Gil Adamson

People who love to read fiction, especially historical fiction, experience a little bit of heaven when the storyline and characters are so good you just don't want it to end. That was my situation as Gil Adamson's Ridgerunner was coming to a close. "NO!" I called out to the Gods, as I turned the page to find the word "Acknowledgements" printed on one of the last pages. I didn't want to leave these new friends I'd made as I read chapter after chapter, page after page. They are so real, the time and place so convincing, and most importantly, the story captivating to the core.

Ridgerunner is the sequel to Gil's previous book, Outlander. That it reads like a stand-alone speaks volumes about the author's skill and talent. The time is 1917 and WWI is still raging, the place is the Canadian Rocky Mountains. A father and son, who love each other deeply and live in the wilderness, have just lost their, oh, so beloved, wife and mother to a mysterious illness. How they cope will reach deep into your hearts.

Michael Redhill, Scotiabank Giller Prize winning author said this: 

“In Gil Adamson’s Ridgerunner we meet thirteen-year-old Jack Boulton, whose quest — perhaps foolish, certainly dangerous — is to be reunited with his only living family member, his father. A beautiful and moving novel about the durability of family ties, Ridgerunner is a brilliant literary achievement, and in Jack Boulton, Adamson has created one of the most vividly rendered children you will ever encounter in fiction. I loved every page of it.”

Ridgerunner is published by Canadian publisher House of Anansi Press, one of my favorites from my earlier incarnation as a Publisher's Rep. 

Two of many memorable lines from the story:

"He sucked in a single breath and saw the vast country in which he had always lived without being part of it, and above that, Canada, left by the cartographer entirely blank and unnamed. He looked at that great vacancy for a long time, the way one looks out to sea, and it calmed him. In some irrational way he imagined he would leave this town, this state, leave America, leave himself behind, head north where surely it was quiet and uninhabited, and he'd just..... cease to be. Wink out and be gone."

"It had taken Sampson four tries to step inside. When, finally, he crossed the threshold, he had braced himself for her presence, her anger or sorrow, something that might blow over him and cling, like sand in his hair. Instead, very clearly, he'd felt nothing. Nothing." 

Here are Gil's fascinating answers to my interview questions:

Tell me about where you live and why you love it so much.

I’ve lived other places (Australia, Japan), and my novels are set in wilderness, but the fact is I grew up in a very big city; Toronto has more people than Chicago. 

We live in a small cottagey house on a leafy street full of kids, with schools and parks all around. Halloween is wonderful thanks to all the children. You go broke buying enough candy. 
I complemented one tiny girl on being a lovely princess, which was the wrong thing to say because she shrieked, “I’m an evil princess!” She’d had to explain it all night and was deeply pissed off. A couple of impossibly leggy Vietnamese kids came dressed as the Blues Brothers—gold star, kids. The ref was so old I couldn’t believe it. One girl came dressed as a full leaf bag. You gave her candy, she gave you leaves.

If I love Toronto, the city itself, it’s for the food. You can find almost any world cuisine here, and within each cuisine you can likely find the exact region you prefer. My husband is a talented home cook, and he likes being able to find any ingredient he wants. Galangal root, kaffir lime leaf, fresh tamarind, callalou greens, on choy. I recall my brother, however, being tormented by the fact he couldn’t find okonomiyaki that tasted quite authentic.

Obonomiyaki

Better than chow mein and chicken balls, I guess. You can get that here, too.  

Where were you living when you were 7 years old? Are they fond memories?

Rathnelly Avenue, in a quirky little neighborhood about a mile from the centre of downtown. There was a municipal water pumping station across the street with a wide green space that was eventually made into a park and playground.

Gil

The adults all decided one summer to form “the Republic of Rathnelly,” to have a yearly street festival, to print out passports for every household, and they even wrote to the prime minister of Canada (father of our current guy, as it turns out) informing him that the Republic was going to “secede from the nation.”  

He wrote back, amused, and said basically, “You can’t do that.” During the street festival, events included the egg toss, the slow-bicycle race (last one across the finish line wins), a mock battle in cardboard canoes with legs sticking out the bottom, and the dog-and-owner lookalike contest (very likely proposed by someone who knew they would win). It was a perfect place for a kid to grow up, and I miss it very much.

