I know I will be spat at by many. But there is no use, I must do it. I have to speak out. About Outlander.
As much as Jamie might be regarded as a perfect character, almost a dominant one, all the other protagonists are not. They are as imperfect as they can come, and still they refuse to develop. Things happen to them, of course, and they may enjoy or suffer in meticulous detail, but they never ever change.
Definitely not the other lead character, Claire.
I must say, I am not even sorry that I do not like her the least. Infact I have never liked her, from the beginning*, though for a long period of words I could not say why. I found out, when Claire started to act like a silly, emotionally driven and thoughtless stereotype of a female, running off whenever a real problem occured.
Of course, by now, I figured out why she behaves like that. Despite a first-person narrator, the nevertheless almighty author is doing this to her, and to the readers. The author makes her this incoherent being that is just as hard to come by as the way the story leads us readers about its winding path with those very high ups and dreadfully long downs.
Oh yes! A story needs suspense! But this kind of suspense is so unbearably far-fetched that it hurts. It seems like a real drawback every time Claire's irrational outbursts happen, the smaller ones not much easier to bear than the massive ones.
One minute she is this exceptionally gifted physician from the future getting along masterly in this dangerous past, and the next minute she will be heading towards the woods without a cloak, doubting her said undying love as much as her whole life and everything around her - just because of a few facts or words she does not want to face, presenting herself as a pathetic victim of her own overreactions.
The author seems to forget that this is a woman of the 20th century, and not only concerning her profession. Therefore, she should be able to know that people need to talk about things to clarify them. But she is forbidden to talk for the sake of suspense. What a sad business.
Only once Claire is allowed to state the obvious, that the necessary things have not been said, and that because of this silence the situation is about to get out of hand. But of course, she doesn't state this in the open, and the only thing she may conclude is that people would not always act reasonable. And then, again, she, too, is bound to silence and unreason. And more, instead of changing the situation, and, of course, maybe, for once, end a (side) conflict, she is forced to endure another threat.
Yawn. Suspense for suspense's sake is tiresome after a while. Even though one cannot stop reading, getting more aggravated by the minute. What a dilemma!
But of course, what we must understand, in those thousands of pages written and sold by now, the author needed to make use of every folly of mankind, and of every crime. What a shame that despite these neverending endeavours, even this enterprising author will not be able to avoid the fact that this story will still have to come to an end one day. The only question left is how many volumes to be endured may still be following.
*This goes for the books, while the Claire of the screen adaption is miraculously much more authentic, very self-possessed, sovereign, and graceful. Who, I wonder, made this change possible, and how?