Alan Zendell, June 19, 2023
Author Diana Gabaldon began writing her Outlander books thirty-two years ago. She has completed nine of them, almost 8,000 pages of prose that have a diverse, devoted following that’s almost cult-like. Their success stems from many things – outstanding writing, an incredibly intense love story that spans 250 years, depending on how you count, elements of both science fiction and mysticism, and a unique view of how our nation came to exist that brilliantly blends fact and fiction. I find the combination irresistible.
I’ve read all nine books and began watching season 7 of the video version that recently dropped on Starz. Probably entirely by coincidence, they are a poignant allegory for the state of our nation today. The two protagonists are Claire, a British combat nurse who returns from World War 2 to join her husband for a long-delayed honeymoon in Scotland, and Jamie, the Laird (lord) of a Scottish clan during the uprising of the 1740s. How they find each other is the stuff of magic and romance, but beyond suspending disbelief over the basic premise, the rest resonates with everything we know and feel.
Gabaldon brings a number of disparate elements together to create a narrative that’s greater than the sum of its parts. Claire is a woman with the skills of a Harvard trained surgeon, and values typical of modern-day Brits and Americans, whose love for Jamie drives her to make an incredible choice: to trade her life in Boston, circa 1970, for a far more primitive one in the eighteenth century. If you want to know how she manages that feat, you’ll have to read the books or subscribe to Starz or Netflix.
Starting in Book 4, Jamie and Claire find themselves in the Colony of North Carolina in 1772. Claire, of course, knows how the Revolutionary War turns out, and having lived for twenty years in New England, her sentiments are with the Americans. Jamie, who fought the tyrannical Engish in Scotland and was imprisoned by them for a decade, is badly conflicted. In North Carolina, he’s a British subject, but he knows what Claire knows, and he despises slavery and racism as much as she does. Co-opted by the Governor, Jamie is forced to work for the Redcoats, and we see his gradual conversion to the cause of the Revolution.
In the process, I learned that most of what I knew about it was either wrong or incomplete. We meet Benjamin Franklin, who is not quite the patriotic hero I thought he was. He spent most of the years of unrest before 1776 in France, and remained a loyal British subject almost until the end. We meet George Washington and see the Revolution from his perspective and in a wonderful twist, Claire comes to know Benedict Arnold, who was a loyal subordinate general to Washington until his perceived betrayal by Washington made him a turncoat. To add flavor, we also meet the French General Lafayette and the Mohawk and Cherokee leaders who played pivotal roles in the fighting, and develop a real understanding of how the Revolution affected native Americans.
Altogether, these characters and situations form a tableau that’s eerily suggestive of what we are experiencing today in America. I’m sure it’s coincidental that the Revolution reaches its climax in Outlander in the midst of perhaps the worst crisis our democracy has ever faced. We see the hardship and suffering, the loss and death, and the personal struggles with conflicting loyalties. More subtly, we also see the fundamental clash between the tyranny of the English King George III and the ideals of Thomas Jefferson and all the patriots who put their lives on the line when they signed the Declaration of Independence. The revolutionaries are by no means angels – within their ranks are thugs and criminals, pirates, smugglers, and opportunists, bigots and superstitious fools. Yet, somehow, this collection of misfits overcome enormous odds to gain the right to govern themselves in a land of opportunity.
Today, we have the ironically named Freedom Caucus, which is the antithesis of everything we fought for in the 1770s. It’s all there in Outlander. First, greed – the idea of enslaving and practicing genocide on millions of people for the sake of profit; the reality of a time when women’s rights were virtually non-existent, when a woman like Claire is viewed by many as a witch; the contrast between the opulent lifestyles of the nobility and everyone else; and perhaps most disturbing, the concept of blind loyalty to a demagogue whose interests have nothing in common with the needs of the people who serve him.
Whether Ms Gabaldon or Starz intended to lay all this before us when so many Americans seem to be disavowing the ideals of our Constitution, I’m glad they did. I hope everyone who watches or reads these stories gets the underlying message.
America the Beautiful 