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Outlander – Real Men Wear Kilts

Oct15

Title: Outlander

Author: Diana Gabaldon

Genre: Time Travel Romance

Length: 642 pages

Read: October 3-13, 2014

Summary: long but good

I’ve been meaning to read Outlander for years. Part time travel, part historical fiction, big best seller… it’s also fundamentally a Romance (cough). This last gave me pause, but finally, after checking out the show (to be reviewed later) I bit the bullet.

It’s funny how bestselling series drive against the current of writing “shoulds.” This book is long. It’s detailed. The protagonist is often adrift without clear “motivation” or “agency.” The prose can be highly redundant. There are countless scenes that don’t serve the spine of the plot.

But these “problems” also help make for a good read, and a good read it is. Fundamentally this is a novel about interesting, and well developed (if sometimes problematic) characters, caught in an unusual and fascinating blend of setting and situation.

What girl doesn't dream of a man in a kilt?

Back when men could wear skirts and still be real men

Setup: It’s 1945 and Claire Randall is a happily married nurse. On holiday in Scotland with her husband, a circle of ancient stones mysteriously teleports her to 1743. Stuck there, she meets and falls in love with sexy highlander Jaime Fraser against the backdrop of the coming Jacobite rising.

This sounds fairly trite, and it is, but the historical detailing of 18th century Scotland is very well done. The author clearly did her research, and she builds a cast of interesting characters and a rather fascinating world on the edge of war. There is an intrinsic tension between Claire’s two lives. Her modern husband isn’t a bad guy at all, even if he lacks Jaime’s manly-man energy. But she finds herself in this new place and in love — so what does she do? This dilemma provides for most of the conflict during the first two thirds of the novel.

Let’s back up and discuss prose and voice. Gabaldon is a good writer. Her prose is energetic and descriptive, often erudite. The voice is completely first person from Claire’s POV. She has an engaging, if a bit overly clinical viewpoint. I had small problems with repetition. Gabaldon often repeats words a sentence later without reason of parallelism and has a tendency to elaborate on a point more than necessary. This is a book where a great deal of the subtext is in the text. Claire spells it out. Sometimes twice. Sometimes thrice. This, by the way, is another of those writing “shoulds.” You’re not supposed to “tell,” but “show” (imply). That’s “better writing.” But as far as I can tell, bestsellers don’t tend to be subtle.

There is a lot of Scottish accented dialog in this book, and it’s very well handled.

Claire’s POV is generally excellent, but it does result in a few issues. Occasionally (particularly in the later part of the novel) some events occur “off screen” (when she isn’t there). Gabaldon then results to gratuitous retellings where other characters relate the event to her in unlikely detail. Occasionally, a briefer recounting leads to some reader confusion. Claire is also hyper aware and overly clinical. As the author likes to handhold us through her thought process, it sometimes feels like exactly this, author handholding rather than genuine cognition. This leads to one of my bigger “motivational gripes” with this generally excellent novel, that Claire often feels fairly selfish and overly analytic. Particularly in the middle of the novel, Claire is nominally still plotting to head back to the future, but this tell feels incongruous with the emotions the author has her “show” toward Jaime.

Crumbling castles and sweeping mountains make for a juicy setting

As I mentioned, the historical details are good. The attitudes of the 18th century men and women are well handled and relatively free of anachronism. Things are properly grungy, sexist, and occasionally brutish. It is occasionally a little odd that Claire herself is not terribly discomforted by this. She points out plenty of good stuff, particularly having to do with justice, medicine, and punishment, but she doesn’t really seem to miss toilets, showers, medical care, comfortable clothes, or well preserved food. Perhaps her life as a nurse during WWII was grungy enough to prepare her. She occasionally mentions discomforts flipply, but less than I’d imagine. She never really complains (or seems to suffer) with regard to food, sleeping in haystacks, or walking barefoot across the chilly Scottish moors.

The time travel element is very light SciFi/Fantasy in this first novel at least, but is used to good effect. There is no mumbo-jumbo explanation to gum things up.

Claire and Jaime’s situation — and relationship — really is pretty sexy

Being a romance, and a fairly erotic one, this is also a novel full of sex. Jaime and Claire go at it like rabbits — and things are often fairly explicit, at least in a literary way. I have no problem with most of this, as it’s actually pretty hot, and I imagine that for many women it’s insanely hot (see, word repeated deliberately for effect!). But there are aspects to the sexuality in this novel that are weird. Two huge ones (spoiler alert):

1) In the middle, after Claire disobeys him, Jaime “punishes” her by strapping her bare ass (to put it bluntly). To tell the truth, his reasoning is perfectly typical by 18th century standards, but comes off as a bit twisted by ours. And some readers will be bothered by the otherwise very spunky Claire’s fairly rapid absolution of her wife-beating lover. In fact, it’s clear that Gabaldon has a bit of a “thing” for corporal punishment as it’s a constant theme in the book. Jaime goes way overboard to emphasize how much hiding her turned him on.

