Gil AdamsonNew York: Ecco/Harper, 2008
$25.99/Hardcover, $14.99/Trade Paper
"The girl stood in her ditch under a hard, small moon. Pale foam rose from where her shoes had sunk into mud. No more voices inside her head, no noise but these dogs."
-The Outlander. p.4
I probably should have known better about Gil Adamson's The Outlander the moment I read the inside jacket of the book. For one thing, I don't like Cold Mountain. The Outlander comes highly recommended to anyone who thought the world of that incredibly popular Charles Frazier novel. The Outlander has also had some pretty strong reviews behind it. It was named one of the best books of 2008 by The Washington Post. And who are we to argue with The Washington Post?
Even so, I didn't think it was fair to judge The Outlander just because someone from the publishing company's marketing department seized an opportunity to grab the average reader's attention, nor from some list-based recommendation by a famous newspaper. The story certainly had some pull to it. I had nothing against a plot involving a young woman named Mary Boulton, battling solitude and madness as she makes her way across the West in order to evade the brothers of the abusive husband she recently murdered. A story like that brings to mind the cruel circumstances and bleak black comedy of Nick Cave's best songs. It also struck me as a strange, strong likelihood that Mary Boulton had probably met the equally tragic Delia from the music of Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan somewhere along the road of life's sad stories.
The first few of chapters certainly seemed to suggest that I had made the right call in "giving it a shot." Author Adamson has made a strong reputation in some circles for her poetry and short fiction. She definitely knows how to get a story to run at breakneck speed, and expects us to keep up for the duration of the ride. There's no question she knows how to drop readers into the damaged mind of a potentially hopeless lunatic girl, on the run from some unforgiving brothers-in-law and however many thousand vengeful dreams and spirits that kick around the back of her mind in a furious bid for position.
"Quiet intensity" would be a good way to describe those first few, frantic pages. They amount to wonderfully effective stuff. At first, we don't even know Mary Boulton's name. We also don't know a whole lot in the way of her circumstances. We just know she's on the run with nothing to her name but the clothes on her back, a small Bible and the bloated, bullying memory of whatever it is that she's done. Certainly not a bad way to start. This might be a reflection her short story/poetry background, which could have informed Adamson's ability to just drop us straight into the heart of the "action."
Trust the strength of her imagery and the emotions of her protagonist to keep our interest firmly locked into the story for the first few chapters. There's an incredible sense of doom that hangs over the trees, the deathly pale sun, the ground that threatens to reach up and trip Mary before she can even get over the next hill. We're by her side in the first moments of her flight from home, and there's really no telling where we might end up. Not only is the ending nearly impossible to predict early-on, it's something of a challenge just knowing what's going to happen on the next page. It's pretty easy to get wrapped up in feeling as though we're constantly in the dark. To appreciate Mary as a character, to get lost in her tragedy and struggle to retain her sanity, we've got to be willing to surrender ourselves to her frame of mind. And that frame-of-mind is well-served in these opening chapters. Adamson clearly cares about Mary, and she pulls out all the stops to make sure we'll care about her as well. She wants that to happen as quickly as possible. Hence, the choice to drop us into the line-of-fire. Adamson wraps her character in emotional energy that explodes across what feels like every line of her beautifully written, electrifying prose. Quickly, effectively, we're in Mary's head and ready for whatever she sees and feels. It's because of Adamson's talent for blending her character's intense perspective with evocative, breathlessly sharp imagery that we're able to get locked in so shortly into the story.
Then suddenly, the whole thing decides to go to hell.
"Suddenly" may not be the right way to put it though. The word obviously implies something happening very quickly and without prior warning. The Outlander's immense promise and subsequent deterioration does not happen at any particularly significant speed. It's a painfully slow process that begins to appear in the background details of the initial excitement the book generates. Pretty soon, this background noise becomes the foreground. After that, it's all you've got. Ambiguity in a story can be a good thing, but not when it starts to rudely wear out its welcome. The story opens under mysterious circumstances, with nothing to keep our attention but the world as Mary Boulton sees it. At first, that's fine. Her growing insanity, her surroundings sinking ever-further into inky darkness does make for some compelling, attention-grabbing stuff. The only problem is that after it grabs that attention, it doesn't make much of an effort to move forward. Of course, the story is moving forward. Mary is traveling, maintaining her desire to survive on little more than base instincts and meeting a cavalcade of odd personalities along the way. But that doesn't necessarily mean that we-the-audience are actually going somewhere meaningful.
Without question, it's important for a story to maintain its tone. It's another thing entirely to get locked into something that feels more like being trapped in a very specific holding pattern. After the ferocious opening, The Outlander does some phenomenal work building towards its conclusion. There's nothing wrong with that, except that it seems to reach that peak after about a hundred pages. And when that happens, we're pretty much left with the book repeating itself over and over and over again. Again, the story moves forward and things do happen, but it all feels eerily like we just read the exact same thing a page back. After a while, you can almost predict where each story point is going to be made. Mary's definitively crazy. She was probably right to kill her husband. As we all know, people suck, are prone to being hopelessly weird and often have personal demons that haunt their every step. The badlands of America around the turn the 20th century made for sadistic and unforgiving company. In other words, it's a fairly safe bet that you're going to have the book's formula memorized long before you actually get to the end. Even if you can't exactly predict the ending, you still wind up being able to make a pretty good guess.
If that doesn't bother you, then you might-well enjoy the book. For those of us who dislike relentless tedium, however, it pretty much sinks any of the vicious ambition of The Outlander's opening section.
Even the narrative suffers and eventually collapses. The language and poetic flow of the words start out as something that work beautifully in bringing us into the world of the novel. The Outlander is quite stunning at times, but when the rest of the book begins to flag, that striking prose goes right along with it. Slowly, cleverness becomes pretentiousness, and colorfully-creative becomes commonplace. At some points, you can even see where Adamson might have been straining to keep the whole show together. It's not that Adamson is a bad writer. What's more likely is that this is just another example of a good idea being unable to support the weight of the writer's storytelling goals. It happens to first-time novelists as often as it does to veterans, and that fact has never been more obvious than in The Outlander.
It's too bad. As a short story or even a novella, The Outlander could have been quite an extraordinary bit of writing. As a novel, it's just wasted potential and comes off as being a lot more pretentious than it actually is. The Outlander is like a first date painfully trying too hard to charm the pants right off of you. When the date is over, you walk away knowing there was some good in there. It's just hard to remember those good bits because the flash lasted a lot longer than the substance. As first novels go, this isn't exactly terrible. Disappointing would be a better word.
There's some talent in Adamson's work. Check out her short stories or poetry. As hard as it can occasionally be to find that talent, it's very much in the book's beginning and even in a couple of its later scenes. All told, there is just enough to make you hope she gets it right the next time around. It's just a matter of her finding an idea that can sustain itself the whole way through.
