On first read, fans of Adamson’s previous fiction might find The Outlander to be a departure. Her 1995 collection of stories, Help Me Jacques Cousteau, was a brilliantly funny dissection of a dysfunctional family in the ’60s, a sharp spitball of pop-culture references and surreal touches. The Outlander, by contrast, is a period western peppered with so much historical and geographical detail it makes Annie Proulx look like a woman who doesn’t do her homework.
But Adamson’s novel, much like its main character, slyly reveals its true nature as it goes along. In the guise of a straight-ahead chase tale with strong romance elements — the plot, in a nutshell, consists of an outlaw being pursued for her crime and finding love (and some pretty steamy sex) along the way — Adamson has crafted a complex portrait of a natural landscape and the ways in which a motley crew of human misfits interacts with it.
Adamson also has two acclaimed books of poetry to her credit, and it’s clear that no one but an accomplished poet could have written this book. Her descriptions aren’t always beautiful — I’m still recovering from a particularly unforgettable use of the word “slurry” — but they are always original and strikingly precise. What’s more, they reflect a deep, abiding engagement with language as a means to capture the almost unfathomable complexities of the world. With The Outlander’s propulsive plot and grotesque cast of dwarves, giants, twins and lunatics, a lesser writer could have opted to sit back a bit in the language department. But “lesser” isn’t an adjective that’s likely to be applied to Adamson anytime soon.
Our outlaw, Mary Boulton, is, it must be admitted, something of a cipher. I’m pretty sure, though, that this is part of the point. Mary — more often referred to as simply “the widow” — is an everywoman thrust into an extraordinary situation. She shoots her husband because he neglects and mistreats her, though the mistreatment and the murder aren’t particularly sensational in themselves. The drama here is all in the flight: in the ways it forces Mary to make allegiances she normally would have shrunk from, to draw on resources she didn’t know she had. True, Mary’s more than a little loopy as everywomen go, a bit of a naïf who’s prone to seeing visions and hearing voices. However, the spooky, hallucinatory atmosphere of the book suggests that a person would be crazier not to experience these things.
Though the word “Alberta” is never used in the novel, we could make a strong claim for counting The Outlander as one of the first examples of Alberta Gothic. Mary’s flight is through the Rocky Mountain wilderness at the turn of the last century, and she takes refuge in a town named Frank just before the famous landslide of 1903. Adamson, a Toronto writer, has real ties to the West — her ancestors were Prairie homesteaders and her grandfather ran a coal-mine in Edmonton. But the novel’s wilderness setting is more of an everywhere than one particular locale. The Outlander imagines a way of seeing the world when all the ordinary distinctions between real and unreal, between self and surroundings, are relinquished. “With nothing to her name,” Adamson writes, “she had simply let go, let go of everything.” The novel entices the reader to fall along with her, and it’s well worth the trip.
