If one had a good editor who really wanted to sell one’s work, said editor might suggest the kind of gimmick that Diana Gabaldon uses in her torrid Outlander. One turns in a well-written, but pedestrian romance story full of fantasy sex and romantic environs, only to have the editor suggest that maybe time travel would make this book more palatable to a wider range of audience.
So, one frames said historical romance in a time travel device, but instead of going science fiction with the time travel, one goes pixie dust and druidic on the tired device. A Stonehenge-esque ring of blarney surrounds our feisty, independent modern woman, Claire Randall, as she is swept back to the Braveheart-era Scottish highlands.
With a setup like that, it would be hard to write a boring novel, and Gabaldon has avoided that rather small likelihood. Instead, our initial groans are treated to a detailed and realistic depiction of Scotland and its inhabitants in the mid-18th century. Evoking the sights, sounds, and smells of that bucolic and deadly time, Gabaldon succeeds marvelously in making us forgot the terrible way we got here and lets us fully enjoy the complete world she has created. Furthermore, she populates that world with rogues, heroes, kindly mothers, and a despicable villain.
The fact that this villain is an ancestor of her husband provides the twist that brings this book above its initial intimations. The main characters musings on ancestry, familial/clan pride, and the place of women in the society she is thrown into allow us to stay engaged in the story and not just wrapped up in its effective telling. Gabaldon perfectly captures the Scottish brogue and lilt in the written dialog and uses her mastery of its tones to help solidify what might otherwise be cardboard cutout characters.
I don’t want to like this book. In reading it, I kept sensing that I was being tricked into reading something below me; that I would get to the last page and find some trademark of Harlequin. Either I am not as high-minded as I like to think, or there are greater ideas being held forth in this novel. Ideas of masculinity, honor, loyalty, and love are examined from many points of view and splayed upon like the rabbit on the spit in Castle Leoch.
Gabaldon deftly hides the turmoil of Claire’s fall from “liberated woman” in the many sex scenes in the novel. I was turned off by what seemed gratuitous sex that often occurred in the most unlikely of situations. It works on the one hand to show us how uptight are our attitudes toward such a natural act in the same way that Claire’s supposed modern liberation is shown to be less than liberal at all. This knowledge is not as enlightening as it seems as the darker side of the woman being relegated to provider of pleasure and solace peeks out around the sunlight of physical liberation. We sense that she has only traded one type of bondage for another.
In this way, Gabaldon has given us a quick, exciting read with truly likable and dislikable characters while examining and subverting some of our “modern” notions of the place of woman in the workplace, as warriors, and as strong members of a community.
