True Grit

When poet Gil Adamson sat down to write her debut novel she had no idea no long it was going to take, or what exactly would happen in the story either.

Set in Canada’s western frontier around the Rocky Mountains at the beginning of the twentieth century, The Outlander is the story of Mary Boulton’s desperate escape into the mountains as she tries to evade retribution for killing her husband.
“I wrote the book from beginning to end, one step at a time. At any given moment I didn’t know what was coming next,” she says.
The Outlander was ten years in the writing. This slow pace Adamson attributes to “a poet’s selfish desire to control the language.” Adamson’s prose does indeed have a poetic quality and The Outlander is a beautifully crafted story. Adamson draws on a variety of genres, most notably the literary Western in the vein of Cormac McCarthy and fairy tale, but the story of Mary’s desperate flight has the same immediacy as a thriller.
“I was thinking of Western literature and passively about the fairy tale as I wanted a bit of magic in there, but I was surprised that people regarded it as a thriller because I never had any intention of it being like that,” says Adamson. But she notes, “I’m very glad that it is – that people find it compelling.”
The Outlander explores the idea of guilt, retribution and redemption. Mary’s guilt is central to her character. Her husband is an unpleasant creation, but Adamson is careful not to make him so beastly that his killing is justified and thus avoids turning the novel into a feminist polemic.
“That was important to me that he not be a wife-beater or so terrible. He was probably a horrible person to live with but it was the confluence of many things, the loss of many, many things in her life that produced a madness in her. The madness led to an act that she can’t explain and that she can’t outrun. In a strange way it was a bit of a meditation on culpability – what happens when you’ve done something bad and it is irreparable?”
Mary’s guilt is not something she allows herself to dwell on – survival becomes her primary motivation.
“No, although she constantly has a sense of having committed a crime. But is she sorry she did it? Later in the book she points a gun at his brothers, in some way mixes them up with him, and she would be happy to do it again. For me it was very interesting writing about it. I didn’t want it to be a very justified killing, and I didn’t want her to be a pure, wonderful person.”
For Adamson it was important that the murder was neither a cold-blooded act of revenge nor a crime of passion.
“Have you ever done something without thinking and looked at it later and gone, ‘Wow, why did I do that?’ I wanted to take that to a bizarre extreme, using a person who is not well and who is in a very dark place.”
Mary is however a character who engenders sympathy – she is young, beautiful, suffering from post-partum depression and grief and although born into gentility finds herself trapped in a poor cabin on the frontier with a feckless husband after being coerced into marriage with a man she hardly knows.
For all her guilt, the reader cannot help but empathise with Mary, as do the characters she runs into and receives help from throughout the novel. The most notable of these is an outlaw and hermit, named aptly enough, William Moreland. Moreland, also known as the Ridgerunner for his ability to survive in the Rockies and escape trackers, is based on a real person of that name.
“Whether he’s anything like the man I created, no-one will ever know because he was a hermit, but some of the elements of the story I gave him are true.”
Once Adamson decided to include Moreland in Mary’s story, the novel veers off into a direction the author hadn’t planned and takes on some of the conventions of a love story.
“I didn’t know there was going to be a love element but when I decided to put the Ridgerunner in it became immediately clear.”
Like traditional love stories, obstacles must be overcome. However unlike most conventional love stories these are not external forces and pressures, instead a balance needs to be found between the desire to be alone and a desire to be with the object of affection.
“He’s a hermit, so he can’t be with her because of his nature, but also he must be with her. There’s a natural tension because I suppose we all need our own space and privacy. Most of us are like that, but especially writers. I live with a writer and many writers are a little bit hermit-like in their behaviour and emotional worlds – so maybe I was writing about that really!”