The Outlander
From the Boston Globe Review
``In faraway places,
dark entanglements`` By Anna Mundow June 15, 2008
To my alien ears, certain American words fairly hum with romance.
"Ridge" is one of them. "Lonesome" is another. Their Anglo
equivalents - hill, lonely - convey none of the drama or the ache. In the
spirit of linguistic romance, then, let's "light out for the territories"
with another one of those exhilarating Canadian novels that transports us
instantly to the frontier. "The Outlander," a remarkable first
novel by Gil Adamson, recalls in its breadth and its exuberance Guy
Vanderhaeghe's "The Last Crossing," which I have raved about in the
past. Like Vanderhaeghe, Adamson takes us on a hunt. "It was night, and
dogs came through the trees, unleashed and howling. They burst from the cover
of the woods and their shadows swam across a moonlit field." That
beautiful, sinister beginning transports us instantly to the West in 1903,
where a young woman is on the run, leaving behind her murdered husband and
pursued by his twin brothers.
Mary
Boulton has been raised for genteel society, not wilderness survival. The
daughter of a former Anglican minister, the girl knows only how to ride -
horses are one of the delights of this novel - and how to flee. Within a few
chapters, however, Mary and her stolen mare are bedding down in the mountains
as winter approaches. "The night was so dark she thought something stood
between her eyes and the rest of the world. . . . Nothing but the sound of wind
through trees. Somewhere to her left, the breathing horse. And high above, the
slow funhouse creaking of pine branches."
Adamson's
descriptions of the woods and mountains are lyrical and startling, reminiscent
in their vividness of Thoreau or Twain, and her heroine is in the great
American tradition of fugitive wanderers. But Adamson's characters never become
types or, worse, archetypes. The loner who saves Mary's life and steals her
heart; the mining town minister who becomes her protector; the miners, the
stragglers, and the settlers - each has his or her own vitality and
consciousness. Even the old tracker who dismounts "with arthritic
languor" to read the traces of Mary's flight is memorable. Then there is
the action. "A whistling rain of arrows fell around them . . . she
imagined birds had begun to fall from the sky, embedding themselves like tiny
suicides in the ground, in the trunks of trees." An arrow extracted from
Mary's leg comes out "with a squeak, like a finger on glass." Just
try to stop reading after that.
(...)
Anna
Mundow is a freelance journalist living in Central Massachusetts.
©
Copyright 2008 Globe Newspaper Company.
