Drums of Autumn

Author: Diana Gabaldon

Genre: Historical, Romance, Sci-Fi

Rating: A-

The fourth instalment in the Outlander series, Drums of Autumn takes our heroes Claire and Jamie Fraser to the American colonies just before the American Revolution.  While Claire knows what is going to happen she's not certain an all the details and knows that she and her family must walk a thin line so as to survive the Revolution with their lives intact.  Newcomers to the land, the Frasers must establish themselves and Jamie dreams of gathering up the men that he was in prison with.  Meanwhile, in the mid-20th century their daughter Brianna is coming to terms with now essentially being an orphan, having lost her mother and the father that she has only just learned of.  In order to come to terms with this, Brianna and the historian Roger Wakefield seek out information about Claire and Jamie, with the hope of discovering what happens to them.

The question that I always have here is just why Claire and Jamie decide to settle in America, at least knowing what they know.  Regardless of their allegiance to the British crown (which does exist for Claire if not her husband), being somewhere largely unaffected by the war just seems kind of safer and in the long run smarter.  Once they commit to making life work in America I get why they chose to stay, but I always wonder why they decided to make that commitment in the first place.  I don't even buy that Jamie wouldn't have had friends or family in Canada to help him establish himself - Jamie seems to have friends or family just about everywhere he goes.

That being said, I did like the general story of Drums.  Things get a lot more complicated in this part of the series than they ever seemed to be in the first two (or three) books, but it's an enjoyable complicated.  I am never too sure about Brianna and Roger as characters, and even less so as time travellers.  Claire seems to have fit in both the 18th and the 20th century, while Brianna and Roger seem to only fit in the 20th, despite their travelling to the 18th (and Jamie, who is stationary in time, doesn't seem as though he would fit in the 20th, although if given the opportunity and need I have no doubt that he would make it work if it meant being with Claire).  I do like the overarching villain of Stephen Bonnett, though, and find the threat that he adds to things to be really interesting.  I grew to kind of hate Geillis in the earlier books, and not in a good way, so I was glad to see that they were really done with her and had moved on to a new threat - or to at least be given that feeling.

Voyager

Author: Diana Gabaldon
Genre: Historical, Romance, Sci-Fi
Rating: B-

The third novel in Diana Gabaldon's critically acclaimed Outlander series, I have to say that I think that Voyager is probably the weakest, at least in so far as her novels go.  While there is a story here a lot of it seems to be more about a justification of her desire to reunite protagonists Jamie and Claire and move them, once again, towards the action.  While I appreciate the sentiment and I do largely agree with the desire to reunite our time traveller with her soul mate, there is still a big part of me that can't help but feel as though more so than most of Gabaldon's books, Voyager really fails to stand out on its own and really serves instead as a bridge covering the cap between two separate parts of the series.

Voyager picks up where its predecessor, Dragonfly in Amber, left off, with Claire facing the revelation that Jamie is not dead, as she had long believed, but rather very much alive - or at least, would be, 200 years in the past.  Time travel inherently makes understanding things like that more complicated.  Claire sets out on a journey to reunited with her man, while the daughter that she is leaving behind, Brianna, comes to terms with the knowledge that the man she thought was her father wasn't, and that she's now about to lose the only parent that she has left.  Meanwhile, Roger Wakefield is faced with the very pressing desire to be a big part of Brianna's life.

I already said this, but I think it bares repeating.  This book is a bridge between two connected but rather separate stories; Outlander and Dragonfly are about Scotland and the Rising, while the later novels are about America and the revolution.  This book serves to connect the two and to establish the younger generation.  While Jamie and Claire continue to play important roles in these books, in a manner of speaking they also become more and more about Brianna, Roger, Young Ian, and other characters more their age.  I understand that, and I really respect that, although I do think that in later books the series becomes a bit bogged down by both the characters and the number of different plots going on.  Gabaldon is a great writer, but sometimes it becomes a bit much and at points it begins to lose the charm of Outlander.

The other problem with Voyager is that in being a bridge book the plot is somewhat lacking.  There's a lot of set up here for a major future plot device, and likewise there's a lot of conclusion here for some of the hanging threads of previous devices.  In as much as the characters might at times bog down later books, one of the things that I love about Gabaldon in general is the plethora of really deep and unique characters.  Voyager doesn't lack in them at all, but for much of the time it almost seems like they're there not so much to introduce or partake in any plot, but to simply exist.  In a way this works, but in a way it doesn't.  The way that it really doesn't work, at least for me, is the fact that there is almost no continuity in these characters - the bulk of them were never introduced before Voyager and do not appear again afterwards.  This is really hugely disappointing, just because I like to see the ways in which these characters appear to have developed off screen.  This idea continues as well; a lot of the characters introduced in Outlander and Dragonfly no longer appear to exist in Voyager.  While it's understandable that Claire has been gone (and presumed dead) for some twenty years, there's still a part of me that wants to see her seek out some of her old companions.  She might not wonder what happened to them, but I do.

