Review: Outlander

Outlander by Diana Gabaldon

My rating: 2 of 5 stars



Updated review September 6, 2014:

I was really underwhelmed by Outlander, and actually disliked it at many points. A lot of people really love it, and it’s hailed as one of the great romance novels of all time. But maybe that’s my problem with it. At 750 pages, I expected more than just a romance novel. I’ve read enough romances that this one just seemed like more of the same, nothing special. It certainly didn’t engage my emotions. I watched Clare and Jamie “fall in love” and was not convinced. They had a lot of sex. A lot. A couple of times “wanting" was equated to “loving" and they wanted each other a lot, so maybe that was supposed to be proof of love. But I really just felt like I was observing from afar, not really impressed with either character, and not feeling the love between them. That makes or breaks a romance in my experience.

Another whole topic is the difficulty I had with Clare’s lack of fidelity to her husband in the other time period - and the argument that it doesn’t matter because he hasn’t been born yet. It matters. Just a little admission that she no longer loved him because of their separation during the war, drifting apart, etc., might have helped since it was hinted at in the beginning. But she never actually realizes it. She continues to claim that she loves her husband too. I think it’s fair to say I wasn’t too happy with this aspect of the romance.

So, the romance failed for me. What else was in those 750 pages? Not much, honestly. There were period details - sometimes so many that I wondered what the point was and where it was going, although those were the more interesting aspects of the entire book for me (life in the keep, etc.). This is why I gave the book 2 stars instead of 1.

Aside from that, there was a lot of violence. When Clare wasn’t being expertly handled or disciplined (seriously!) by her man, she was on the verge of being forcibly taken by others. There were cruel men, those with no control over their appetites, and gangs of drunken and beastly men. I lost count of the number of times she was almost raped. I guess Jamie was the only man allowed to be honorable in the time period.

If the danger wasn’t rape, it was something else like a witch hunt or wild wolves. If it wasn’t Clare being almost raped, it was boys and men actually being raped and tortured. The period is depicted as very brutal and uncivilized, which seemed a bit more medieval to me than 18th Century Scotland should have been - but I’m not a historian so I could be wrong. Whatever the case, if Clare wasn’t having sex, she or Jamie were meeting with horrific violence of some sort. And although danger should have made the book more interesting, I found that the story dragged on and on. A romance should not be so long if that’s all there is to sustain the story. 200 pages is about my limit on pure romance. And dark violence isn’t my thing either.

One thing I can say is that I now understand what spawned an entire genre of time-travel romance, and why Scotland seems to feature so prominently in them. I have to say I prefer the others I’ve read, even though they made my eyes roll too. At least they were shorter and skipped the rape and torture.

So, I pushed through because I didn’t want another DNF book this year, and I wanted to see what the hype was all about. I thought maybe I was missing something that would become clear later on. Not so much. I was sooooo thankful when I turned the last page that I could move on to something else. I will not be pursuing any of the sequels (the number of which astonishes me).

August 23, 2014:

I'll try to review this properly later, but for now I'm just glad I managed to finish it.



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