The Outlander, by Gil Adamson
The Outlander, a strikingly good first novel by the Canadian poet Gil Adamson, is a drama of extremity and isolation set in the Rocky Mountains of Canada in the early 1900s. Much of it reads like a pastiche Western with elements of supernatural grotesquerie out of Stephen King or even The X-Files. Turn-of-the-century Alberta is portrayed as a menacing backwater, where settlers are in danger of being scalped by Crow Indians and fur-trappers disembowelled. Into this pioneer territory comes Mary Boulton, a 19-year-old housewife who has just murdered her husband. In physical and emotional disarray, she is on the run from her brothers-in-law, who want her blood in return for the crime committed.
Mary has some dim hope of salvation in the mountains above Alberta, where she can go to ground. Along the way, details emerge of her troubled past: an unhappy marriage, a still-born child, creeping depression. The plot unfolds at a tremendously slow pace, yet Adamson keeps the tension up as we urge Mary on in her flight through the wilderness.
The author writes well on the supernatural chill of the Canadian outback at nightfall, the forests alive with unseen ghosts. The habit of civilisation can easily disappear in such a landscape. Mary subsists in it by eating porcupine she has trapped and, like a hungry wolf, devours a deer after leaving the carcass hacked and bloody in the snow. In the course of her truancy she evades rangers, trackers, Indians and other ‘outlanders’ living semi-wild, until finally she arrives at a mining camp called Frank. There she finds refuge with a bizarre preacher-cum-pugilist, the Reverend Bonnycastle, who literally punches the more sinful members of his flock into a becoming righteousness.
The Klondike sleaze of Frank, with its laudanum-purveyors, saloon-keepers, scufflers and other chancers, is superbly evoked by Adamson. In spite of the town’s reputation, the widow believes she is finally safe here. Her own soft bed in the Reverend Bonnycastle’s house is like an impossibly civilised amenity after her months of vagabondage in the Rockies. However, disaster strikes one day when a landslide down nearby Turtle Mountain buries the town in mounds of rubble. The ‘widow’ survives the Frank Slide (a real historical event), only to find herself the more dangerously exposed to her pursuers.
Gil Adamson can out-purple Walter Pater when she wants to, as passages of overheated literary prose occasionally mar The Outlander (‘She felt a braid of intention unravelling within her’). Still, by any standards, this is an exceptionally fine debut, which deservedly won the Dashiell Hammet Prize for crime fiction and has been nominated ‘Novel of the Year’ in the Washington Post.
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