A Dragonfly in Amber

Author: Diana Gabaldon
Genre: Historical, Romance, Sci-Fi
Rating: B+

The sequel to Outlander, A Dragonfly in Amber is a bit more jumpy than its predecessor – particularly in the start and finish.  Rather than being a straight continuation of the story where it left off, Dragonfly jumps to the future – thus establishing that Claire both survives the rising and returns to the future, while leaving the how, why, and (most importantly) what happens to Jamie left hanging.  I think a big part of the reason why Dragonfly isn’t as strong as Outlander is because of this immediate jump to the ‘future’; it’s a bit disjaring (which is okay, given the nature of the series), but more significantly it kind of interrupts the story.  Outlander is one concise story, about a woman out of time, with the reader experiencing things as she’s experiencing them (despite the novel being written in the past tense).  By starting Dragonfly twenty (and 203) years after the events of Outlander Gabaldon is establishing Claire as this older, wiser woman now telling a story to her daughter – and, frankly, some of the story that she tells the readers is stuff that I would hope she isn’t also telling Brianna.  The story that Claire tells Brianna and Roger is one that picks up very roughly where Outlander ends and brings our English woman and Scotsman into France on the eve of the 1745 Rising. Knowing what they know about the future, Claire and Jamie are faced with a problem: can they use what they know to change the future and if so, should they be trying to prevent the Rising or work to make it successful?

I really like the way this book ends, even if I wasn’t a big fan of the way in which it was started.  Honestly, I love the idea of a narrator telling us a story from a much older perspective, as they look back on their life.  It’s actually a big part of why I enjoy Bernard Cornwell's The Warlord Chronicles and The Saxon Stories.  As I said, the problem that I had with the way Dragonfly did this was that it interrupted the overall narration of the story.  I think I would have rather seen the jump forward twenty years to a Claire telling the story to Brianna and Roger at the end; have her in the present with her daughter be the big reveal at the end instead of the shock at the start.  But that’s all coulda, woulda, shoulda, and while I’m not a big fan of how Gabaldon did this overall I do have to admit it works.

That being said, what I don’t think worked as well was the period of the novel where our heroes are in France.  While I loved the characters that are introduced here – especially Master Raymond – and would love to see some of them remerge in later books, the overall story here in itself was a bit on the dull side.  The charm of Outlander was its setting, but the bulk of Dragonfly is really removed from this setting.  Claire was a fish out of water to begin with, but while in France it’s more like she’s… I donno… a whale out of water.  She’s able to survive, but not for long – likewise with my attention span.

One of the things that I do love, however, is the introduction of Roger as a narrator, even if it is in the third person. I really like the way Roger sees things. Like myself he’s a historian who’s intrigued by a good tale, and it’s made very clear very quickly that the only way Claire is able to move forward and Brianna is able to accept the truth is through Roger. The part of me that enjoys a good mind fuck in literature almost thinks that it’d be fun if Claire was revealed to have been a complete nutjob who dreamed her time in the eighteenth century, but I realize that’s not going to happen – there’s too much pseudo-science to these books to make them just a mind fuck.

Outlander

Author: Diana Gabaldon
Genre: Historical, Romance, Sci-Fi
Rating: A

The first in Diana Gabaldon’s series of the same name, Outlander tells the story of accidental time traveller Claire Randall and her journey through the eighteenth century Scottish Highlands on the eve of the 1745 Jacobite Rising.  I’ve read this book a number of times now, along with its successors, and I think this is easily the best in the series – although the sequels aren’t shabby either.

At the start of the novel former army nurse Claire Randall and her husband, Frank, are in Inverness, Scotland on a vacation to rekindle their marriage – no, not rekindle.  More renew; while there’s no doubt of the love between the two, they’ve been separated for a long time now as the result of the War, it being 1945 at the start of the book.  Then life drastically changes for Claire; during an excursion around the standing stones at Craigh na Dun Claire finds herself transported back 203 years in time, to 1742.  Claire quickly becomes captured by Clan MacKenzie and taken to Castle Leoch, and somewhat enchanted by the mysterious Jamie McTavish.  Overhanging all of this is Claire’s desire to return to her own time, and her husband, as well as the looming threat of war – which Claire, graced with the knowledge of the future, knows will be disastrous for Scotland.

I think this might be one of the few novels written in first person that I’ve ever really loved.  There’s something about Claire that makes it clear that even though she’s telling the story – and as such it’s biased by her perception of things – it’s clear that she’s still a flawed person.  A good number of the things that befall her and Jamie are caused by Claire’s own shortcomings and her failure to really fit into the world around her.  I love that Gabaldon took a woman who isn’t entirely modern and sent her back; I think it does a lot to help her fit into the eighteenth century while also making her accessibly to a contemporary reader.  She doesn’t spend her time fussing over things like central heating or running water – although she does lament the standard of personal hygiene common at the time – but she does have ideals that don’t exactly coincide with the way that the typical eighteenth century woman was expected to behave.  This becomes more prominent by Drums of Autumn, by which point it’s really clear that Claire’s place isn’t necessarily eighteenth or twentieth century, it’s at Jamie’s side.

As I believe I’ve said of other works of Gabaldon’s, Outlander is very anecdotal.  However, where it doesn’t seem to work as well in some of her short stories, it works really well in Outlander.  The overall issue of the plot is clear very early on – the woman from the twentieth century transported back to the eighteenth, on the eve of what is to be (for Scotland) a devastating war – and the incidents that happen following it do a lot to firmly establish the characters, the setting, and the time.  There is a bit of repetition to the story, particularly when it comes to Black Jack Randall, but it’s easy to forgive, especially at this early point in the series.  There’s also so much detail that it’s easy to get lost a bit at times, but for the most part it’s just enough to really emmurse yourself in the story.

My favourite part, though, is the dialects and accents. Gabaldon really has a nack for writing accents and dialects in a manner that’s easy to read. Her characters talk like people really talk, using words that firmly establish who they are and where they’re from. This is seen even more later on in the series, as more ethnicities are introduced, but for now it’s really easy to see that Claire Randall talks like an Englishwoman – not an American – and a good chunk of the rest of the characters talk like Scots.