Outlander, or Cross-Stitch as the UK edition is called; I was quite cross about this for a while, until I found out that Cross-Stitch was actually the authors original and preferred title so it's the Americans who should be annoyed, thank you wikipedia; is an odd beast. I liked it, don't get me wrong, but I wanted to love it and that just never really happened. It came close a couple of times, but never quite gelled properly for me.
Stripped to it's barest bones, the plot is nothing fiercely original; a time traveler becomes trapped in an era alien to their sensibilities, and must adapt to survive. In this case Claire Randall, a battlefield nurse fresh from the wars, is whisked back in time to Scotland on the eve of the Jacobite uprising; as well as dealing with the rising tensions between the English and their Scottish subjects, she must also tread lightly for fear of her modern attitudes, and indeed her modern medicine, getting her the kind of reputation you really don't want in a still massively superstitious culture.
And that right there, is a plot I want to read. Unfortunately, it's a plot that goes off the rails once the inevitable love story comes into play.
Finding herself thrust into a marriage of political expediency Claire, in a shocking twist (which is so inevitable as to be revealed on the cover as part of the premise, despite not happening until a good few hundred pages into the book), falls in love with the man in question. Which is all well and good; except it isn't.
I'm not going to get up in arms about how she's already married and is therefore an adulteress, and a bigamist (maybe not technically; there's some admirably energetic doublespeak employed to explain why she isn't at all, no way, don't be silly. But, you know, she's married and she gets married again); which seems to be a major bugbear for some people, but I am going to have a problem with a couple of things.
Firstly, the much vaunted epic love between the two is completely absent in the first half of the book, when she is still looking for a way home and isn't looking at him romantically, before suddenly being shoved down our throats in as engineered and contrived a manner as I've ever read. She loves him because the author says she loves him, and the author says she loves him because, well, that's just what happens in stories like this. I think that if their relationship had continued in the 'grudging respect leading to deep friendship' vein of the early chapters, the book would have been the better for it.
Secondly, and I don't mean to be blunt, he beats her. It's presented in a matter of fact, 'that's just how they did things back then' light, and maybe it was, and maybe it would have been unrealistic to shy away from that, but the fact remains that while it may be the way they did things back then, it most certainly isn't how they do it where she comes from, and it's a betrayal of her character that she accepts it so readily. Yes, she protests, and yes, she makes token threats of what she'll do if he ever tries it again, but she is at his mercy, and he beats her, and she not only forgives him but their 'love' affair steamrolls from that point on. This is not a healthy relationship.
To be clear, I'm not talking about the controversial rough sex sections, which seem to cause as much consternation as the infidelity in some quarters; the record (and my google history) will attest that I have no problems whatsoever with that kind of thing between consenting adults, but the cold blooded, methodical, corporal punishment of a man who feels the need to control his wife... that left a bitter taste.
Moving away from the central relationship, we come to another problem, again on a sexual theme; homosexuality. There are two prominent homosexual characters in the novel, and while one of them is presented as an amiable and likable man who wins over Claire with his charm and wit, he's also a man with a long history of being predatory towards young boys lower in social standing and power; a 'kink' that is treated as a running gag. And the other is a sexual sadist who may or may not have molested his brother when they were kids. I'm not saying the prejudice is intentional, but it's problematic, regardless.
Then there are the plots that go nowhere, such as the Nessie style monster and the second time traveler. Both are presented as being a big deal; both fizzle out well before the climax. Hell, even Claire's efforts to get home are abandoned halfway through the book and her poor first husband all but forgotten about. In fact, I'm doubtful you could even say the book has a climax; it more just sort of dawdles along to a vague happy ending with the leads having run away and ignored their problems.
Now, maybe this stuff will be dealt with in the sequels, I don't know, but the fact is that this book wasn't written as the first in a series, and wasn't sold as such. As a standalone novel, it's a bit of a hot mess.
But, lest we forget, I did say that I liked, if not loved it. Why? Well, the aforementioned friendship between the leads was very well crafted before it devolved into the very dodgy sexual politics of their married life; the depiction of life in Scotland under the yolk of the English is evocative (if a little on the nose) and the political intrigue of the Clan power machinations is gripping stuff, even if it does fizzle out with the rest of the decent plots a hundred pages before the end.
Gabaldon is a good writer. Her prose is dense, but never so much so as to confuse or bore, and her characters, when they behave like human beings and not robots servicing a plot, are well drawn and for the most part likable. Let's just hope the sequels; which I will be reading; have a tighter focus, and a surer handle on their characters.
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| Diana Gabaldon |
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