Books I Couldn’t Have Written: Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander Series

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Elizabeth Zelvin

I’ve been taking a break from mystery reading. Instead, I’ve been rereading the six books in Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series, in anticipation of the new one coming out soon. I’m finding them even more absorbing than on first reading, when I hurried through the pages—and there are a lot of pages in each book—impatient to know what happened next. Gabaldon pulls off a bravura performance every time, and as I read slowly enough to notice what she’s doing, I can see a number of different aspects of mastery of the novel form that I can’t imagine myself ever achieving as a writer.

For those who haven’t had the pleasure of reading Gabaldon, Outlander is the story of Claire Randall, a young married woman fresh from nursing on the battlefields of World War II, who steps into a stone circle on a hill in Scotland in 1945 and unexpectedly finds herself in the Scotland of 1743, two years before the rising of the Highland clans in support of Bonnie Prince Charlie and the tragic defeat at Culloden that broke the clans forever.

From the second Claire steps through the stones, I was swept away into the 18th century so powerfully that I hated to come back. Claire meets and is forced for her own safety to marry a young Highlander, Jamie Fraser. Jamie is the quintessential romantic hero and high on the list of fictional men that women readers wish they could take to bed. But he’s also a complex and intelligent man, a warrior, a scholar, a farmer, a woodsman, a born leader, and yes, very, very sexy. And Claire makes a fine heroine, with her healing skills (reinforced by a medical school education and twenty years of modern doctoring when she goes back to Jamie the second time), her courage and competence, and her adaptability to the very different life she finds herself in.

So what’s so great about these books?

1. They’re genre-benders: epic historical novels with a touch of magic and a strong dose of romance, which in this case means both Big Love and erotica. Gabaldon didn't invent the time travel romance, but I think she took it to a new level.

2. They’re well researched historically, giving a vivid picture of the times that ranges from battle to domestic life in great detail without being one bit pedantic. The research is not only tightly woven into the plot but transmuted into the fabric of character and action.

3. Extraordinarily well developed characters—they’re so well defined that I have had very little trouble keeping track of the huge cast of secondary characters over six books. They pass the “feels like family” test with flying colors. Jamie and Claire in particular are very lovable, and the secondary characters are variously likable, endearing, exasperating, hateful, or fascinating, just like real people..

4. Plotting. Something is always happening, and everything that happens is filled with tension, conflict, and excitement. And there’s plenty of forward momentum—each scene serves the story. On rereading the first book, I found a wonderful scene near the end that I had missed, believe it or not, on first, second, and third reading, probably because I was so eager to get to the resolution each time. I wonder if other readers noticed that Claire actually wrestles a wolf to death with her bare hands outside the walls of Wentworth Prison. Yes, Claire and Jamie are larger than life. But this reader is delighted to suspend disbelief.

In the fifth book, The Fiery Cross, she’s added three third-person point of view characters to Claire’s first-person narrative, and makes their experiences big and small—from fighting off a rapist to brewing an herbal remedy for migraine—so interesting that the reader is happy to linger and savor every moment. There’s a wedding scene (Jamie’s Aunt Jocasta marries Duncan Innes, one of Jamie’s followers from Ardsmuir Prison) that goes on from page 403 to page 545, and I swear I didn’t get tired of it for a moment.

5. Description, setting, smells, textures. Gabaldon rings endless and beautifully crafted changes on the weather, scenery, and conditions of 18th-century life. Thousands and thousands of them without repeating herself, apart from a fondness for the word “declivity.” Nobody’s perfect.

I don't have my copy of the new book, An Echo in the Bone, yet, but I've read the first scene. It’s every bit as gripping as the first 18th-century scene in Outlander. Jamie is lying wounded on a Revolutionary War battlefield, and Claire has to defend him from an awfully persistent mother-and-son duo of scavengers who want to slit his throat and strip him of his possessions. I can hardly wait to read the rest.

My Favorite Reads in Other Genres, Part II

Elizabeth Zelvin

My last post on this topic covered some beloved authors: Lois McMaster Bujold, Sharon Shinn, and, and Kate Elliott, especially their genre-bending series, respectively, the Vorkosigan saga, the Samaria novels, and the Jaran series. Here are some others that I love.