The other place I spent time was at my grandparent’s house outside the city, right on Lake Ontario, surrounded by trees. While the adults were busy failing to relate to one another my brother and I used to run around in the woods. One summer (I was about 7) there was a moon landing about to happen.

7 year old Gil

No one wanted to go back inside, so someone found several extension cords and brought the portable TV out onto the lawn. I stood in my bathing suit eating a sandwich, watched a man in white step onto the moon, but I didn’t think much of it at the time.

Is there a book that changed the way you look at life?

No. Not at life. But there have been books that utterly changed my understanding of what was possible in fiction and poetry. I remember the feeling of reading such books. It’s almost a physical lightening, a joy: You can do that? You can do that?

Do you have a favorite children’s book and what about it makes it so?

By children’s book I am assuming you mean things like Dr. Seuss. We loved all of them. We read comic books like Asterix, in English and French. The French puns were better. But my father was a natural educator, and he read to each of us, separately because of our different ages and bedtimes, every night of our lives until we told him to stop. He’d lie on the bed, a child’s head on his bicep, and hold the book over us so we could read,too.

Which we didn’t; we flipped through comic books and simply listened to his voice. Sometimes he’d say “Are you bored?” and we’d jump up and say “No I’m not, don’t stop.” He read books that were just above our “level,” adult books as well as kids’ fare. Huck Finn, Treasure Island, Charlotte’s Webb, Ferdinand the Bull, Wind in the Willows. He allowed the Narnia books but we had a talk about religion and the authors' intentions as we went along. He read books like Animal Farm which, from a child’s perspective, was about unfairness and made perfect sense. Sometimes, it backfired on Dad. I was so terrified by the drunk father scene in Huck Finn that he gently slipped over that part years later when he read it to my brother. As an adult I re-purposed that awful drunken scene and put it in Ridgerunner. So, you see where things end up sometimes.

What are the funniest or most embarrassing stories your family tells about you?

I used to capture snakes, just pretty little garters and ribbon snakes, and I’d keep them for an afternoon. I tried to kiss one once and it bit me on the cheek. It probably thought I was about to eat it.

My family never stopped razzing me for kissing a snake.

Is there a song that you listen to when you are feeling a bit down?

If I have a delicious desire to feel even sadder, Hope Sandoval’s “Drop.”

The way you drop

is like a stone

make like you're flying

but you've just been thrown.

Sandoval’s voice makes me crazy. But mostly I reach for Rodrigo y Gabriela’s “Diablo Rojo” 

for the sheer joyful energy of the guitars. 

That album got me through grief after my father’s loss. Gabriela uses her guitar as a percussion instrument, and there is something very cool about her.

How are you different now than you were in your 20’s?

 I was a complete idiot. Now I’m only half an idiot.

In Ridgerunner, Charles Hyndman's whiskey plays a part, have you ever had any?

I named drinks in this book after various people. When casting about for a name (of a horse or a whiskey or a street) I often shout to my husband “Give me a name for a horse!” And he does. But sometimes I actually solve the problem myself. My grandfather’s name was Charles Hyndman; not much of a drinker himself, but I think he would have liked the idea of his name on something so expensive and fine, even if it is fictional. Bratty’s Special Old, which appears earlier in the book, was named after a big real estate developer here in Toronto who won the right to have some author (me) name a character after him, thanks to a fundraiser. I had mixed feelings about the whole endeavor, and that’s why the whiskey in question burns on the way down.

Also, Jack’s love of books is clear. Brehm's Life of Animals is such a beautiful book, how did you hear about it?

Isn’t research funny? The exact moment when you found something seminal often vanishes in time, and the book itself seems to have been with you forever. It may be as simple as me searching for “books for children pre-1900.” Brehm’s Tierleben, in German, is one of the most beautiful books I’ve never seen. 

It’s hard to find a copy, but you can see scanned versions online. The gorgeous depictions of wild animals, the sheer range of zoological information, is stunning. As a child I would have slept with this book in my arms.

Plus I loved that he was so intrigued by the line “Gunnison manifested himself before the girl, to her obvious shock and delight,” by William Le Queux. Loved that.

