Red Shift (novel) - Inspirations

Inspirations

A 1975 lecture by Garner entitled "Inner Time" is concerned with engrams, experiences which remain in our subconscious and continue to affect us. Garner mentions repeatedly recounting a trauma to his psychiatrist in order to "release" it. The repetition of events over time is one of the main themes of Red Shift. Garner goes on to explain how memories form their own sequence, independent of chronology (hence "inner time"): “any two intensely remembered experiences will be emotionally contemporaneous, even though we know that the calendar separates them by years.” This idea informs the structure of the novel.

As for the plot, in the same lecture Garner stated that Red Shift is an "expression" of "the story of Tamlain", although critics have had some difficulty with the comparison. He also documents, in his introduction to the 2011 New York Review of Books edition, several unrelated bits of "compost" which inspired his novel. The first is the well-documented massacre at the parish church in Barthomley, 1643, the facts of which haunted Garner, a lifelong resident of the area, for some time. Next came a news article about a young couple: after a serious fight culminating in a break-up, the young man had given the woman a taped message in which he apologized but said if she did not care enough to listen to it within a week, he'd kill himself. She did not listen to the tape, and he made good on his tragic promise.

Later, Garner heard a local legend that Mow Cop was first settled by a community of escaped Spanish slaves who were being marched north to build a wall. Garner recognized this as a potential garbled reference to the famous lost Ninth Legion of Rome, also called "The Spanish Legion". He knew that at the very time the Ninth Legion disappeared, emperor Hadrian had ordered the building of a 73-mile long stone barrier, Hadrian's Wall. From this he concocted the idea that the Ninth had been sent to build the wall but went AWOL on the way, settling on Mow Cop: the basic premise for the Rome-era portions of the novel. Garner explains that this scenario immediately brought to his mind the unrelated event of the Barthomley massacre, the first connection between different historical periods that informs Red Shift.

Finally, Garner saw some graffiti in a train station that said, in chalk, two lovers' names. Beneath it, however, was written in lipstick "not really now not any more". Upon reading this, all of the above-mentioned bits came back to him in a flash, and he wrote the novel.