[1] Writer and folklorist Neil Philip referred to it as "a complex book but not a complicated one: the bare lines of story and emotion stand clear".

[1] Academic specialist in children's literature Maria Nikolajeva characterised Red Shift as "a difficult book" for an unprepared reader, identifying its main themes as those of "loneliness and failure to communicate".

"[6][incomplete short citation] Emma Donoghue wrote that "More than any orthodox work of historical fiction, it was this weird fantasy novel which taught me to look beyond the walls of my own era, my own reality.

After killing many in Barthomley, Macey's skin is painted red by the tribal girl, using dye from alder bark.

He and the girl leave together after he returns to Barthomley to bury the axe head in the burial mound, asking forgiveness for killing the villagers.

They find the stone axe head buried in a mound and call it a "thunderstone", believing it to have been created by lightning striking the ground.

He leads them to a shanty town settlement at Rudheath and tells them to go to his family on Mow Cop once Thomas has recovered from his wounds.

Pieces of the three narratives are alternated in an inconsistent pattern, calling attention to their similarities beyond the landscape: themes, circumstances, visual descriptions and even lines of dialogue echo throughout.

They also leave Rudheath, removing one of Tom's sanctuaries, as he used their house for studying, though his parents accuse the couple of using it for sex.

Both parents try to find refuge in an idealised family life, having Tom pose for pictures while pretending to cut his birthday cake.

Logan also complains that they are "soldiers, not bricklayers"; the last testified activity for the Ninth Legion in Britain is during the rebuilding in stone of the legionary fortress at York (Eboracum) in AD 107–8.

The inhabitants of Civil War Barthomley speak the broadest version, and the dialect is heard least among the rootless modern-day characters.

The Roman-era characters speak, in the case of the legionaries, an Englishman's perception of contemporary military jargon of American GIs in the Vietnam War, and, for the rest, an English peppered with Cheshire dialect and pagan references.

Though the English language had not yet reached Britain, the differences in vocabulary suggest that the "Mothers" tribe speaks a Yorkshire dialect, e.g. calling a yard or enclosure a "garth".

Macey seems to participate in the Civil War massacre while killing at the Barthomley stockade and, while on Mow Cop, he has visions of the folly tower.

It is as if his tortured soul finds release in the savagery of the Roman times and the devotion of Thomas Rowley to his wife.

The narrative immediately switches to Macey in the grip of a berserker rage, after which he tells Logan of seeing hands pressing towards him from far away.

About 20 Parliamentary supporters had taken refuge in St Bertoline's Church when Royalist forces under the command of Lord Byron started a fire.

Approximately 2 miles (3.2 km) southeast of this is an area called Rudheath Woods, near the villages of Allostock and Goostrey.

A 1975 lecture by Garner entitled "Inner Time" is concerned with engrams, experiences which remain in our subconscious and continue to affect us.

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".

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.

[14] 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 in 1643, the facts of which haunted Garner, a lifelong resident of the area, for some time.

[3] 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.

From this he concocted the idea that the Ninth had been sent to build the wall but some 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.

[3] Finally, Garner saw some graffiti in a train station that said, in chalk, two lovers' names; beneath, however, was written in lipstick "not really now not any more".

[3] In 1978 the BBC produced Alan Garner's own script adaptation of the story as an episode in the Play for Today series.

This is itself a quote from King Lear (Act III, Scene iv) and is a phrase which appears elsewhere in the book during shift sequences.