Seeing Reddish, the Best that One Can

23 Feb, 2025

Fresh off my good impressions of Alan Garner’s The Owl Service, I moved on last week to another of his books that’s often mentioned along with that one: Red Shift, which came out six years later, and is wildly different in terms of style.

Whereas Owl Service did rely heavily on dialogue, Red Shift is almost entirely dependent on it. And given that the latter’s protagonists are teens in a certain place and age, things can grow a bit confusing for someone not familiar with that setting or the regional slang that came along with it. But throw in two other plot lines, each in a separate, far-distant past and linked only via the respective couples’ connection to a stone axe, and readerly disorientation, with little context to provide placement, is not infrequent. This is especially true when the characters running around in ancient Roman times are tossing out phrases that seem more appropriate in a portrayal of frazzled troops in Vietnam.¹

I think I understood most of the story well enough, though, and enough to make me wonder about the larger questions I assume Garner would have us consider: much like in Owl Service, how time may move, if not in neatly repetitive rounds, then in malleable cycles that draw people in, with something like fate pulling the strings in time’s flow. How relationships—between couples, parents and children, communities formed and maintained out of something other than choice—are never really straightforward, and how even those we “work at,” as self-help literature might say, may run their own doomed course and fail anyway.

But there’s the particular conundrum I walked away with here, as I did in Owl Service: namely, whether these cycles do finally spiral themselves out and come to an end, and if so, how. Neither book provided any definitive answer I could find, and that’s somehow appropriate. But whereas the resolution in the earlier novel seemed redemptive, or at least positive—maybe no one was physically hurt, even if the emotional scars couldn’t realistically be dismissed—the cycle here either came to a sad (though again not deadly) end, or what we were treated to was just another particular, not final, iteration that resulted in the only separation so far of any of the couples involved. That outcome may have been due to one member of the pair finally handing over the artifact to an institution—uprooting it from the general region in which it had been operative for so long, and cared for by each of the past pairs who’d found it. Having been removed from the possibility of circulation, been willingly given up, the axe may have been robbed of its power—to, among other things, provide a material home for the transcendent glue that kept boy and girl together while all else was mired in something less than beauty. The cycles it enabled have come to an end, because the enabler itself can no longer be touched, picked up, interacted with in a specially shared way.

So the book could have been more straightforward, yes—but I almost don’t want it to have been anything other than what it is. Very little about the paths individual or collective lives take is totally clear, and our perceptions of what existence may have been like or meant to distant forebears are probably even murkier. And when you bring in aspects of reality that operate according to inaccessible and improbable laws, all you might have is dialogue: lots of talk about it that can’t really pull up any helpful context or other resources that will get you anywhere.

I’m not entirely sure, then, what Red Shift is or was meant to be, and I’m very far from knowing how I feel about it in general. I am glad, though, that Garner took the chance he did, refusing to cram a tale that’s anything but simple into the confines of an orderly—or even a comforting—style.

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