Writer mines for details that bring history to life

“Ridgerunner,” Gil Adamson, 400 pages, House of Anansi, $32.95 The author of successful ‘The Outlander’ worked 10 years on followup

No matter who we’re talking to, every conversation these days starts out the same way: How are you holding up under COVID-19 restrictions?

“Life is strangely the same inside the house and completely different outside of the house,” says Toronto writer Gil Adamson.

Launching a new book isn’t giving her the chance to get out that it normally would — although it’s given her the time to have an expansive phone conversation about her new book “Ridgerunner,” a followup of sorts to her wildly popular “The Outlander,” the book that made her a writer to watch.

It was her first novel — she’d previously published a collection of linked short stories, “Help Me, Jacques Cousteau,” and two poetry collections, “Primitive” and “Ashland.” But “The Outlander” — not to be confused with Diana Gabaldon’s “Outlander” fantasy series — was something altogether different. She won or was shortlisted for prize after prize — the Dashiell Hammett Prize; the Amazon.ca/Books in Canada First Novel Award; the ReLit Award; the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize.

“It did change my life financially,” she says. “But, you know, that money is all spent now and I’m still me.”

The money’s not the point, though. “Kevin and I agreed that, regardless of trajectory or events, the real thing that’s important is if you look at the book on your shelf in your office and you’re happy with it.”

The Kevin she refers to is Kevin Connolly, the poet and editor who has been her partner for more than 30 years. Theirs is a literary household.

“What a terrible thing it must be for some writers who hurried through something, or have elements of the book they regret or weren’t allowed to keep, certain chapters they got bamboozled into changing,” she continues. “And then they look at the book on their shelf and they just don’t feel good about it.”

That desire to get it as perfect as she can reflects in the length of time it took to write these novels. “The Outlander,” published in 2007 when Adamson was 46, she’s now 59, took her ten years to write. And, if you’re counting, there’s more than 10 years between its publication and “Ridgerunner.”

“I just happen to be a very slow, careful, glacial writer,” she laughs. “And, you know, I do have hope that someday I will learn to write more quickly.”

I wouldn’t count on it, somehow. That is not a criticism. Her focus on detail brings “Ridgerunner” to life, enveloping the reader in a world they can almost see and feel and hear. It comes from the attention she “naturally, almost helplessly” gives to the make the sentences as well-written and as accurate as she can. Adamson hadn’t thought about writing a followup to “The Outlander.” And if you look at the acknowledgments at the back of the book — something I recommend everyone do, whatever book you’re reading, there’s plenty to be learned there — Adamson thanks “a book clubber” who wondered aloud what Mary Boulton and William Moreland would be like as parents.

“I thought, I know exactly what they’ll be like as parents because I created them,” she says. “The thing that was more interesting to me was what kind of person would they produce?”

She was sure that person would be calm, and relatively grounded. It wasn’t about how they raised him but about whom they raised.

“Ridgerunner” doesn’t follow exactly from the end of “The Outlander.” When Jack, Mary and Moreland’s son, arrives at the outset, he’s already 12. It’s November 1917. His mother is dead, his father has left him with a local nun, away from the family cabin in the woods he’d grown up in, while he goes out to steal enough money to secure his son’s future.

“There’s a lot of father-son stuff in this book,” Adamson says, referring to other relationships, including one based on a real-life escaped prisoner of war.

At first, she wrote the story with the child as a girl. But that just wasn’t working.

“There were several things that I took on in writing this book that made me a little bit nervous,” she says. “And one of them, of course, was I am not, nor ever will be, a teenage boy.” She spoke to men she knew about what they remember. She recounts that, when she and her brother were little, their father would read boys’ adventure stories aloud. She was familiar with that world and, even then, would be able to imagine herself in the story of Huck Finn, or as Jim Hawkins in “Treasure Island.”

Much of Jack’s story takes place in what was Laggan, Alta., and is now Lake Louise. There were plenty of photos of the place because even 100 years ago it was attracting all sorts of wealthy tourists, Adamson says. So she could easily construct the town as it was, in 1917, 1918 even earlier, and see what they’d be seeing — exactly where the outfitter’s place would be, for example.

“As a literary writer, you are not researching the way a regular researcher would. You are mining for details that you can use in the plot, in the character’s experience.” However, the research she did for “Ridgerunner” differed from what she did for “The Outlander,” much of which, she said, was about people’s day-to-day lives, particularly the lives of women.

Given that the backdrop of this book is the First World War, and a prisoner-of-war camp in the area features strongly, she wanted to get a feel for how the daily lives of those in the camp might have unfolded. She found official military diaries and read voraciously. “I was just making sure that I wasn’t going to write anything that a (war) historian — hopefully, fingers crossed and touch wood — will go ‘For goodness’ sake, you got that so wrong.’ ”

For all that the book features people who are loners or who are alone in the world — Jack without his family, Moreland, the nun — it really is a story driven by human connections and relationships. It’s about Moreland’s relationship to his son; the nun’s relationship to her own family and to Jack; or even the hermits, in the wilderness outside Banff, and their relationships to each other.

Another character, Samson, for instance, has a wife. He very much loves her — but has no interest in living with her; he simply visits all the time.

It’s the same thing, she says of these long-distance friendships, that happens to farmers. “When you are a farmer and your nearest neighbour is many, many kilometres away, they feel close to you. You feel like you know them well.”

Which makes this novel, while we’re distant but trying to maintain and make sense of our connections, just right for our times.