Ridgerunner by Gil Adamson

Ridgerunner by Gil Adamson
House of Anansi, May 2020

A literary historical novel with the propulsion and atmosphere of a western.

I loved Gil Adamson's Outlander (2007), in which a 19-year-old white woman, Mary Boulton, is on the run from the law across the 1903 Canadian West, so I was delighted to learn that her new novel is a follow-up to Mary's story. In Ridgerunner, it's 1917 and Mary has recently died. Her widowed husband William Moreland and her son Jack Boulton are the main characters. There's also an ensemble of colourful secondary characters, including Sampson Beaver. Formerly a US marshall from Oklahoma, Sampson is now an old man living in seclusion in the mountains, and the nearest neighbour to William and Jack.

        Sampson took off his hat, turned his face up to the moon, and closed his eyes like a man sunbathing. Perhaps, he thought, we are toughest when we are young, and life wears us down; we become increasingly tender with age. 

Jack is indeed tough and capable at twelve, living on his own in the wilderness while his father is on the run, blowing up banks and stealing money so that his son will have choices instead of living in poverty. Everyone seems to struggle with their mental health, including Sister Beatrice, the nun who initially took charge of Jack after his mother died. Her inherited family house is in Banff, but town life didn't suit the boy.

        But a small town is a living engine run on talk, innumerable bees grumbling in their paper cells. Jack heard it everywhere he went. Gossip, opinionation, conjecture, speculation, debate.

Gil Adamson's prose is a pleasure. She evokes time and place beautifully. This is the kind of story where you can really sink into the atmosphere. Most of the story takes place in the Rocky Mountains near Banff and Lake Louise, but Moreland travels far. The following passage is an example of his experience of the prairies:

        But the prairie had puzzled him; the way you could walk for hours and seem not to advance. All around him were roads that ran so long and straight between wintering fields of unknown crops they seemed to vanish over the curve of the earth. He saw a ranching truck in the distance heralded by nothing but a soundless dust plume leaning with the wind. He watched it go, wondering where the driver was headed. Ranches, feed barns, maybe a killing house, where someone was making money on wartime bully beef. To the truck's right, a tiny fist of terrible weather hung over the land, so corralled by the miles it would never make it to where Moreland stood. How beautiful to watch weather work at a distance, without the slightest need to decide what that weather would mean to you. Rain, snow, lightning, it was happening to someone else.

Remote as the setting is, the outside world encroaches. Young men are scarce, having gone off to fight in the war in Europe. Hundreds of civilians deemed "enemy aliens" are imprisoned in internment camps at Castle Mountain and Banff, where Jack sees them being used as forced labour.

Moral ethics, loyalty, the class divide, motherhood, and father-son relationships are some of the issues that provoke thought. Overall, the plot and pacing make this a page-turner. It's intelligent and very readable.

Giller chances: MEDIUM HIGH - As enjoyable and well-written as Ridgerunner is, I don't see a larger truth, something that would lift this into award territory. I guess what I mean is that I didn't feel changed after reading this.

This post is part of a series. I'm on the Shadow Giller jury this year, so I'm reading as many qualifying Canadian titles as possible in order to come up with my own longlist prediction before the official one that will be announced on September 8, 2020. To see my other reviews that are a part of this project, click on the Shadow Giller tag. Also, please visit our Shadowing the Best of CanLit website to see what the rest of the Shadow Giller jury are up to. Thanks for visiting my blog.

Book Bingo: Six Lines Complete

Only three more squares to go on my Books on the Nightstand bingo card! My earlier book bingo posts are here (two lines) and here (four lines), in case you missed them.

Following are my comments on the books for the categories in the two vertical lines outlined above in orange.

WESTERN: Law of the Desert Born by Louis L'Amour et. al. [Graphic novel]

In the bottom panel,
the sole of his boot
comes right out at the
reader, and his hat
breaks into the panel
above, creating a nice
sense of motion.
(Click to make big.)

