HOW BEST TO equip you for a journey into the thrilling and whimsical landscape of The Outlander? I want to be a worthy guide, so I will step lightly and quickly, like a woman dashing across a river, and attempt to leave little of my own scent behind.
She is unsure which way to go.
Upriver or down?
Pursued by dogs she wades backward
through the cane brake
to erase her scent.
At a ferry, she crosses to a new world,
hooded and rotting in her funeral skirt
of curtain and bedspread.
Gil Adamson penned these lines in a long poem titled, “Mary,” ten years before the publication of The Outlander. It turns out that the poem’s eponymous figure is our first glimpse of the novel’s protagonist, Mary Boulton, a woman “widowed by her own hand.” In an interview, Adamson confessed that when she finished the poem, she wasn’t entirely satisfied with it. “In retrospect I suppose it was because I wasn’t finished with the idea, I wasn’t finished with the story.” And so she followed Mary further into the woods.
The Outlander’s gorgeous prose owes much to its origins as a poem and to its decade-long gestation. The language is as layered and rich as the mountain in the mining town where much of the novel takes place. Every line is pressurized; the prose harnesses a near-explosive energy. In the course of those ten years, Mary’s character also solidified. Whereas the poem ends with an image of her as “pitiless and spectral,” the novel depicts her as a flesh-and-blood girl with a hapless history. Raised in a house of mourning by a preacher father who loses faith after his wife dies, Mary has a melancholy childhood. She grows up to find herself even more isolated — a woman trapped in a loveless marriage on a homestead miles from anyone. Her circumstances beg for our sympathy. Yet the novel retains the poem’s original impulse: Mary murders her husband because he has had a hand in dealing her a great loss.
The novel doesn’t confide this at first. Instead it begins in medias res, after the murder: Mary is being hunted, pursued across the mountains by her dead husband’s brothers, red-headed twins hell-bent on revenge. Her flight through the Banff Rockies is rendered in precise and stunning detail, but her precipitous journey is as much psychological as it is physical; the red-headed “abominations” drive Mary further into herself. Perhaps they represent the punishment and retribution of her father’s scripture, though one of the many paradoxes of Mary’s character is that despite her religious upbringing, she is haunted less by guilt than by grief. The demons she flees are those wrought by memory.
But to speak of the book as a study of one character’s reckoning with her own grief is to reduce it in a way I’ve promised not to do. It gives no intimation of the great fun to be had here — the roiling, rousing interludes with Adamson’s wild pantheon of characters: the wealthy crone, Mrs. Cawthra-Elliot, and her sadistic maid, Zenta; Henry, the Crow Indian, and Helen, his Baltimore-born wife; the merry Reverend Bonnycastle who lives in a cock-eyed house; and McEchern, a dwarf who sells bootleg whiskey and runs a bathhouse. These delicious episodes trace Mary’s slow movement from the land of the shades back into the company of the living.
Most evocative of all is Mary’s stirring romance with William Moreland, the Ridgerunner. Moreland is a wanted man, an outlander who shuns society. His heart is as frozen as the hills he lives in, and his solitude has been so protracted that he’s surprised to hear he’s missed the turn of the century. Mary has everything to learn from Moreland about self-sufficiency and survival. And he has something to learn from her about the pleasures of human connection and desire.
What is the relationship between freedom and love? Can they co-exist or are they destined to snuff each other out? These are the questions that preoccupy Moreland. For her part, Mary is concerned with whether anguish and bereavement can ever adequately be overcome. But there’s little time for musing; the twins keep after her. Their pursuit is relentless.
Will Mary’s struggle turn her into the nightmare apparition of Adamson’s poem — a “quick, descending fury” — or something else? I’ll not give away the answer, or anything more, wishing to preserve the great pleasure and surprise that await you in these pages.
For Adrian, the good father