buy for 500 pounds this he recognized being Alan being the precocious child he was that it was a medieval longhouse he bought it for 500 pounds and he's lived there ever since. And he stayed in this one bit of Cheshire.

He's the most extreme example of a writer who stays in one place but whose imagination takes him. I think it's worth talking about, and because it has bearing on Redshift, what is in the next field from this extraordinary house. That if you look out of the kitchen window, you can see the great Lovell telescope of Jodrell Bank, which came into existence at the same time that Alan came to Earth.

A red shift. I copied out the dictionary definition of a red shift red shift in this book means several different things it means a red shift that's the red shift happens when light or other electromagnetic radiation from an object is increased in wavelength or shifted to the red end of the spectrum. It's proof of the expansion of the universe moving away. So it has that level, but also the red shift. There's a shift that one of the characters is wearing, which is stained with blood.

So it has a... We have a clip, don't we, of Alan... This is Alan talking about what a writer does. beth mae'r ysgrifennwyr yn ei wneud? I mi, mae'r ysgrifennwyr yn rhywun sy'n byw yn eu bywyd eu hunain, eu hunain yn ymchwilio am beth yw'r hyn sy'n ei ymwneud â hynny. Maen nhw'n eu hunain yn gwyddonwyr yn eu labo, ac mae'r labo honno yn eu hunain. Mae'r ysgrifennwyr yn ei labo ei hunain, ei hun. Mae'r wrydwr yn ei laboratorium ei hun, sy'n ddwyieithio, er bod, er bod yn ddifrifol, yn fy mhrofiad, nid yw'r wrydwr yn ddyn ddiddorol iawn fel unigolyn. Nid yw'n ddifrifol beth bynnag yw'n ei wneud, nid yw'n bwysig beth bynnag y mae'n ei wneud, ac maen nhw'n y rhai sy'n cael y gwaith, oherwydd nid yw'n ddiweddar. Mae fy mhrofiad a'r plant yn byw gyda chadw mwyach, dyna'r hyn sydd eu bod yn ei fodloni, y mab ffyniadus mawr. my wife and children are living with an even bigger child. That's really what they have to live with, a big grown-up kid.

The writer takes far more out of himself. But that, again, is not a hard matter because the compensations are so enormous. There you go. I mean, that is what you feel like. You feel that there's never any slack in Garda. There's never any wasted... There's not a single wasted moment there's a lovely um quote from that book the voice that thunders uh which is Garner's amazing collection of essays and lectures that Philip Pullman quoted in first light uh I think very interesting that Pullman picks up on this

of all the things he could have possibly picked up, where he says, gone as grandfather, a white smith passed on this kind of wisdom to the young Alan. Quote, he uttered two precepts. They are absolutes. The first was, always take as long as the job tells you, because it will be here when you're not. And you don't want folks saying, what fool made this codge? The second was worse. If the other fella can do it, let him. That is, seek until you find that within you that is your unique quality. And, having found it, pursue it to the exclusion of all else and without thought of cost.

I think those are precepts for any writer to live by. I try to. I do my best. I just, I wanted to say some things because it's really important that the things about this book if you're looking there are lots of boxes to tick here there's the there's tom the character who's there are there are three adolescent males i think or close to adolescent males who are connected over time macy thomas and tom they all are to some degree afflicted uh macy has kind of mad kind of burzak rages where he kills people uh thomas has epilepsy and tom has what's called in the book his rages which are you know and they the way the book is written there are these are connection points these three characters are connected through time and there's a lot of interesting stuff you could say that Alan's written about.

How do they refer to the epileptic moments they're referred to as? Well, you don't quite know if they are their fits, but there are these visions of blue and silver. Blue and silver. Which without, for those who haven't read it, we don't want spoilers, but it

sort of comes clear at the very end of the book what this might be, what these images of blue silver might be. It was very striking for me, rereading the book, I hadn't read it in a while, and it was only on this recent rereading that I saw that blue silver having some resonance with my own experience of epilepsy I have focal epilepsy and I haven't had seizures in a while but they have silvery quality it's very difficult to describe but a bluish silvery scent quality aspect that really chimed uh with what was in

