Drag-On-Fly in Amber The next feat of literary endurance will be to tackle the third book in the Outlander series, entitled Voyager, preferably before the Season 3 premiere of the Starz Original Series®.
Add me to the pile of readers who think Drag-On Fly would have been better minus 200-300 pages. Normally I don't hold it against an author when the book is full of padding that doesn't advance the narrative, extraneous "character moments," even Moby Dick–style long-winded explanations. The Harry Potter series has some of the best padding I've ever encountered, stuff that would sink the page-to-screen translation like a lead weight—e.g., the subplot involving Hermione's Society for the Preservation of Elvish Welfare.
Gabaldon's extra padding in D in A does us readers the great service of making 18th-century Scotland that much more real, through all the senses, right down to the smells of the malnourished and malprovisioned Jacobite Army. But there's too damn much of it. Nonetheless, that multi-sensory approach is one of the aspects in which the quality of the writing took a quantum jump over the first Outlander volume.
Add me to the pile of readers who think Drag-On Fly would have been better minus 200-300 pages. Normally I don't hold it against an author when the book is full of padding that doesn't advance the narrative, extraneous "character moments," even Moby Dick–style long-winded explanations. The Harry Potter series has some of the best padding I've ever encountered, stuff that would sink the page-to-screen translation like a lead weight—e.g., the subplot involving Hermione's Society for the Preservation of Elvish Welfare.
Gabaldon's extra padding in D in A does us readers the great service of making 18th-century Scotland that much more real, through all the senses, right down to the smells of the malnourished and malprovisioned Jacobite Army. But there's too damn much of it. Nonetheless, that multi-sensory approach is one of the aspects in which the quality of the writing took a quantum jump over the first Outlander volume.
The attention to the authenticity of dialog is another way the writing generally improved. Sometimes the dialog was actually <i>too</i> good: I found myself simultaneously cheering and scratching my head over Claire's improvised quips delivered in convincing 18th-century literary English. It was as if, while traveling the world as a kid with Uncle Lambert, she had devoured the complete works of Daniel Defoe to prepare herself for her eventual journey through the stones.
Question for those who know: When the Scottish characters don't speak consistently in their dialect—e.g., alternating between can't and canna—is that authentic, or is it just Gabaldon forgetting?
Gabaldon also seems to have exercised more caution in exorcising some of the anachronisms that litter the first book. Some easily forgivable anachronisms of dialog remain; I can't cite any examples.
Those who complain about the structure—scenes of Dr. Claire Randall, her daughter Brianna, and a grown up Roger Wakefield in 1968 bracketing 800 pages of flashback—also make a good point. I take issue mostly with the changes of POV between sections of a chapter, between Claire's first-person and a third-person limited omniscient through Roger. Nice try, Dr. Gabaldon, but it didn't work for me.
Question for those who know: When the Scottish characters don't speak consistently in their dialect—e.g., alternating between can't and canna—is that authentic, or is it just Gabaldon forgetting?
Gabaldon also seems to have exercised more caution in exorcising some of the anachronisms that litter the first book. Some easily forgivable anachronisms of dialog remain; I can't cite any examples.
Those who complain about the structure—scenes of Dr. Claire Randall, her daughter Brianna, and a grown up Roger Wakefield in 1968 bracketing 800 pages of flashback—also make a good point. I take issue mostly with the changes of POV between sections of a chapter, between Claire's first-person and a third-person limited omniscient through Roger. Nice try, Dr. Gabaldon, but it didn't work for me.
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