OUTLANDER

Maybe I’ve mentioned that my cousins were fans of “Outlander,” not the properly sci-fi novel about an off-planet creature that has been made into a movie, but the best-selling bodice-ripper about a woman who steps through a split stone in a standing circle like Stonehenge and finds herself in the midst of the Scots borderland wars just before the uprising for Bonnie Prince Charlie in 1755 which ended the power of clans. So far there are seven novels in the series which is rapidly becoming an industry. Written by Diana Gabaldon (a Latino woman with a biology degree), the tale is told again in a graphic novel called “The Exile,” drawn by a Vietnamese artist, Hoang Nguyen. This time the redoubtable Murtagh is the hero. This will seal the deal with my cousins, since Murtagh echoes my uncle Murdock.

What I want to talk about is not that, but rather about genre. Lately it has become fashionable to flog writing as being “brainy” and “intelligent.” This morning I read about how one writer of mysteries has been hugely boosted by a review that said the book was what [fill in name of famous best-seller mystery] would write “if he were intelligent.” The beneficiary has not hesitated to hand out copies of the review to good effect. So “Outlander” is discussed in terms of being an upscale “romance” or a genre-melder historical novel. Certainly, Gabaldon is a competent researcher who has chosen a time/place packed with possibility. So far as writing goes, it’s not brilliant, but it’s clear and friendly. Davina Porter, who is not Scots but married to a Scotsman, adds so much elegance and atmosphere that one soon stops fussing about cliches and how many times a person can say “wee drap” and “whul naw” and not be kitsch. It is very immersive.

Where Galadon shines is plot. She’s of the “Lord of the Rings” school of plotting (one damn thing after another) but throws in plenty of history and local knowledge (esp. the botanical) and a bit of philosophy where it fits pretty well. In fact, the whole plot line is meant to exploit the problem of whether a person who loves “forever” and exclusively can really do that in the face of time travel. Claire the time traveler is on her honeymoon, madly in love with Frank in 1945 near Inverness when she steps through the portal to the same place in the past. In 1744 she falls totally in love with Jamie, mortal enemy of her Frank’s ancestor. Now, does she try to get back to 1945 or not? Which man wins?

If you hate spoilers, stop reading now.

Others have imagined people falling madly in love with a true love’s ancestor but not with his enemy. I had been worrying about shocking my cousins’ delicate sensibilities but after reading this first novel in an apparently endless series, I won’t worry. First it was the sex scenes (one cousin doesn’t like them and skips them but she's not shocked), then there was the violence, and finally the climaxing torture scene and its re-enactment in the name of healing.

Gabaldon is good at reversals, so Claire is a nurse who has just made it through WWII, an experienced woman who quite pulls her weight. She is also older than Jamie and has to teach him, the virgin, how to make love. Frank is an historian, which is often very helpful to Claire so long as events were actually recorded and she can remember them. She also keeps Frank’s genealogical chart vividly in her mind. We know what doom is coming for them at the Battle of Colodon and there is some worry that Claire has witnessed the death of her husband’s ancestor, the villain, before he could reproduce -- so what does THAT mean? He’s not supposed to die until the battle, which is the next year.

It also develops that the villain, Black Jack Randall, is gay, madly in love with Jamie whom he sexually tortures in excruciating detail, and profoundly jealous of Claire. But in the midst of his sexual frenzy it is the name of his youngest brother he cries out -- a man who became a cleric. Whuuaaa? Throughout the tale Jamie absorbs an incredible amount of rending and pounding and fevering, all addressed by Claire and soon interwoven with more bouts of vigorous intercourse, described in detail -- rather skillfully in my opinion. Just the right amount of euphemism. Everything is limned in golden light from candles or the sun or firelight. There’s a lovely hidden hot springs lake in a cave. Along the way Claire manages to kill a wolf with her bare hands (Murtagh sends her the skin afterwards, completed with yellow glass eyes) and discovers that her best friend is a witch who also came through the split stone portal in 1967, so she possibly knows Claire’s future.

But let’s go back. Black Jack Randall has captured Jamie at last, smashed his hand with a mallet, nailed that hand to a table, lashed his back with a carriage whip, sodomized him, forced him to fellate, slashed him across the chest and smeared his own cock with blood which he forces Jamie to lick off, burnt him with a poker and then his heated insignia ring to brand him, tormented him by forcing him to describe intimate practices with Claire, etc. etc. When Jamie is rescued (by driving a herd of cattle into the castle and past the dungeons -- I’ll remember that strategy), he’s in really bad shape and is transported to France for healing in a monastery. Seasickness when crossing the channel just about finishes him off. Claire and the monks do their best to save him.

This is where Gabaldon plays her most wicked and inspired card: Jamie is in such deadly psychological knots of rage and humiliation that Claire decides the only way to bring him out of it is to re-enact the torture. Re-imprinting. (Is this current Post-traumatic Stress Dogma? It works for her.) So she strips them both and gets to work, impersonating Black Jack by using all the little sexual tricks she learned from Frank, plus what she could deduce had been done from Jamie’s wounds. From the writer’s point of view, she gets to use the same material all over again. Um, narrative incest? Just a tiny bit more sophistication and grace in writing, and this could have broken over into being serious literature. Couldn’t it?

But, gee, isn’t it? I mean, all this intensity and everyone loves it -- isn’t this Dickens ripped from the headlines of Psychology Today? Later she and one of the multiple monks have a nice chat about whether she is committing a sin in the eyes of the church by being married to two men at once, if not quite at the same time, and whether she ought to be worrying about destroying her own husband of 1945 by saving her own husband of 1744. The monk basically says, “Why worry about something over which you have no control anyway. You’d have no more control in 1945 than you have in 1744.” And as long as you’re properly baptized and married . . . that’s all God wants. (Well, the church anyway.)