Back when I worked in the retail book industry, Diana Gabaldon released Outlander. It was the start of an epic, time-traveling romance series.
The basic premise is that Claire (played by Caitríona Balfe), a nurse during World War II, is married to her husband, Frank. They get along, but don’t have the happiest of marriages. They take a trip up to Scotland, to get away from it all after the war ends, and maybe work on their marriage. Claire goes out for a walk and comes across a stone circle, which looks like a miniature version of Stonehenge. Somehow, when she touches one of the stones, she gets transported back to Scotland of the 1700s, immediately gets in trouble, and is rescued by handsome young Scot Jamie Fraser (played by Sam Heughan). Thus starts their long, winding tale of love and struggle.
I was told by many of our regular romance reading customers, that if you read only one romance novel in your life, you should read Outlander. They’d recommend it with all the same passion as Stephen King readers said if you only read one Stephen King book in your life it should be The Stand. (Read The Stand, was disappointed).
I haven’t read the book, or any of the sequels spawned after the first book became a major bestseller. I’ve always meant to read it, as one of those cultural touchstones that everyone has read, if or no other reason than to discuss it with our customers. Alas, I’m not really a romance reader so I’ve always put it off.
Well, my procrastination was (sort of) rewarded by the production of an Outlander TV series. The wife watches lots of TV. She finishes entire series by the time I get through half a season of something I’m watching. She also starts many series but doesn’t finish them. She likes me to watch TV with her so I find it troublesome when she starts a series that I like, but she doesn’t finish it. I know it will take me a long time to get around to seeing the rest of the series given the amount of time I get to watch things. (I’ve been stuck in the middle of season three of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine for a month and a half now.)
Anyway, the wife wanted to watch the pilot episode of Outlander to see if she liked it, and she wanted me to watch it with her. So we sat down and queued it up on the old telly. We made it through the pilot episode.
Turns out, I liked it. I think the time-travel aspect caught my interest. Wise of Ms. Gabaldon to have that as part of the storyline. I’m sure many husbands got lured into watching the program with their wives by the promise of time travel.
Anyway, it went on for eight seasons and we finished watching the last season last night. Along the way Claire and Jamie get caught up in the Jacobite Rebellion, the war at Culloden, eventually travel to North Carolina in America, and even make it though the War of Independence. Although, if you go by the thinking in Ray Bradbury’s short story A Sound Of Thunder, Claire is seriously messing up the timeline.
In Bradbury’s story, a hunter time travels back to the Cretaceous period with the purpose of killing a dinosaur. It is a guided safari, and the company that put the safari together has already gone back in time, found a suitable dinosaur, and noted it’s time and place of death. This is so the hunter can shoot the dinosaur, history doesn’t get changed and all is well. However, the hunter steps on a butterfly by mistake and kills it. They come back to the present and find everything has changed.
Claire, being a nurse, ends up medically treating a number of people over the years, and saving many by being able to perform surgeries that would have been far beyond physicians in the 1700s. And yet, at other times, she withholds information because she knows what happened in the history books and doesn’t want to change things.
Aside from all that, the stories were engaging, and the performances were top notch. There are may emotional up and downs, and lots of twists. All the usual techniques used by writers to keep you engaged in the story are used well in this series.
Fair warning, there is a lot of sex throughout the series, but season eight amps it up. Every major character in season eight gets sex, sometimes multiple times, in almost every episode of the season. If this kind of thing puts you off, you might not want to watch the series. Then again, it is primarily a romance tale so the sex should be expected.
If he books are anything like the series, and usually they are better, then I think I’d agree with my book customers that if you are going to read (or watch) one romance in your lifetime, it should be Outlander.
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