this book and i'd never never seen that before there's there's the connection all the way through this book about with astronomy redshift it's a sort of clue in the title but they uh tom and jan have a delta orionis that they watch at 10 o'clock each night is one of the things they do because they're separated. But the whole sense, there's an amazing quote from the film One Pair of Eyes that Alan made in 1972 where he says, Our emotions are as violent as the stars

and won't be denied no matter how hard we try. His definition of violence in that is fascinating and his definition of violence is really interesting fascinating right good violence is creation bad violence is destruction so but the idea that the stars that there's this sort of destructive force within us you know without going into all the details but alan has battled with manic depression throughout most of his adult life not long after the stone book quartet i think he went into his second major bout of that and stayed in it for a very long time and emerged amazingly with Strandloper,

a book that took him 12 years to write. And he's written two, I think, equally extraordinary novels since Thursbitch and Boneland, which is the final book in the trilogy that started with Weird Stone. You know, the thing about Redshift, and one of the reasons why it might have received poor reviews, is not just that it's experimental,

if it was published as a book for young people, but it's a book about sex and violence. Yes. It is not merely about those things. It contains instances of those things there are numerous murders and several rapes in the course of this quote-unquote children's book i mean it's the most violent of his books and the historical bits i think are remarkable i mean to imagine yourself into second century britain band of roman soldiers being kind of, you know, massacring a village. I mean,

I know Alan was reading about the My Lai Massacre in Vietnam, and there are some connections in the dialogue, I suppose, of the Roman soldiers to sort of American GIs. But then I think the Civil War section, where the Bartlemy Church, where there was a massacre in the Civil War, again, something that a lot of people probably don't associate with the Civil War, where we all think it was a sort of benign... This is a war where one in ten English males died. It's easily the worst, bloodiest war we've ever had. To do that and then to bring it into a contemporary setting

without it feeling cranky and sort of... I mean, it's a pretty remarkable technical achievement sf would somebody write could you write this for young people now in this way well that's a huge question um i mean i think you could view uh what we now call ya or young adult literature as uh coming out of things that alan was doing. So I could see, certainly, some young adult authors trying to have a go at a thing like Redshift. I'm just not sure who could pull it off in the way that Alan did. I'm not sure anybody has got close to that level of complexity

and harmony in the patterning. To me, that's what makes Garner an extraordinary writer. It's not the subject matter so much. It in the patterning. To me, that's what makes Garner an extraordinary writer. It's not the subject matter so much. It's the patterning. The patterning of words, images... Ideas. Ideas, actions, relationships. It's relationship to poetry as well.

It's prose poetry. It is, absolutely. It really is. It's so intensely patterned. And that is the great pleasure of it for me. Rather than... Yeah, there's violence. The violence is part of a pattern

that you kind of assemble in your mind and there's psychic violence as well as physical violence. A sort of better question is would a book like this be published as a young adult novel? If you submitted this manuscript to an agent, to a publisher, I don't think it would come out in a young adult imprint,

even though quite a lot of the characters are young. It probably depends on the publisher, but most publishers wouldn't. And there is something gloriously uncommercial and not of our age about Alan Garner's entire career, isn't there? Yes. Redshift particularly. I'd like to ask something to you experts

with regard to how you feel about, again it's not a spoiler but the final two pages of the novel Redshift by Alan Garner are in code and not only are they in code, I would argue having found out what the code means because

these days you can just go and look it up on the internet whereas when it was published you couldn't do that you have to work it out for yourself and we did what's but what's contained in the code is actually seriously affects how you think about what you've just read so it's not just a little fun mass kit williams masquerade style game at the end it's a it's a it's a well come on well you know it's a it's it totally integral to your understanding of the book and i'm i i am going to express mild mild um what's the word i want annoyance yes i suppose so yeah i think that's a bit unfair to the reader having said what Alan says about communing

with the reader it seems a bit showy offy what do you think? Do you mind it? Do you love it? I think he never minds if there's like one really high bar

that only a few people will jump for. Yeah. What do you think, SF? Do you think it's... I have to say, the first time I read Redshift, I didn't even attempt to decipher it or find out what it meant. I was kind of fine with the way the book ended without it. I didn't really need to know.

