Voyager is the third installment of the Outlander series by Diana Gabaldon, a supremely popular American novelist. My posts on the Outlander series have gone a little bit more in depth than my normal book reviews, because something about her writing inspires me to consider them with a more writerly eye. As such, this post will include spoilers, so if you’ve not read this far in the series yet, you’ll want to skip it. If you’re interested in my previous posts in this series, you can find them here.
The last we heard at the end of Dragonfly in Amber is that Jamie Fraser had likely survived Culloden; another of what I’ve begun to call Gabaldon’s signature powerful moments. With that scrap of information, Roger Wakefield, Brianna, and Claire all begin searching every record they can find trying to trace Jamie’s movements after Culloden. Brianna’s researches are driven by a need to know as much about her true father as possible, but for Claire, another possibility presents itself…if time moves concurrently, and Jamie is still alive twenty years after Culloden, would it be possible for her to return to him?
Spoiler alert. She does. She does and it’s so satisfying, and yet, is Jamie still the same man he was when she loved him so deeply and truly twenty years before? Working a front as a printer in Edinburgh, Jamie has been earning his true living as a smuggler. His life is full of people of questionable character, and yet face to face he seems to be her same Jamie. Is their love unchanged? Is it still strong enough to keep her there for their happily ever after?
After being completely and clumsily jolted by perspective changes in DiA, I wasn’t sure what to expect in Voyager. There were multiple narrators, which seems to be the new normal in the series, but the shifts in Voyager were much more natural and followed the flow of the story much more naturally. The first half of the book bounced back and forth between the search for Jamie in historical documents by the trio in the 1960s, and Jamie’s first hand accounts of what happened to him during the years after Culloden (providing more detail than could be found in the historical record). Once Claire makes the journey back to Scotland, to Jamie, it is much like Outlander again, we see everything through her eyes as it happens. It works very well, and allows for the reader to know certain things and explanations that Claire isn’t aware of when she goes back. However, Jamie’s passages did not account for all of the time the two were separated, leaving room for a few surprises for the reader too.
*I don’t necessarily think Claire’s perspective before she goes back was necessary. She could have explained it all once we are in the old times, she could look back with regret for leaving her daughter and explain that she had time to set everything in order for her before she left. Just like the things she brought with her were slowly revealed and not told beforehand. The only thing it adds is Joe Abernathy’s character, which may or may not be needed in future books. But that is just what I would have done, if I were writing this book.
I definitely preferred the first half of the novel. I felt the balance between the modern search for Jamie and the flashbacks to what he was actually up to in-detail was done very well. I don’t love everything that actually happened with the characters during this time (I’ll get into that later), but overall it was very good. Once Claire tracks him down and actually goes back, things get wild. The second half is crazy-fast paced and pretty melodramatic. I almost wonder if maybe the natural conclusion of the book or even the entire series was when Claire got back to Jamie. After that point, it kind of feels like adventures just for the sake of adventures. We no longer have an idea of where the story might go, which left me feeling a little listless. Perhaps the cacophony of conflicts that prop up straight away once she arrives back in time is simply trying to make up for the fact that there is no longer a thread of conflict connecting the two halves of the book. Because of this, I felt as if it were actually two novels shoved into one, again. The two halves really didn’t have anything to do with one another. The major conflict of the 18th century (Ian’s capture by pirates) wasn’t introduced at all until well after Claire is back with Jamie. Would it not have been more powerful to have the one half end with Claire going back through the stones? Or perhaps even as she sees him working in the printshop before he sees her? Maybe it’s just me…
One thing that bothered me quite a bit about this novel was Brianna’s complete 180 degree shift from the previous book. We went from Brianna throwing tantrums every time someone even slightly suggested that James Fraser was her real father in Dragonfly in Amber to her diligently and avidly searching for him with extreme interest in Voyager, and even sending her mother away to him for his own sake. A transition between these two extremes wasn’t even attempted. Did the author think we’d have forgotten about her feelings about the situation in book two? I know I didn’t.
I felt like the twenty years of separation was done very well on Jamie’s side. I loved reading about the little vignettes of his time without Claire. However…he had a baby with the bossy daughter of his master. Really? Not that it wasn’t well written, and made sense…technically (everyone’s motivations were totally explained)…it didn’t feel natural. I have an inkling that the only reason this happened was because the resulting child is going to have some significance later on in the story. I mean…what other reason could there possibly have been for that to have happened? And I don’t really want to get into the conception scene, which was pretty revolting for a few reasons. I just wish that whole thing didn’t happen. But I can understand it. If another child of Jamie’s is needed for later developments in the series, blackmail is pretty much the only way Jamie would sleep with someone else, right? Except there’s the thing where he also slept with someone when he was the dunbonnet and again after his marriage with Lagohaire. It’s a little clumsy.
