This is an intro written nearly forty years later for a reissue of Garner’s own 1973 novel Red Shift. It’s also a story, in a personal vein, in which Garner investigates the process of creativity, describing how ideas, memories, and events pile up then tug at your sleeve. He’s explaining how he came to write the book, and it involves a meeting with a neighbour: “A descendant of an old Mow Cop family told me a story she’d heard from her grandmother, who could neither read nor write.” But she had retained the oral tradition that some Spanish slaves, being marched north to build a wall, escaped and established a dark-haired community in Cheshire. Garner is “startled” to realise that this old, local folk tale is a version of the story of the Legion of the 9th, lost to Roman history in 120 AD.
He describes this meeting as an illustration of how he works, gathering scraps of stories, repeating and reworking them. And though he lights on the final line very early on in the process, he then has to “leave it and let the rest of the story write me.” Garner is a very distinctive writer. I wouldn’t say I even like his stories, not most of them, (though his retelling of the Russian ‘Bash Tchelik’ is fabulous) but they are completely haunting; they don’t let you go.
First published in the NYRB reissue of Garner’s own 1973 novel Red Shift, 2011
A Personal Anthology 