Diana Gabaldon’s wildly popular Outlander series is the gold standard for time travel romance, but it’s also a remarkable set of historical novels (sticklers may question the accuracy of the history, but it’s close enough for me) and precisely the kind of character-driven novel that makes readers fall in love with the protagonists and want to take them home. In this case, it’s 20th-century Claire, the World War II nurse, and 18th-century Jamie, the Scottish Highlander, who fall in love two years before Culloden, have a child, and go to extraordinary lengths to be together. Gabaldon herself has some entertaining forwards, and she admits that her husband claims she knows nothing about men. That’s to women readers’ advantage (and some men’s too—Jamie is also attractive to 18th-century gay guys), since Jamie is complex and charismatic and utterly romantic.

Elizabeth Moon has been sticking to hard science fiction lately, but I periodically reread the Sheepfarmer’s Daughter trilogy, aka The Deed of Paksennarion. It’s a fantasy: pre-technological world, elegant elves in the Tolkien tradition (and their cousins who have gone over to the dark side), paladins with mysterious powers. But Moon puts Paks, her protagonist, into a mercenary army where she learns to fight as a foot soldier in the rank and file. I believe Moon has a military background, and she’s great at the details: for example, how a group of soldiers would fight in formation with twelve-foot spears without knocking each other over. The coed army is presented in a satisfyingly matter-of-fact way, as is the fact that Paks is not interested in sex. She’s just a peasant girl with a low libido and a winning personality who wants to be a fighter.

The late Dorothy Dunnett wrote perhaps the most brilliant historical novels I’ve ever read, the Francis Crawford of Lymond series. Her intelligent characters are demonstrably brilliant. Her mastery of a huge historical and geographical canvas is amazing: 16th–century, Scotland, England, France, and as far as Russia and Turkey. Lymond himself is a “man of destiny,” one of those save-the-world superheroes that the reader can’t help falling in love with. And the heroine, Philippa, is a worthy partner—like Mary Russell to Laurie King’s Sherlock Holmes. This is the world whose princes spoke several languages at the age of five or six, and could write a poem, win a game of tennis, and ride a horse with equal skill. There’s just a little woo-woo to spice it up, including a very funny scene with Nostradamus and an oracle that can’t spell. Dunnett’s later House of Niccolo series, in the mercantile world of Europe and such exotic locations as Timbuctoo at the height of its glory as a center of learning, may be even more brilliant. But it’s the Lymond characters who are truly lovable.

Reading for Romance

Elizabeth Zelvin

I don’t write romance, but I read for it. No, I’m not confessing to a secret taste for bodice rippers. I read mostly mystery and some carefully chosen fantasy, SF, and historical novels. But what most of my favorites have in common, regardless of genre, is fully realized, endearing characters and meaningful relationships, especially though not exclusively romantic ones.

Looking first at my favorite mystery series, let’s take Marcia Muller’s Sharon McCone books. I love Sharon, but I’ve never fully bought her relationship, now marriage, with Hy Ripinsky. My pick among those books is Broken Promise Land, when Sharon’s assistant, Rae Kelleher, falls in love with Sharon’s brother-in-law, country star Ricky Savage. Some of it is told from Rae’s point of view, and for me it evokes that achingly emotional phenomenon, falling in love. Now let’s take Margaret Maron’s Judge Deborah Knott series. Like Sharon, Deborah makes a series of wrong choices before she finds a keeper. In her case, it’s a guy she’s known her whole life, Deputy Sheriff Dwight Bryant. And what a delicious twist it is that she lets her inner pragmatist insist she’s settling for a marriage of convenience, while Dwight conceals the fact that he’s been in love with her for years.

Sometimes an author fails to allow romance to triumph or draws the suspense out to my increasing frustration. I don’t think I’ve ever quite forgiven P.D. James for not letting Adam Dalgliesh get together with Cordelia Gray. And I wanted to shake Cynthia Harrod-Eagles, or perhaps her protagonist, Detective Inspector Bill Slider, for several books in a row as he shirked breaking with his irritating wife and committing to his delightful girlfriend.

Several years on the mystery lovers’ e-list DorothyL have taught me that I share my tastes across genres with quite a few other mystery readers. Even the ever-vigilant list moderators will allow members to post about Dorothy Dunnett and Diana Gabaldon. Both write mysteries, but it’s their more popular series, in both cases historicals with just a touch of woo-woo, that are so darn good. Dunnett’s Francis Crawford of Lymond and Gabaldon’s Jamie Fraser both figured prominently in a hugely enjoyable discussion on the list of which fictional characters DLers would happily go to bed with.

