A little break from horror genre - as much as I started to enjoy it, it has to be taken in small doses - and welcome return to Diana Gabaldon's "Outlander" saga. I started this year with first two volumes ("Outlander" and "Dragonfly in Amber") and decided that perhaps I should go back to it while I still remember the outline of the story. Initially, I have actually read the trilogy (when it was still just a trilogy) back in the day when these novels were still new and recently published, but later got sidetracked with other things and never continued - I always knew that I would eventually return to Gabaldon, but first had to refresh my memory and start from the beginning.
Gabaldon is a modern-day Scheherazade with glittering imagination, wit, humour and obviously she has great affection for her characters. She is also a spiritual descendant of a certain French writer called Anne Golon who in her time, created literary phenomenon "Angelique" - I am not sure is Gabaldon actually familiar with Golon, but both of them delight in historical research and describe damsel-in-distress who goes trough every possible adventure from novel to novel, including witch hunt, pirates, Turkish harem, snake pits, you name it. Popularity of such novels immediately branded them as lowbrow entertainment, kind of "bodice rippers" which perhaps correctly describes their mass appeal - say whatever you want, there is a fair amount of body heat peppered amongst heroine's adventures, usually somewhere between her being kidnapped and sold in a slave market (of course, heroine always emerges untouched and even more beautiful than ever). Although different personalities and placed in completely different time frames, both Angelique and time travelling Claire Randall are simultaneously outsiders (brave, outspoken, passionate about truth, heroic, different than other passive women around them) and conservative - no matter how many times they get kidnapped and lusted after by various men, both are faithful to only one man in their lives, which happens to be their husband. So its only superficially that they are heroines - given different circumstances, its easy to imagine them as perfectly content housewives - alas, for the sake of adventures, both heroines ride here and sail there, living outside of the law and basically enjoying freedom unimaginable for other women of their times.
For the sake of the story - and to explain how Claire's daughter now happens to be grown up woman - twenty years have passed since Claire and Jaimie Fraser separated. One way or the other, after impossibly long introduction and what it feels like a half of a novel, the two eventually meet again (in his time) and continue their tempestuous relationship, while ridiculously complicated twists of the plot have them constantly on the run and saving each others lives. At this point Gabaldon is obviously confident and relaxed enough to allow some breezy humour and tenderness every now and than (with all the incredulity I found myself being occasionally moved to tears) but she seriously stretches her credibility with readers by keeping lovers exactly the same as they were twenty years ago - with this I don't mean physically (apparently everybody is still lusting after both of them) but psychologically they are exactly same old selves, always passionate, always arguing and making up all teary just to discover something unspoken that will lead to another argument, another chapter, another return. It does start to feel like some adolescents idea of what relationship is all about which kind of brings the novel to another level of fluffiness - even though the initial time-travelling start was not exactly serious literature in the first place, but at least it had some historical research that made sense. You would assume that after twenty years apart, both Claire and Jaimie would grow, change and mature into different people because this is what happens in life, we metamorphose into different versions of our younger selves - centre might be similar but edges smooth out and years of experience leave traces - well, not with these two. Its all about passion, sex, breaking up and making up. Seriously, it looks like Claire's daughter might be more balanced than her adventure-loving mother. Most of their arguments is because of the secrets Jaimie kept from her, but than, as they are constantly on the run, there is a hardly a time to stop and relax enough for any confessions - this is where Claire gets a bit shrewish, after all, she had also lived her life all this time and not exactly as a nun. So in the middle of this constant hurricane we have Claire and Jaimie running for their lives across the country and then some, towards the end of the book they are sailing for Jamaica and this is exactly where I am right now - no wonder that at this point I kind of had enough initially - mind you, this is another similarity with Anne Golon, since her Angelique also left the old world and sailed for Canada at certain point.
Its really very entertaining and a perfect escapism, but for even the second time around I started to feel that this is turning into soap opera.
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