So I don't think it's essential. Then when I found out, you know, yes, it's interesting. But I think it's what Alan himself refers to as puzzles and thrums. They are what we've referred to as the oddments of thread that were kept and woven for personal use. The oldest of scraps made into other garb. And Alan regards himself as collecting these puzzles and thrums. The oldest of stories made into other tales. And he's talked about four of these specifically, which were the origins of Redshift.

One of which is a newspaper article about two lovers who had quarrelled. The boy threw a tape at the girl as he left. A week later, killed himself. Only then did she think to play the tape. It was a complete apology, but he said if she didn't care enough to listen to it within a week, he would know that he had ruined everything.

And that was the first thing that started Redshift. So to me, the bit in code at the end is the equivalent of the tape and that was the starting point for him I think of this story, it was the first spark, it needed a few more sparks so to him it is highly significant because it is where the thing began

but I don't think you need it as a reader The other spark, and this is something he does with all his books, is he always starts with the last line. And the last line in this case was a bit of graffiti I think on a railway station wall. And the book is all about trains and shifts and time and the blue and silver train. Everything is connected.

But what is it? He says, yeah, it was the usual stuff, including one record in chalk of teenage romance written in the form of the ubiquitous mantra, Janet Heathcote and Alan Flask, it is true. Then the sky fell on in me and with it redshift. Someone had come back later and written immediately below the mantra in silver lipstick without punctuation or a capital letter,

the cramped single line, not really now, not anymore. That's how my novels arrive. I don't go looking for them, they come looking for me. We've talked about violence. I just wanted to say, I think that the relationship, the Tom-Jan relationship, that was the thing that most stuck in my head when I was a teenager.

And it's not unproblematic, is it? I mean, I guess we're rereading it. But I just think the dialogue is so, he's a, you know, Alan's a big Beckett fan and I think when you're reading this, two things, one is it's superficially cinematic. You think, oh, this would be great in a film. It wouldn't. No.

The film is okay. I think it does some things really well but i think you need um a filmmaker who will do with images and sounds what alan is doing with prose and that is that was not the case on british television in the 70s whoever was directing it it's it's it's very faithful in some ways like scrads of dialogue are reproduced exactly, but it doesn't really work. It doesn't give you the extraordinary feeling of all this stuff coming together. There is an amazing image in the book

that is not in the film, unfortunately, which I think is an image of the book itself, which is where Tom's mother, in the modern story, is assembling a jigsaw that has three scenes in it. And one apparently... Romantic Cheshire. Yeah, that's right. It's legionaries wearing the wrong armour. And then there's

something with quite a lot of thatch and black and white timbering. And he's describing his own story in the jigsaw. Those are the three things. And that is what an Alan Garner book is. It's a jigsaw you have to assemble in your head. And I think, I mean, I would say, reading this again,

and not having read it for a while, one thing I found myself thinking was, you need to relax when you're reading it. Yes. You need to not strain for the connections. Don't read it quickly. Don't read it quickly. No, definitely.

The connections are there, but you don't need, it's not like a jigsaw, in the way that the pieces don't need to fit together exactly right away. You can just let it go through. They will cohere. And I think the Beckett reference is really interesting because like Beckett, perhaps, a lot of people are a bit intimidated by Alan Garner and yet I think Beckett's a really funny

writer and Alan Garner is a really funny writer. There's some really funny Hamlet-y humour in this definitely with Tom and Jan that the thing also which I didn't really get when I was a teenager is the sexual relationship between Tom and Jan, which is troubling, because, I mean, without giving too much away, let's just say it's troubling, and none of it is explicit. None of it happens. It all happens in the pauses, in the gaps. And although you may or may not like the way, perhaps,

I mean, I think, you know, we were talking, SF, earlier, that Tom overreacts maybe to the revelation but I just think technically those scenes are so brilliantly handled. But the other thing we were saying and I think a book published in 1973 is that Jan

in those encounters has a lot of agency Well the women through each of the... The girl in the Roman period, Madge, they are both objects of veneration, but also they are objects of agency, characters of agency, and they save in two cases.

