As novels go, The Outlander should qualify for Great Canadian status, or at the very least, Great Albertan. Set in 1903, it describes a young widow’s desperate flight through the western wilderness. Mourning the death of her newborn child and having murdered her cheating husband, Mary Boulton (referred to throughout as “the widow”) is chased by her husband’s brothers into the mountains towards the mining town of Frank, Alberta. Fighting for her sanity and survival, she encounters an oddball cast of characters, including an old bird lady, a recluse known as “the Ridgerunner,” the Reverend Bonnycastle, a lunatic, a dwarf and a giant named Giovanni. The widow’s journey is an epic tale of madness and mayhem, refuge and retribution. And, of course, her stay in Frank coincides with the catastrophic fall of Turtle Mountain, known as the Frank Slide.
Described by author Gil Adamson herself as “literary gothic western,” The Outlander is perhaps the only book of this genre, but it seems at home among such Canadian classics as Susanna Moodie’s Roughing It in the Bush, Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace and, most recently, the made-in-Alberta opera Filumena.
The Outlander is Adamson’s first novel, 10 years in the making, but she’s no amateur, having honed her craft with two acclaimed volumes of poetry (Ashland, 2003; Primitive, 1991), a book of short stories (Help Me Jacques Cousteau, 1995) and the incongruous Gillian Anderson “X-Posé,” Mulder It’s Me (1997). Yes, Gil (short for Gillian) is an X-Files fan.
There are no aliens in The Outlander, and the only ghosts that haunt the woods the widow travels are in her head. But there are no real normal folk either. Only misfits and aberrants inhabit the novel that unfolds operatically, a sort of morality tale that concerns itself more with the roles its characters play than with their characterizations (hence the use, primarily, of monikers instead of proper names).
“I think it’s a hard book to type,” Adamson admits. “I wanted to try a completely different voice and that voice should be as rich, as thick as I could make it.” She explains that the novel began as a poem from Ashland called “Mary” that she didn’t like and couldn’t figure out why. “It just didn’t feel finished, and I was looking for an idea for a novel. I thought I might as well use one that was already mine.” So she began with the image of “this young woman dressed in black, frightened and running.”
Once a Banff local, and a repeat alumna of The Banff Centre’s Leighton Studios, Adamson knew she wanted to set the novel in the Rockies but “didn’t want it to be too specific.” It wasn’t until she stopped at a welcome centre on one of her trips across the border into Alberta that she saw information on the Frank Slide and was struck by the story of the miners who dug their way out.
Adamson admits that although she went to great pains to get certain historical details right, she “tried not to be researchy.” “I saw (the site of the Frank Slide) after I wrote it and worried about how different the sense of it might be.” But the book’s magic comes from its poetry, not its precision of geographical or historical detail.
“She rested that dusk and woke later to find all light erased. The night was so dark she thought something stood between her eyes and the rest of the world. Blindness could not be this complete. Nothing but the sound of wind through trees. Somewhere to her left, the breathing horse.”
The widow’s motivations and moods — her fear, isolation, disorientation — and her physical condition are explored and reflected through the novel’s landscape that Adamson lovingly renders with vivid, intuitive, sensory language: “Morning came in a fug of humidity, the sun a hot smudge above, the ground steaming.” You don’t read the book so much as soak in it.
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