INTERVIEW: ' The Outlander', Gil Adamson's first novel, is shortlisted for the IMPAC award. The Canadian author was in Dublin this week, writes Anna Mundow
'HE DID WHAT? You're kidding me!" This was Gil Adamson's astonished reaction when she heard that Michael Ondaatje had written a glowing commendation of her first novel The Outlander. This self-deprecating Canadian recalls her second response: "Are you sure he got the right Adamson? There are a few around."
Ondaatje had the right Adamson and clearly the right book which he praised as “a remarkable first novel, full of verve, beautifully written, and with all the panache of a great adventure”. Since then, Adamson’s novel of the Canadian frontier appeared on numerous Best Fiction 2008 lists including those of the Washington Post, the Boston Globe and the Barnes Noble Review. Shortlisted for the 2008 Commonwealth Writer’s Prize, it also appears on the longlist for the 2009 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. “I’m in a state of numb surprise,” Adamson says of her inclusion on the IMPAC list which she describes as “. . . one hell of a reading list. I am thrilled to be anywhere near some of those authors.”
Critics in Canada and the US have hailed “the arrival of a talented new writer”. But Adamson, while fresh, is hardly new. The 48-year-old Toronto-based poet and writer published her first book of poems, Primitive, in 1991 and her short story collection Help Me, Jacques Cousteau, in 1995. Living with Canadian writer Kevin Connolly (who has relatives in Kilkenny and in Co Clare), Adamson even admits to being part of a small Toronto literary circle. “Because I’ve been scrounging around for so long as a writer, a lot of people who come over to dinner are writers. We go to launches all the time: it just seems incessant. You want to say, ‘Goddammit, stop writing! I need a night in’.”
This irreverent woman laughs easily, particularly about herself. But it was Adamson’s darker imagination that invented Mary Boulton, the novel’s disturbing heroine. “It started with the image of a young woman dressed in black, running like hell,” Adamson recalls. “From that I wrote a poem that was a summary of her life.” The character in the poem was “crazy, unpleasant and quite violent”. Transplanted to The Outlander, this desperate woman is, from the outset, on the run. “It was night, and dogs came through the trees, unleashed and howling,” the novel begins. “They burst from the cover of the woods and their shadows swam across a moonlit field. The girl scrambled through ditchwater and bulrushes, desperate to erase her scent.”
It is the summer of 1903. Mary Boulton, the daughter of an Anglican minister, escapes alone into the Canadian wilderness, leaving behind her murdered husband. She is pursued by his twin brothers. But why is she being hounded? And who committed the murder? From the first sentence onwards, Adamson tightens the suspense, luring us into the wilderness and into Mary’s past. Within 60 or so pages, the running woman from Adamson’s poem has become a complex and fascinating character.
“I had a sense that I could not live with that crazy woman from the poem for long,” Adamson explains, “so I lightened her up a little. Not that she’s exactly sunny, but I hope she’s not too frightening. In order to keep writing – and because I write slowly – I needed to worry about her. And I wanted the reader to worry about her too, because even with a questionable character, when you are anxious you will keep reading.” (Adamson cites the example of Cormac McCarthy’s novel Child of God in which the central character is “really horrible” yet demands our concern. )
When she says that she writes slowly, Adamson is not exaggerating. It took her 10 years to finish The Outlander. She then put the novel in a drawer for a couple of years. Eventually, at the insistence of Kevin Connolly, she sent the manuscript to an agent where it was lost during a staff reshuffle. Adamson left it at that until Connolly – and fate – again took charge.
During those years, however, the story of Mary Boulton never loosened its grip on its author. Adamson still sounds excited when she recalls the moment at which Mary began to emerge fully. “It was when she reaches the house occupied by the old ladies and their maid. There is something wrong in that house, but what is it? We don’t know.” The episode is both sinister and elegiac, just as Adamson intended. “That house represents the end of an era,” she explains. “In Canada all these grand old families came over from England with their china and their finery and found themselves in a totally alien environment. That grand colonial vision died a miserable, withering death. There’s a commonality with the American South in some ways.” There are also echoes of Adamson’s own family history which goes back seven generations in Canada and includes homesteaders on Manitoba’s Red River, a circuit court judge and a phone operator who also ran a coal mine in Alberta, the territory in which the novel is set. And Mary Boulton is named after Adamson’s great-great grandmother.
It is not so much Adamson’s roots in that place, however, as her ability to conjure up Alberta in the early 20th century that makes The Outlander exceptional. Here, for example, is an Indian ambush: “a whistling rain of arrows fell around them. One small, singing thing went past, then many, the air hissing with them. So alien was this event to the widow that she imagined birds had begun to fall from the sky, embedding themselves like tiny suicides, in the trunks of trees”. An arrow extracted from Mary’s leg comes out “with a squeak, like a finger on glass”.
Whether she is describing the endless forest in winter (“Nothing but the sound of wind through trees. Somewhere to her left, the breathing horse. And high above, the slow funhouse creaking of the branches”) or the coal mine (“thin rills of smoke corkscrewing into the rain”) Adamson allows you to see it as she sees it: vivid and astonishing. “I was driving across to Alberta,” she recalls, “and I picked up a leaflet at a visitor centre. It was on the Frank Slide, Alberta’s spectacular mining disaster of 1903.” That leaflet transformed Adamson’s novel. “Immediately the book locked into a specific topography. There were so many stories of that event; of the entire mountain collapsing and the survivors digging themselves out. I pictured those men with their lit mining helmets, emerging out of the ground.”
Adamson was also drawn to a time when the frontier was in flux and “eccentricity was much more accepted”. Her novel is populated with oddballs and outlaws, each one entirely convincing. Mary Boulton is, of course, the main renegade; a resourceful woman, yet one whom Adamson would not allow to become a feminist stereotype. “She has a serious stain on her character,” Adamson concludes, “and I hope that readers understand how that might have happened. Not because her husband beat her; I couldn’t make it that simple. I wanted to mull over the notion of culpability. What happens when you do something momentous? Does God catch you with a pitchfork? What if you get away with it?”
Some readers may see Mary’s actions as neatly justified, but Adamson rejects that interpretation. “In entertainment, payback is expected,” she concedes, “but in life it doesn’t often happen.” In other words, The Outlander is a grown-up novel. “Thank you,” Adamson says, “I’ll take that.”
The Outlanderby Gil Adamson is published this week in Europe by Bloomsbury, £10.99 in the UK