Tellingly, the list included Lois McMaster Bujold’s Miles Vorkosigan, who’s a terrific character and as much of a superhero as Lymond and Jamie, but not sexy and gorgeous like them. Miles is only four feet tall with a big head and a condition something like brittle bone disease—but he’s such a great guy that readers were ready to jump his bones. Virtually, of course. And it probably helps that we know how good he is in bed. The Vorkosigan books are science fiction by genre, though they often contain a mystery. My favorite, A Civil Campaign, does not. It doesn’t need one to carry the story: it’s the perfect cross between space opera and comedy of manners. And the romance between Miles and Ekaterin is very satisfying indeed. Bujold dedicates the book to Jane (Austen), Charlotte (Bronte), Dorothy (Sayers), and Georgette (Heyer), and I think she does her sources of inspiration proud.

Considering my tastes, you’d think I’d have a romance in my mystery, Death Will Get You Sober. But I don’t. My protagonist Bruce is too busy getting sober to fall in love, though he goes to bed once each with his ex-wife (whom readers will learn more about in a future book) and a witness. And if he did, both his sponsor and his best friend Jimmy would remind him that AA wisdom suggests no new relationships in the first year of sobriety. Bruce is one of those characters whose perch on the author’s shoulder is the driver’s seat. He won’t be hurried, and I can’t force him. In the second book, he has a romantic interlude, but it’s transitional for both partners. In the third, he’s attracted to a suspect, but it doesn’t work out. In book four, he meets someone who might become a girlfriend and a recurring character. But I don’t know for sure. He hasn’t told me yet.

So for now, I read for romance, but I don’t write it—yet.

Getting Lost in a Good Book

Elizabeth Zelvin

A few weeks back, Sandy Parshall used the expression “getting lost in a good book” in her blog post about the joys of suspenseful reading. It set off a train of association for me about how that happens and how it feels. As a mental health professional, I can tell you that the psychological phenomenon involved is dissociation. Getting lost in a book or movie, along with the long-distance driver’s road trance, is at the mild end of the same spectrum as dissociative identity disorder: the extreme condition that used to be called multiple personality. While it’s certainly not pathological, getting lost in a book produces the same effect of coming to with a jolt from a world that made the one you’re actually in vanish completely. There’s the same sense of having been somewhere else and having no idea how much time has passed.

Sandy also mentioned how sorry she is for people who miss this pleasure because they don’t read. A similar discussion was going on at the same time on DorothyL, triggered by some mystery writers’ experience of strangers—obviously not fans—who email or come up to them to announce that they only read non-fiction or that they only read the Bible. For me, it takes fiction—a story—to sweep me away that completely. My husband is a history buff and inveterate non-fiction reader. He’s always trying to involve me in his reading. He’ll chuckle aloud and say, “Listen to this!” as a preface to telling me some priceless tidbit about Napoleon or Frederick the Great. (When Death Will Get You Sober comes out, you’ll see I borrowed this trait for one of my characters.)

The standard answer to that or any other interruption in our house is, “Shush! I’m reading my bookie.” “Bookie” is our private baby talk for genre fiction, a novel on the light side of what the Brits call “a good read”—a story absorbing enough to sweep the reader away. It goes with teddy bears and cuddling up to read. My husband sometimes complains that it’s not fair to shush him, since I don’t always refrain from talking to him while he’s reading. But the truth is that he’s more willing to be interrupted when he’s reading serious history or something dense and weighty like a book by John McPhee. He’s absorbed, but not to the point of dissociation. I’ve noticed that when he lightens up enough to pick up a mystery, science fiction, or fantasy, he too says, “Shush! I’m reading my bookie.”

What lures me most intensely into an alternate world? While I read more mysteries than anything else, they were not the first books that sprang to mind. Historical fiction with endearing characters and a dollop of romance and fantasy can do it. I remember the pleasure of reading Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander for the first time. It utterly pulled me into the 18th century. Dorothy Dunnett’s Lymond books take me just as thoroughly to the 16th century. Come to think of it, Lois McMaster Bujold’s Miles Vorkosigan series, set in the galactic future and on an old-fashioned planet within it, does the same. The common elements are lovability and a touch of romance, combined with highly intelligent writing, brilliant characterization, and superb storytelling. Of course, there’s plenty of that in mystery too. I don’t want to come back from Judge Deborah Knott’s North Carolina or Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes’s England (and points east and west) either. So shush! I’m reading my bookie.