Outlander wields compelling plot

• By GREG LANGLEY
• Books editor
• Published: Apr 27, 2008 - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

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THE OUTLANDER
By Gil Adamson
Ecco, $25.95

Set in 1903 in the Canadian West, this novel begins with a young widow named Mary Boulton on the run. As the story unfolds, her compulsion to flee is revealed: she’s a widow because she has killed her husband, and his two gigantic, look-alike, red-haired brothers are chasing her. So she runs, afoot and on horseback. Adamson’s language is dense with imagery and the careful pacing of each sentence is evidence of her (Gil is short for Gillian) background in poetry.

“The girl scrambled through ditchwater and bulrushes, desperate to erase her scent. For a perilous moment she dared to stop running, to stand motionless, listening, holding her dark skirts out of the water. In the moonlight, her beautiful face was hollow as a mask, eyes like holes above the smooth cheeks.”

Some of the language is arresting and you have to pause to reflect on it. In one passage, she describes the widow’s progress down a dirt street that has been graded and the excess soil piled on either side. “Grasses grew on the heaped soil like hair on a bee-stung dog, and the widow struggled along from clot to turf.”

Despite the temptation to linger over such delicious phrases, the plot is too insistent to allow much dawdling. The reader is sucked along with the widow on her frenetic run to the mountains. As the story progresses, Adamson seamlessly blends in small facts and reminiscences that fill in the back story and establish the widow’s motivation and character — as well as that of her pursuers, the brothers Jude and Julian.

Mary has been the wife of their brother, John. She is the daughter of a minister beset by crippling depression when her mother died. She marries John partly out of desperation to do something with her life. John and Mary live in an isolated cabin near the Rockies, and their life is hard and brutal. John is abusive. Mary gets pregnant but the baby doesn’t survive long after its birth. Soon after comes the fatal encounter and John is dead, the now-widow on the run.

It’s set in the West, so The Outlander is a Western, but one more in the spirit of Cormac McCarthy’s All The Pretty Horses than anything by Louis Lamour or Zane Grey. Like McCarthy’s The Road and Jim Crace’s Pest House, this is a pursuit story. But the panoramic sweep of its setting and the rich cast of eccentric and colorful characters the widow encounters on her journey are most reminiscent of Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain.

There’s the “bird lady.” Mary is drawn to churches, and she enters a strange one she stumbles upon in her flight. There she meets Mrs. Cawthra-Elliot, the bird lady, who takes her in briefly and offers some advice.

“‘You know I don’t hold with the view that women can’t live like men. We’re not all that unalike, the two sexes. Drinking injures us no more than it does men. Neither does a year or two at university, as I had,’” she tells the widow. All too soon the relentless brothers show up and accost Jeffery, the bird lady’s hired man. Jeffery immediately sizes them up.

“Their eyes were the problem, he could see that now — never mind the dour and brutal cast of their faces, the sheer size of their bodies — but in their eyes, a profound cunning.”

So Mary lights out again, this time on horseback. She makes it to the mountains where she meets “the Ridgerunner,” William Moreland, a recluse who survives by pilfering cabins belonging to the National Park Service. The Park Rangers are always chasing him but can never catch the wily woodman. Mary stumbles upon Moreland by chance and forms a bond with him that lasts until he perceives the bond as bondage and fades back into the forest. Once again, the widow bolts.

She next meets an Indian named Henry. He and his white wife help the widow get to a mining town named Frank where the widow finds sanctuary with … a minister named Angus Lorne Bonnycastle — “Bonny.” She keeps house and goes to trade in the town’s trading post, which is run by a dwarf named McEchern.

Bonny is building a church, but he’s no carpenter; the listing, crooked structure has hardly a plumb board in it. It’s symbolic of the rough religion Bonny preaches: his “sermons” are fistfights with male congregants. As he says in one homily, “We cannot save ourselves from injury, because it will surely come. Life itself is injury, the way bread is made of flour.”