Thank you to Melwyk/Melanie over at The Indextrious Reader for recommending some westerns approached from a different slant (see the comments below my first book bingo post). I was tempted by Mary Doria Russell's Doc, but decided to save that for another time. Instead, I went with a classic that has been transformed into a graphic novel.
Writer Charles Santino and artist Thomas Yeates adapted Beau L'Amour and Katherine Nolan's audio script of Law of the Desert Born, which had already been adapted from a short story written in the mid-twentieth century by Beau's father, Louis L'Amour.
Designed with minimal text and an oversize page format, Yeates' realistic black and grey washed illustrations are a significant aspect of the narrative. I found them immediately appealing.
In an afterward, Beau writes, "One of the best aspects of the audio script was that there were no gunfighters, no hidden treasures, no girl who was the daughter of 'the richest man in the county.' It was just about working stiffs trying to keep their heads above water and doing a bad job of it." 
Yes! And the main characters are not clearly good guys or bad guys. I loved the ambiguity and the layers of loyalty and betrayal. It's very noir and I could not guess how it would end. It was excellent and I could not have been more surprised.
I could have slotted this into my THAT YOU THINK YOU WILL DISLIKE bingo category (if it hadn't already been taken) since I wasn't too fond of L'Amour's Hondo. I was as wrong about Law of the Desert Born as I was about disliking the book I did use for that category (Soccer In Sun and Shadow.) So, thank you to BOTNS book bingo for leading me to two books I never would have read otherwise!

HAS A PLACE-NAME IN THE TITLE: The Green Road by Anne Enright (Intersection with a previous line. See Book Bingo: Four Lines Complete.)

WITH A CHILD ON THE COVER: The Door: Poems by Margaret Atwood
The photo on the dust jacket is of Atwood as a child. (Awww!) Did anyone back then guess what a literary powerhouse she would grow up to become? I'm excited about her new stand-alone novel, The Heart Goes Last, coming out in September 2015. Meanwhile, I still find books of hers that are new to me. I spotted this poetry collection on a truck of recently-returned materials at the library. I've now read it through several times. So good! Wry, poignant, and relevant to contemporary life. I would recommend this to people who normally avoid poetry.

Owl and Pussycat, Some Years Later
"So here we are again, my dear,
on the same shore we set out from
years ago, when we were promising,
but minus - now - a lot of hair,
or fur or feathers, whatever.
I like the bifocals. They make you look
even more like an owl than you are.
[...]
But sing on, sing
on, someone may still be listening
besides me. The fish for instance.
Anyway, my dearest one,
we still have the moon." 

In my head, I can hear Atwood's distinctive voice and cadence as I read her poetry. She makes me smile.

AN AUDIOBOOK: Kindred by Octavia Butler [Recorded Books audiobook: 11 hr: read by Kim Staunton] (Intersection with a previous line. See Book Bingo: Two Lines Complete.)

WITH AN ANIMAL ON THE COVER: Blacksad by Juan Diaz Canales and Juanjo Guarnido [Graphic novel, translator unknown]
This is an outstanding collection of three stories in the style of 1950s hard-boiled detective noir, except with anthropomorphic characters. John Blacksad is a private eye with a muscular human body and the head of a black cat. I know this sounds weird, but it really works. I can also recommend another in the series: Amarillo. Readalikes: Grandville (Bryan Talbot); Britten and Brulightly (Hannah Berry); and Richard Stark's Parker series (Darwyn Cooke). Also, if you liked Mort(e) by Robert Repino, try Blacksad.

AN ACADEMIC/CAMPUS NOVEL: SuperMutant Magic Academy by Jillian Tamaki [Graphic novel]
It's a bit of a stretch to place it in this category, since it's more of a boarding school story, but whatever. Jillian Tamaki is brilliant and I love this anthology. The comics follow the lives of a group of students with magical abilities. My favourite characters include Marsha, who has a crush on fox-shapeshifter Wendy, and Frances, who is always staging feminist performance art. Check out some of it online here.

WITH A MYTHOLOGICAL CREATURE ON THE COVER: Nimona by Noelle Stevenson [Graphic novel] (Intersection with a previous line. See Book Bingo: Four Lines Complete.)