From the sublime to the ridiculous: the whole story of William Le Queux is a hoot. He was a prolific hack. Death rays, espionage, sex and more sex. The prose is so bad it worked on me like pepper spray. I felt like crying. I didn’t feel well. And yet not only did his plucky secret agent (with the ridiculous name of Duckworth Drew) inspire a young Ian Fleming to write xenophobic and exciting 007 stories of his own, but Le Queux’s tales of German spies infiltrating British society and government (way before that was even a thing) actually inspired the creation of the British Secret Service. All thanks to a paranoia created by Le Queux himself.

William Le Queux

What a hornswaggler. I loved picturing what a bright but innocent young boy might make of the sexual innuendo in such books. What would “manifested” mean to him? (I actually wrote that line myself.) I do remember hearing people “talk around” something sexual in front of me when I was young, and man, the weird things you picture because you don’t understand things yet.

Is there something special or interesting about you that very few people know about?

Well, I was hit by lightning. Not smack-bang on the head, of course, or I wouldn’t be here. And I wasn’t harmed at all. There’s a word for the discharge that flows through the earth, seeking lower ground—that’s what went through me.

"If a genie came to me today and said I could do it again, I would."

I can’t say I remember it clearly, nor do I recall that awful moment when the lightning and thunder are no longer separate but simultaneous. I was on a camping trip in Quetico Park. Lake Superior is known for sudden, violent storms, and that’s what we got. It was short-lived and absolutely shocking. Anyway, I was fine. But I feel I should tell you how much better I felt afterward. Perhaps I was just glad it was over and the sunset was happening, but I don’t think so. I think electricity reset my brain somehow. That’s my way of understanding it. I found myself calm, content, and totally without fear—not a normal state of mind for me. What a relief to feel no sense of anxious self-preservation, no need to worry about my complex teenaged life, my family, my mother, was the car still in the parking lot after 2 weeks, what if it wouldn’t start … nothing was really important enough to worry about. The earth, with me on it, was doing its thing. The feeling lasted for about 12 hours and then began to fade. I very much regretted slipping back into the granular, quotidian, bearable pain of existence. If a genie came to me today and said I could do it again, I would.

And in a short essay…………………………

IF YOU COULD GO BACK IN TIME

to any period from before recorded history to yesterday,

be safe from harm, be rich, poor or in-between, if appropriate to your choice,

actually experience what it was like to live in that time, anywhere at all,

meet anyone, if you desire, speak with them, listen to them, be with them.

When would you go?

Where would you go?

Who would you want to meet?

And most importantly, why do you think you chose this time?

I keep trying to concoct something dignified and literary, but the truth is I would like to go back and see dinosaurs. You know, from a safe distance, and not touch anything.

That reminds me of a Bradbury story, something involving a butterfly, and fascism. I saw a cardinal up close the other day, its head cocked, eyes looking into mine—it was real and there. It’s frustrating that we don’t know how a pterodactyl sounded or moved, how it arranged its body to sleep. And about color, we know nothing. We now think dinosaurs had feathers, but when I was a kid they were assumed to be butt naked. Artists’ renditions often annoy me. There’s a term, I’m sure, for creating a theory from partial information that will look dumb later. Piltdown Man was a hoax, but boy did they believe it for 40 years.

We’ve only just realized the Easter Island heads have bodies and legs down there under the soil. That’s a head-slap moment.

Then again, I might like to go back and have a word with Virginia and Leonard Woolf. Assure them both that her work will still matter for some time and she will inspire untold numbers of other writers. But I’d really be there to give them shit about trying to cancel Robert Louis Stevenson and keep him out of “the canon,” trying to mark him as a writer of no account, because even if she didn’t like his writing style, what’s it to her? It’s hard enough being a writer without your colleagues ill wishing you. And by the way, it didn’t work.

Well Gil, you are the first ever to finagle multiple time trips from me, very clever! I'll see what I can do.
Thank you so much for the insights and stories of who Gil Adamson is; I feel I know you better now.

Readers, Ridgerunner won't be available in the US for a a few more months but you should definitely order it now from your local independent bookstore. They will let you know when it arrives and hold it for you.

Gil is also the author of :

                        

Please feel free to "like" Advance Reading Copy, on Facebook, thanks!