2) More disturbingly, Gabaldon probably isn’t the biggest fan of Homosexuality. The novel’s villain (Black Jack) is not only gay, but she goes to great lengths to integrate his evil tendencies and his sexual proclivities. Otherwise, he’s actually a rather excellent villain, but she goes big time overboard in Jaime’s recounting of the intensely odd and twisted “final hours” between Jaime and the menacing Black Jack. It’s pretty darn nasty and twisted. This, along with a retelling of an older encounter between Jaime and a gay Duke feels like an overzealous attempt to demonize… to quote the novel: “poofters.”

Overall, this is an excellent novel. None are perfect, and it’s engaging throughout. The place/time is vividly depicted, and the characters are boldly executed. Both stay with you — which is no small feat for any author.

For more book reviews, click here.

Claire never offers her opinion on Haggis

By: agavin
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Posted in: Books

Tagged as: Book Review, Claire Randall, Diana Gabaldon, Highlander, Outlander, Scotland

Untimed, Unheard no More

Jun25

Seventeen months in the making, the Untimed audiobook is finally ready!

The complete unabridged book is available on Audible, Amazon, and iTunes for MP3 download to your phone or ipod. It’s narrated by producer Steven Barnett.

A bit about the production

I started way back in January 2013, and like most Independent authors considering an audiobook edition, decided to use Amazon’s ACX service. This is a marketplace for connecting authors with voice and production talent as well as an automated mechanism for delivering the finished books to the big online markets (Audible, Amazon, and iTunes). This makes it easy to post descriptions of what your looking for and a section of the book to read. I listed both The Darkening Dream and Untimed. Lo and behold, over the next couple of weeks a pile of auditions started to come in.

Untimed is a tricky novel from a recording standpoint. Like all my books it features a lot of accents. The two most important characters are Charlie, a modern 15 year-old boy from Philadelphia, and Yvaine a 16 year-old girl from 16-18th century Scotland. It’s also a first person narrative, so it needed to be read in Charlie’s voice. Therefore, I wanted to cast a man who sounded fifteen, but also could pull off a passable falsetto. Steven Barnett’s audition was the one that fit the bill. He sounded young, and he proved great with accents.

Steven Barnett in the studio

It important to prepare detailed notes on all your characters. Untimed doesn’t have the biggest cast, but the characters are from all over the world (and time!) with varied accents and histories. Given my lean prose style and my use of whitespace to delineate dialog instead of extensive tagging (see below), the voices needed to be distinct enough for the listener to distinguish who is talking. After Steven studied my character sheets and we discussed them on the phone, we created a number of voice tests for the major parts. I listened and then gave feedback. This is a broad pattern that continues through the process. Prep -> Record -> Listen -> Feedback -> Repeat.

As I’ve experimented in many mediums: video games, novels, screenplays, and now audiobooks, it’s worth noting some of the differences. The physical placement on the page (as dictated by white space) is useful in novels. I separate dialog spoken by different people on different lines, and I make sure to place tags (he said, she said) and beats (small action queues like “Yvaine shifted in place” or “Donnie smirked” in the same paragraph as the speaker’s dialog. In an audiobook, you can’t hear the white space, but differences in voicing can make up for who is speaking. Still, you lose this spatial grouping. The tags also stand out more when spoken, as the eye tends to ignore them.

Another thing I hadn’t thought about is how long it actually takes to listen repeatedly to an entire novel. Untimed is over ten hours and every few weeks I’d get an hour or two of recordings, need to listen — usually twice (paying attention!) — and write up notes. And my side of the work was a lot easier than Steven’s. I can only imagine how long it took to record multiple takes, audition them, edit, then proof.

A final thing I decided to do was to add sound effects (sfx) to Untimed for the time travel aspects. I wanted the mysterious Tick-Tocks to have a creepy otherworld quality, so I thought to underscore them with an antique ticking noise. They never talk, but they do CHIME. In the books, I just write it like that, but having Steven read out the word “chime” sounded lame, so I replaced it with the sound of a deep resonant clock tower. Likewise, to help sell the mechanics of the time holes and the frequent (and complex) travel, I engineered unique sounds. This harkened back to my days as “assistant” sound engineer on Crash Bandicoot (I process and installed all the sounds that the real engineer, Mike Gollom, made for me). I found a source of royalty free sfx and combined and pitch shifted various ones until I got what I wanted. For example, the Tock ticking is a layered sample combining 4-5 different clocks and watches to reach suitable complexity.

Then, as the months rolled by, chapter by chapter, the book came together brilliantly. I’ve listened to it 2-3 times — although not all together at once. I’m curious at the psychological effect, but after reading various drafts countless times and a couple listens, I’ll leave that to you guys!