BY AN AUTHOR WITH AMERICAN INDIAN/FIRST NATIONS/INDIGENOUS HERITAGE: If I Ever Get Out of Here by Eric Gansworth [Listening Library audiobook: 10 hr 20 min: read by the author]
Louis Blake faces heartbreaking discrimination as the only Aboriginal student in his Grade 7 class in the 1970s. He is from a poor family on the Tuscarora Reservation, not far from the Canadian border in New York State. I picked this up because of a recommendation by Debbie Reese at American Indians in Children's Literature. It made me laugh and it made me cry.
Readalike: The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian (Sherman Alexie).

ROMANCE OR LOVE STORY: The Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford
(Intersection with a previous line. See Book Bingo: Two Lines Complete.)

SET IN EUROPE: Antennas Everywhere by Julie Delporte [Graphic novel, translation by Helge Dascher]
A fictional diary of a young woman in France who suffers a debilitating sensitivity to the electromagnetic radiation emitted by modern technology. I was immediately sucked in by this story and I love the impressionistic style of art and text, both of which are rendered in coloured crayon. Delporte now lives in Canada.
Readalike: The Voyeurs (Gabrielle Bell) for another graphic memoir with a melancholic atmosphere; Girl In the Dark: A Memoir (Anna Lyndsey) for another rare disorder connected to technology.

Coming up soon: Book Bingo Blackout!

Hondo by Louis L'Amour

For over 10 years, I've been giving workshops and presentations on the topic of readers' services, which is the art of matching readers with books. When someone approaches a library staff member and asks for help finding something good to read, an ideal starting point is: "Tell me about something that you've read and enjoyed."

There's a particular film clip that I've often used in an introductory course. In it, a man responds to that question, talking passionately about Hondo by Louis L'Amour. Last week, before I gave my annual presentation on readers' services to students in the library and information technology program at MacEwan University, I decided it was finally time for me to read Hondo.

So, I did. I tried to keep an open mind. It's set in 19th-century southeast Arizona. Hondo Lane is a US Army Calvary scout who falls in love with Angie Lowe, a woman who is raising a small boy on a remote ranch. Her husband has abandoned her but he shows up later. Meanwhile, a treaty breech has caused the Apache people to be at war with the US Army and every white settler.

Hondo was written in 1953, when attitudes toward women and Aboriginal people were different. L'Amour is sympathetic to indigenous peoples... in a noble savages kind of way. Hondo Lane had lived among the Apache with an Aboriginal wife, who had died. The following is just one of the many passages that made me cringe:

"He was no man to be thinking about a woman. He had never lived with a woman... wouldn't know how to. He wouldn't know how to handle a kid, either. And women... It was one thing with a squaw. After a while you knew them. But a girl like Angie, now, that would be different."

That Hondo's Apache wife doesn't even count as a woman is bad enough. White women are helpless without a man's protection. Angie grew up on a ranch, yet needs a man to look after anything to do with tools. She is somewhat of a damsel in distress, mopping the floor when she doesn't know what else to do, and is presented as a paragon of womanly virtues. Hondo admires her clean hands and she gets all bashful that he noticed. Oh, please.

My sister Simone is an example of a farmer who can build
and repair pretty much anything she sets her mind to.

Today is International Woman's Day, a fine day to contemplate sexism:

"There were things a man must face and things a man must do that no woman could understand, just as the reverse was true."

L'Amour's bad guys have no redeeming qualities and the good ones are only slightly more complex. The reader in the film clip that I mentioned likes that Hondo uses his wits, and only resorts to violence as a last resort. True enough, but I need more than a strong and silent he-man hero.

I don't care for romance in general, so that aspect of the plot did not appeal. Then there are the military ideals that are foreign to my nature:

"He saw all that remained of Company C, the naked bodies of the dead, fallen in their blood and their glory as fighting men should."

So what does that leave? The western genre definitely has a focus on plot and this one has good pacing. While I had guessed early on how things would end up, there were enough obstacles to keep me interested.

Westerns tend to be rich in jargon and Hondo is no exception. I came across words like sutler, guidon, jacales, cantle, simoleons, lineback (horse coloration), and nopal. There's also some evocative landscape imagery:

"Broken clouds floated above, and in the far off west the storm rolled and grumbled like a drunken sergeant in his sleep."

