, Published 2007
I found The Outlander through one of my favorite book sites, Bas Bleu. Gil Adamson is a Canadian poet whose first book went on to win the 2007 Hammett Prize for crime fiction.
Adamson’s poetry background shines through in the darkly atmospheric book. Adamson admits that the book began from the outline of one of her poems and centered on the image of ““a young woman, dressed in black, running like hell.”
That woman, referred to as “the widow” is 19 year-old Mary Boulton, running for her life after murdering her husband. Mary escapes into the Albertan wilderness in order to escape her vengeful brother-in-laws who have set out to track her down. While trying to elude her trackers, she is also beset by a host of hallucinations which sneak up on her in the deep quiet of the mountains.
The Outlander touches on memory, loss, madness and fear, not of the outside world, but of the darkness in one’s own mind. The memories haunting Mary slowly reveal themselves to the reader:
“Unpopulated, these memories, but each one nonetheless saturated with human presence, like an unattended meal still steaming. Something was coming, some message—each memory sculpting its own silhouette.” (64)Mary eventually encounters other outsiders (or outlanders) during her escape: a dwarf running a mining store, a giant Italian who makes moonshine, the Ridgerunner, who has lived in isolation for thirteen years in the Canadian wilderness, as well as various tribes of Native Americans. All living on the edges of society, “... lucky miscreants, outlanders, errors that should not exist but lived on anyway” (314).