It's not clear. I'm still not sure what happens at the end of the contemporary I'm not sure that we're making it there isn't an answer is there you have to supply your own my guess is Tom is not really capable of going where Macy and Thomas have gone

Macy and Thomas have both you could say forgiven or transcended the kinds of jealousies that have driven Tom out of control. Because the girl is definitely pregnant by, she was raped, so someone who isn't Macy. And it's possible that Madge is pregnant by the other Tom. Who may be a descendant of the goddess and the Romans.

We don't know. We don't know. We don't know. There is that possibility that all these characters are their own descendants as well. This is what I mean about the book being about sex and violence. How those things are processed by humans from one generation to another.

There's also a brilliant thing I have to say in the, you know, we were talking about the TV adaptation. I have to say when I watched the TV adaptation, my heart went out to all those people in 1970s Britain who'd have been at work all day, come home just wanting to relax in front of the TV and be bombarded with this, what's this thing? There's a brilliant joke in the TV. God bless Play for Today.

Exactly, there's a brilliant joke in the TV about uptight attitudes to sex where in the caravan where Tom's parents live where I believe in fact she is doing a jigsaw the mother in the background on the TV is that's life with Cyril doing one of his odd odes about funny shaped vegetables

and sex and nudge nudge and so the whole idea of this enclosed repressed attitude, where Tom says at one point, do you know what it's been like growing up here in this caravan? I've been able to hear everything. And that's another thing is that modern communication devices,

like the headphones and the TV, they're all about disconnection. I mean, it's such a rich and complex novel. You know what? Neil, suck it up. It's extraordinary. Well, I mean, if we didn't overuse that word, I think there are very few writers...

My own humble opinion is I can't think of a living writer in English that is more remarkable than Garner I think he is I think he is absolute in the absolute kind of the fact that he's done exactly what he set out to do he has total integrity in what he does and I think I think and Erica would also he's also i mean he's not the gloomy mage of cheshire that some people might i mean he's fantastically when alan's on form he is one of the funniest and most um i mean most sort of impish he's very he can be fantastic company it's he's a but the books are something else i mean they are to me high modernist masterpieces to rank alongside the best of

Eliot, Ted Hughes and Beckett. They're not to be trifled with. I had a very early email exchange with Alan Garner when I first came to know him. And again, fortunately didn't really know what I was getting into. But I always remember this email I got from him where I must have said something. I don't remember what I said in my email, but I referred to the invention of stories. And his email came back to me all in capital letters. Two sentences. I don't invent. I find.

That's good. Well, that is what he does. He pulls together these little bits and pieces that would mean nothing to anyone else and makes something enormous out of them. The sense of deep time and deep place and deep space in all of Garner's books

is mind expanding. I feel it's very, very difficult to talk about a book like Redshift without making it sound a little bit off-putting, but I would urge anybody listening to this. The nine books I think he said recently,

he regards them all as really one book that's been developing. I just read all of them. I mean, you know, they're not long. You can read an Alan Garner book in a couple of hours, as Andy said he did, and yet it can carry on deepening inside you your whole life. So, you know, I wouldn't necessarily start with Redshift if you've never read any Alan Garner.

I would start with Weird Stone and read all the way through to Bono. I would start with the Stone Book Quartet. Would you? I wouldn't, because I think that's almost... It's the summit of the steeple, you know. I don't know. I think I agree with Erica. I think based on my limited reading... I think for an adult reader, a reader coming as a grown-up, because it gives you the landscape it gives you the background and then

you can read it definitely does that's what i that's my take on it i think i think i i i think weird stone is a good place to begin because it's where he began yes that's you kind of very gradually see the development of the project um but the key elements are there right at the beginning even if the characters as he says himself, are kind of two-dimensional, the landscape is not. It is deeply, deeply alive. Alderley Edge is absolutely alive in Weird Stone and will be all the way through the whole project.

Unfortunately, we're going to have to stop. So I want to thank SF and Erica, Matt Hall, our producer, our sponsors Unbound, but just a little bit of a Garner sign off and that's about the top and the bottom of it the whole beggaring cheese I've given you a story, not too long and not too short just the same as from you to me

I'd tell you more gladly but that's as much as I know see you in a fortnight I'm Alan Garner Aha! You can choose to listen to Backlisted with or without adverts. If you prefer to listen to it without adverts, you can join us on our Patreon

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