Sally Cooper Reviews Gil Adamson's Ridgerunner
Gil Adamson. Ridgerunner. House of Anansi. $32.95, 439 pp., ISBN: 9781487006563
“So you found out your normal daily lifestyle is called ‘quarantine.’” The COVID-19 pandemic has spawned many such memes. It’s a time when some of us are shuttered alone in small spaces, others in confinement with loved ones they’re not used to seeing every minute of every day. Community and self reliance are key. Reading is impossible. But also, at times, with the right book, a balm.
Gil Adamson’s rich and exciting second novel Ridgerunner, dwells in the nuances of solitary sorts: the outlaws, the outliers, the unloved. Set in 1917, in the unforgiving, heart-stoppingly beautiful landscape of Banff, Alberta, while Canadians were off fighting in World War I, Ridgerunner both embraces and upends familiar tropes as the wild west faces mortality along with the rest of the world.
Ridgerunner picks up several years after the end of The Outlander, Adamson’s first novel, finalist for several prizes and winner of the Dashiell Hammett Prize for Literary Excellence in Crime Writing, the ReLit Award and The Drummer General’s award.
Jack Boulton, son of outlaws Mary Boulton and William Moreland, finds himself taken in by a nun after surviving a life-threatening illness. His mother newly dead, his father vamoosed, 12-year-old Jack faces long days and nights alone but for school bullies and the nun’s library of forbidden books. The nun, an incompatible, layered character, aims to colonize (civilize) Jack to the point of changing his name and clothing and routine despite having promised to care for him temporarily while his father steals enough money to secure his boy’s future. That is, until Jack runs away.
Like The Outlander, Ridgerunner is episodic, with delightful, sinewy language that takes time with the details of the moment, of humour and whimsy, that often get swept over. Dogs and horses are impeccably observed, as are Jack’s youthful qualities, the objects in his cabin, the mountains and woods:
He found a crusted brick of salt his mother had kept in an empty ammunition box; sugar in pretty good shape; some chicory, which he generally refused to drink, but without coffee, it would have to do; and the end of a plank shelf, a blackened blob of… something. He bent to sniff it, immediately staggered back, stood aghast for a moment, and then gagged. It might once have been jerky of some sort but it was now spongy with rot and mined by ants, lying in a shadow of its own grease. He took it between finger and thumb and straight-armed it out the door, side-shuffling across the clearing, past the creek, toward a rock precipice, where he flung it into the air and watched it flutter stiffly into the bristling forest below.
Adamson’s writing soars when describing Banff and how it is changing, the infringements of logging, the railway, and tourism, zeroing in on war prisoners at work on the road from Banff to newly-renamed Lake Louise. Adamson sets up Jack’s story, carefully, in counterpoint to his father’s methodology, moving fluidly from character to character. The adventure accrues as stories weave together, climaxing in a genuinely shocking plot twist.
Adamson’s sentences, her observational humour, fall in the Cormac McCarthy tradition without the Faulknerian flourishes. There are faultless lines, attentive to sense: “Strange how quietly it came, whispering along the line. A leisured drumming in the distance. He pressed a boot heel against the track and felt the train coming.” But Ridgerunner is not without its gothic elements, the nun’s story a terrible call back to a woman’s twisted loneliness in William Faulkner’s short story, “A Rose for Emily.” The war is distant and some characters experience dramatic events (a son who volunteers for service; war prisoners working on the railway) in memory, rather than in real time, keeping some of the story at bay.
The novel dwells in memory by necessity, too, as Adamson explores themes of grief, loss, abandonment, survival, and coming of age. The risks and gambles of having and caring for children; the dangers external and internal and unexpected. The porous boundary between youth and manhood and the way grief moves in the body, these themes deepen Ridgerunner’s adventure and mystery.
In a time of enforced self-isolation, a novel about a solitary outlaw and his abandoned son, a boy who chooses life alone in the woods over life under the care of a possessive woman, is both timely and out of time. Jack and Moreland are alone by fortune and by choice; the devastating war is being fought on distant soil, not affecting them directly. They are set apart in a way it is hard to be in our current situation, fighting what cannot be seen, forging resilience, grieving, finding each other.
Sally Cooper is the author of the story collection Smells Like Heaven (ARP Books, 2017) as well as two acclaimed novels. Her third novel, With My Back to the World, is was published in 2019 with Wolsak & Wynn.
Follow Sally on Twitter @cooper_sally