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.