“Outlander” by Diana Gabaldon: Review

Unless you have been living under a rock, you will by now have heard of Diana Gabaldon’s Historical Romance series “Outlander” and the TV series it spawned. I’d heard a lot of good things about this book, and I’m something of a history buff, so I decided to pick it up from my local dealer. Oh yeah- I’ve started referring to bookshops as my “dealers.” ‘Cos I’m addicted to books. Ba dum tss.

I’m so sorry.

Moving swiftly onward. The story follows a WWII combat nurse, Claire Beauchamp, who is reunited with her husband Frank in the year 1945 for their second honeymoon after a 5-year separation during the wartime years. They are honeymooning in that well-known Mecca of romantic getaways, Inverness. Everything seems just dandy until Claire touches one of the mysterious standing stones atop the hill at Craigh-na-Dun and finds herself transported back in time to 1743. There, she finds herself a “sassenach,” an outlander, and faces many dangers. She finds herself forced to marry the young highlander Jamie Fraser, and becomes torn  between her two husbands from two separate centuries.

I have to hand it to Gabaldon, she has written a page-turner in the literal sense of the word. This book may have been 850 pages thick, but I couldn’t put it down. The first chapter was a little slow, but otherwise, I tore through it. There was action, there was romance, there was Scottish griping, there were kilts.

The characters were well-developed. Claire was a great protagonist- she was funny, headstrong, sassy, intelligent and medically ruthless. She never gets boring or whiny, and even though she has a tendency to be a little Mary-Sue-ish- all the men love her, all the women are jealous of her, she’s always the cleverest and prettiest and bestest person in the room- she’s not annoying or obnoxious. She’s a strong character, and takes control of her situation most admirably. Her intelligence, spunk, and medical skill give her that oh-so-important ability to do something. Jamie Fraser is more than your archetypal main romantic interest- he’s gallant, charismatic, funny and charming, but also wounded on the inside, and flawed in a way that makes him a dynamic and 3-dimensional character in his own right. His character arc develops in a way that makes you care about him as a character, not in a way designed to make him mysterious and sexy. Even the smaller, background characters seem realistic and well-developed, and the villain, Frank’s evil sadistic ancestor Johnathan Wolverton “Black Jack” Randall, is suitably horrifying.

On top of that, the books were exquisitely researched and nicely written. Gabaldon herself started out as a research professor, and it shows as she vividly portrays every facet of life in the Scottish Highlands in 1743, from the medicine to the running of a castle to the judicial system. There were detailed descriptions and adrenaline-pumping action sequences and the whole thing was highly readable.

On the whole, the romance between Claire and Jamie was strong. They developed a strong friendship, and Claire clearly knew the difference between infatuation and love, never mistaking one for the other even after their almost immediate wedding. After the wedding, however, things got a little weird. Don’t get me wrong, there are still many poignant or tender moments between the two that convincingly propel their relationship from infatuation to love and make the reader invest in Jamie and Claire as a couple- it’s just that we have to get through all the funny business first. Seriously, after the wedding night, these two spend an alarming amount of time engaged in amorous congress. Now a little bit is alright, but frickle-frackle probably makes up about 50% of this book by my estimates, which eventually had me feeling a little:

*crickets chirping*

Having said that, this book was one of those that, if you stop to think about it, turns out to be absolutely unfathomably ludicrous. Claire single-handedly wrestles and kills a wolf, a rag-tag bunch of kilt-clad Scots storm a high security English prison using a herd of cows, a Catholic priest assures Claire that her bigamy is A-okay in God’s eyes, someone is rescued from being burned at the stake by a madcap last-second intervening Scotsman taking on a mob single-handedly, there is some incredibly problematic justification of wife-abuse and some equally problematic depiction of homosexuality, a rag-tag group of Scots storm a different high-security English prison, Claire somehow remembers enough incredibly specific details about pre-Jacobean Scotland to make any University professor burn with jealousy, Jamie and Claire are at it like hares 24/7, an honest-to-god dinosaur emerges from Loch Ness and has some kind of “Free Willy” moment with Claire, and there is apparently only one redhead in all of Scotland.

The size and eloquence of the book may try trick you into thinking it’s deep or intellectual or otherwise high-brow. It’s not. Make no mistake, this book is far-fetched, problematic, and often batshit insane. But I let myself be swept up in the story and accepted it for what it is- well-written, highly readable, extraordinarily detailed, highly addictive poppycock- and not only did I devour this book, I had a bloody good time whilst doing it.

Rating: ****

Let me know what you think of Outlander, or my review, down in the comments!