Thirsting over a rugged Scottish bloke in Gabaldon’s Outlander.
Yeah look, there’s spoilers here. Not that I’d recommend the book.
Outlander (first titled as the marketingly unattractive Cross Stitch) is one of those books that keep popping in the various book lists that I ambivalently follow and I just need to tick off my list. Finding a copy in my mum’s place in Australia, after she had gone on a rampage on buying books from the Salvos for two bucks each was a blessing as I wouldn’t have to spend my hard earned cash on a new copy or hoping I’d run into it in book swaps.
It is a book that had risen in popularity due to the TV show of the same name. There’s probably only two ways that this could go — whether it would be as good as I’d expect it to be, or it would be a giant letdown. For whatever reason I didn’t expect this book to blow me away. Let’s just get this out of the way, as I won’t spend too much time going through this review. I reckon Outlander is trash.
Time travel to the Scottish highlands
Claire Randall, enjoying her second honeymoon with her heartthrob academic husband on the quest of exploring his family tree woke up one day right in the middle of 1743 in the middle of bloody nowhere Scotland after she witnessed witches doing witchey things in discount Stonehenge. Luckily, she ran into a version of her husband, who was an English captain and thus, her husband’s great-grandad five times over. But this guy is really nothing like her docile hubby, he’s a bit of a dick and wanted to rape her right off the bat.
She was rescued by a gang of Scottish highlanders who were also carrying an injured but hunky, rugged, <insert superlative adjective here> type of fella, a Jamie Fraser. Claire, being a trained nurse in her native 1946 England fixed Jamie up and instantly built a rapport with him. Jamie, it turned out, has a bit of history with Captain Randall, who was nightmare fuel for the Fraser family. He allegedly raped Jamie’s sister and caused the death of the father indirectly, as he died of a heart failure while seeing Jamie whipped.
Claire, eager to go back to her own world, had no choice but to stick with this band of misfits and become a physician in Castle Leoch, her new refuge, that is until the laird, Callum instructed Claire to go with the men where she could reconnect with the English, who might be able to send her off to France. This was a bit of a blessing for Claire, who wanted to steal away and find a way back to 1946.
In a turn of circumstance, she ran into old evil Randall again and under Dougal’s instructions, Claire had to wed Jamie lest she be turned over to the seedy cunt Captain Randall. And of course, if you’re married you gotta smash. Jamie, being a virgin before this marriage, found out that he likes smashing and smashes Claire every chance he gets. GOOD FOR HIM I SAY.
But Randall would have Jamie one way or another, and when Jamie had to go on a trip, a jealous would-be-wife-of-Jamie got Claire into a precarious situation where the villagers accused her for being a witch. This forced Jamie to go back and rescue the damsel in distress and take her back to his original home in Lallybroch, where he’s supposed to be the boss. But when Jamie was kidnapped by the English during a hunting session, events forced them to deal with old mate Randall again, who this time, is very much set on clutching Jamie’s anal cherry.
Jamie is the Scottish Fabio, and he’s here to steal your hearts (and ovaries)
Gabaldon admitted that it is difficult to place a genre on her work. Is it fantasy because of the time travel aspect? It could also fall under historical fiction, as most of the events in the story are historically accurate. It is perhaps closer to an adventure novel as the characters are constantly on the move and the action is high octane, almost cinematic in its writing. But it falls most towards the romance side of things for me, especially all the romantic and sexual tension that Claire and Jamie are constantly under, and for a lot of readers this would be the highlight of the book.
Hey, I bloody get it. If I was a thirty or forty year old woman who’s a bit bored of boinking my husband, or some dude I matched with on Tinder and who really is just a mommy’s boy fuckboy, of course I’d be salivating over Jamie who can actually fight with his bare hands, know how to handle horses, have a rough Scootish accent and would defend your life to the extent that some evil English dude might do things with my hairy Scottish arse.
But it makes me cringe. Jamie is just built up to be this perfect tough and sensitive dude that he’s beyond believable — he’s a pathetic tryhard, not through the character’s own fault, but the author’s. The story is also driven largely by exposition through dialogues, as Claire uncovers more and more of the place she was living in and Jamie’s rugged past. Did I use the word rugged again? This is fine, but I feel that the dialogue is overused to propel the plot.
Then there are some passages which made me go dafuq. Like that time Jamie spanked Claire because she was just being a notty girl. I shook my head, but I wonder if some of the readers were drooling over thinking in their heads: yeah that rugged Scottish bloke can punish me anytime mrawrr. Then he got raped in the ass by the evil dude. It felt like it was a bit much for me, and if I had found the character believable then maybe I’d feel a bit of sympathy. But reading that gay scene (alluded to or not) surprised me, but in the end I really couldn’t care less if Jamie was going to make it out alive or whether he was gonna cop it.
Outlander perhaps can thrive better as a historical fiction, as the dynamics between Callum and Dougal, along with the other Scottish clans leading up to the big war where the English just decimates them, is a more interesting aspect. But this is more of a footnote that’s happening in the background. Having said that, it might veer more towards this direction in the future sequels of Outlander, but I’m not going to read anymore. It’s once and done for me. The TV show might be good as well, but the book put me off it.