In Dragonfly in Amber we started to see a little bit more playing with time as opposed to the strict linearity of Outlander. Scenes were skipped over to keep information secret from the reader in order to have a greater effect when it is finally revealed. In that book, I felt it was done rather clumsily and eventually it was so frequent that it was rather annoying. We still see a little bit of that in this novel, but it was done much more successfully. In some cases in Voyager, the reader is already aware of certain circumstances but one of the characters does not. It adds just as much, if not more, tension to be handled that way. It also doesn’t blindside us, which is a very uncomfortable thing. Can you imagine what you might have felt if we found out about Jamie’s son at the same time Claire did? I would have been furious. However, we are blindsided by his second marriage…sort of. There are several hints that there is something Jamie is hiding from Claire at Lallybroch by things that Fergus and Ian say…or attempt to say before Jamie cuts them off abruptly. So even though it is completely out of left field when we find out about her, it still works.
I continue to find this series a valuable learning tool for my own writing. In these sequels I feel like I am learning about a lot of stylistic, plotting, and organizational trends, what I like and what I don’t, which I am finding very enlightening. I’ve often found it challenging with new books to read with a critical/writerly eye, but something about the Outlander series is just clicking with that side of myself, and it’s making it easier for me to see those things in other books now too.
With that in mind, I want to mention two techniques/examples from this novel I found particularly successful.
When Claire is trying to decide whether or not to uproot her life in the 1960s to go back to Jamie, she goes back to their home in Boston to speak with her friend Joe Abernathy. While there, he receives a skeleton to examine and asks Claire for help. It was found in the West Indies, in a cave, and met a particularly violent death. I don’t remember this scene in the slightest the first time I read it (I had stopped at Fergus’ wedding to Marsali that time, so I didn’t know who the skeleton was yet), but this time, I had learned to recognize the signs that Gabaldon was leaving some bread crumbs for later on. I hadn’t known just how much this skeleton was going to be a part of the story, but I figured that by the ending, we would know exactly who that skull would have belonged to.
Geillis frigging Duncan. Holy crap. The absolute last person I was expecting to see again in this series was Geillis Duncan. My jaw literally dropped when I read the name. When Claire started dropping hints that Mrs. Abernathy was probably someone that Claire and Jamie already knew, I racked my brain for who it might be. My best guess was a terrible one, because she isn’t Scottish…but I suspected perhaps Louise from their days in Paris (I feel like we didn’t really get enough closure with her character to be honest, so maybe that’s why I secretly longed for it to be her). I guess I am just in awe of another one of those dang revelations that changes everything that Diana Gabaldon seems to sprinkle in every novel.
Another thing I thought was well done in Voyager was that Claire was the one who was injured for a change! I don’t necessarily think the injuries always have to be so dang extreme, but after Claire tending to wounds of everyone else and their dogs, it was about time for her to get into some physical trouble of her own. It was refreshing.
The ending of Voyager was pretty disappointing to me. Not only did it require major suspension of disbelief to accept that their tiny boat made it from the West Indies to the Atlantic coast of Georgia in the middle of a hurricane without anyone starving or drowning, but it left no dangling rope. If Dragonfly in Amber did one thing well, it was to leave us aching with anticipation of the possible reconciliation of Claire and Jamie. It made us hungry for the next book. At the end of Voyager, there is nothing. Virtually no loose ends to tie up, nothing driving the reader forward except perhaps two things: a reader wanting to read about the colonization of America or a reader so dedicated to the relationship of Jamie and Claire they just want to know more. I was of neither camp. I also fed it was largely unnecessary for the unconventional trip to Georgia, especially since our leading couple had already discussed and all but decided upon immigrating to America anyway just a few chapters before…? 🤷♀️
On reflection, it looks like most of what I’ve written is somewhat critical, but that was mostly just because I would have done things differently. I did really enjoy the book overall, and I really wanted to discuss it with everyone I could as soon as I finished, so I would count that as very successful.
Id love to discuss it further if any of you had comments about it. Were you happy with the way things played out in the past? Let’s discuss in the comments!!
The Litertarian 