Readers who love westerns are looking for the myth and legend of the wild west; a nostalgic tone, cowboys and Indians action; a romanticized depiction of a particular historical and geographical setting; and a lone hero who triumphs over injustice. Louis L'Amour has got this all wrapped up. But this kind of book isn't for me. Give me less typical westerns, like The Sisters Brothers or True Grit, instead.

Albert of Adelaide by Howard Anderson

Howard Anderson's Albert of Adelaide is a charming, oddball tale about a platypus who escaped from a zoo with a quest to find somewhere that he could feel at peace. In the remote desert of northeastern Australia, the first animal that Albert the Platypus encounters is a wombat arsonist and con artist named Jack.

"Jack paused to pour more tea into his cup. 'I don't know how much you know about wombats, Albert, but we're a boring lot, let me tell you.'
'I've seen one or two from a distance, but you're the first one I've ever talked to,' Albert replied.
'We live in deep holes, come out in the early morning or late in the evening, eat some leaves, and then call it a day. What kind of life is that?' [...]
Except for all those leaves, the life didn't sound too bad to Albert. 'Quiet.'
'Damn right it's quiet. It was too damn quiet for me.' Jack spit a tea leaf into the fire."

Some of the characters that Albert meets are not so friendly as Jack. In a bar at Ponsby Station, he encounters outright prejudice: "WE RESERVE THE RIGHT TO REFUSE SERVICE TO ANYONE WHO ISN'T A MARSUPIAL. The Management." Misadventure ensues.

It is rare to find an allegory written with such a light touch as Albert of Adelaide. Animal fantasy is also an unusual subgenre for an adult audience. Actually, this book would be fine for readers as young as 9 or 10. I would recommend it to anyone who enjoyed the film Rango.

Readalikes: The Sisters Brothers (Patrick DeWitt); Mr and Mrs Bunny--Detectives Extraordinaire! (Polly Horvath); and The Rabbits (John Marsden and Shaun Tan).

The Sisters Brothers by Patrick DeWitt

Set in 1851 during the California gold rush, this adventure is told in the introspective voice of Eli Sisters, a gentle-hearted contract killer. His job doesn't suit his temperament, but Eli follows the lead of his more ruthless older brother and partner in crime, Charles. Eli is loyal to Charles, while being aware of his faults. He also has complaints about their shared living arrangement. "Charlie has many unsavory acquaintances. They have no respect for the traditional hours of sleep." Eli himself is prone to sudden rage, but only when confronted by the actions of a bully.

Eli describes mastering a surge of anger: "My pants were still down and after collecting my emotions I took up my organ to compromise myself. As a young man, when my temper was proving problematic, my mother instructed me to do this as a means of achieving calm, and I have found it a useful practice ever since."

The chapters are short and the pace is quick. If you like darkly funny books with a strong sense of place and told in an original voice, you will enjoy The Sisters Brothers as much as I did.

Pair this with True Grit (Charles Portis) for another unusual western, or with In Bruges, a comedy about a couple of hitmen written and directed by Martin McDonagh.

True Grit by Charles Portis

Oh. Wow. This book is AMAZING. The plainspoken narrator, Mattie Ross, totally won me over with her voice. It has the feel of a memoir, rather than a novel, as Mattie looks back on the winter when she was 14, when she left her home determined to avenge the murder of her father. She is practical, unsentimental and unselfconcious. She is a force to be reckoned with, undaunted by the lawlessness of the old west.

The story has plenty of adventure and action as well as colourful characters. I'm not surprised that it's been translated to film. Not having seen either of the movie versions, I can't say how closely they follow the book. I look forward to watching the Coen brothers version soon. (Well, not so soon. I just checked and there are 464 people ahead of me on the waiting list for the dvd at the library.)

I listened to the Recorded Books audio edition (6.5 hours) read by Donna Tartt. Her deadpan delivery is perfect for the part. In an afterword, Tartt says that four generations of her family all fell in love with this book at about the same time. I know exactly how that feels and I'm already planning to buy copies to give as gifts. I'm sure that my mom and siblings will love it too.