Book Review: Diana Gabaldon’s An Echo in the Bone
Short version: Read it! It’s a lot more interesting than the last two ones, mostly because a) less domesticity, more action, and b) more Lord John. *approves* Beware of the cliff-hangers, though!
Before I get started on the book itself, though, let me note: I recently get the impression Diana has written herself in love with Lord John as a character more than she ever intended, which is why we get his POV in a Jamie/Claire book for the first time since Drums, and there’s a new novella coming out soon (edited by GRRM, no less - finish the damn Dance with Dragons already, George, before doing other stuff… no, wait, I want this book, too! The eel excerpt is awesome!), as well as the next Lord John novel (Helwater era John and Jamie, OMG WANT!). It seems the het-only fans are starting to complain, but I hope she doesn’t listen to those too much.
Now, review.
The Bad:
The book seems disjointed in places. There are more POVs than usual, which adds depth most of the time but occasionally makes the action feel spread thin over the map, so to speak. Coherence between the different plot lines goes missing now and then, and the paragraphs sometimes feel they should be in a different order to get their point across better. Not to mention chronology. (And I don’t mean the 1770s vs 1970s chronology jumps, which work fine, as usual, but the various 18th ct POVs. A bit more editing could have done wonders there.
The ending felt unfinished. Yes, I’m acquainted with the concept of cliff-hangers, but Diana, of all people, really doesn’t have to worry about people not buying the next part! And they weren’t even good cliff-hangers, only half-baked ones! She should have cut off the book with Jamie’s “death” and Claire’s marriage to John. That’d have caused some uproar! As it is, the most interesting questions are already answered. (Do John and Claire have sex? Check. Does Jamie come back? Check. Will Jamie be incredibly pissed off? (Negative) Check.) What is left is the question as to how this little triangle (and their assorted relationships towards Willie) will eventually resolve. (Also, Jem and the French gold, but… meh.) Still interesting, but a lot less spectacular. And it would have made sense to give the John/Claire marriage more room in the next book, instead of making it a tacked-on afterthought to this one. A number of events feel too rushed this way.
Willie wasn’t as entertaining a POV character as I expected. It’s almost as if he has no innate sense of humour whatsoever - a strange thing indeed in a Gabaldon character! And while I get that he’s still got a lot to learn, he comes off as annoyingly immature and naïve most of the time.
What happened to the sex scenes? Is it just me or did there use to be more of them, and longer ones? Jamie and Claire are still handsome for their age, so where did the explicitness go, huh?
The Good:
I went in skimming for who tells how much of the story (I always do with multi-POV books), and was slightly annoyed by how much of Bree-and-Roger-in-the-20th-ct there was, but I ended up liking their parts a lot more than I expected. (Probably because I’m in love with Lallybroch. *wistful sigh*)
Everything that’s usually good about a Diana Gabaldon book: history coming to life in interesting, action-filled and often absurd ways, awesome sense of place and atmosphere, revisiting beloved characters, meeting new and interesting ones, emotionally cathartic moments, suspense, humour, disgusting medical procedures… and did I mention history? (Brief summary, but be assured all these aspects easily make up for the bad stuff mentioned above! They’re just not news, so I don’t see any point in elaborating.)
The Amusing:
You will never look at Benjamin Franklin the same way again. This wouldn’t necessarily be all that bad, except that bursting out laughing whenever he comes up in conversation isn’t usually appropriate. On the upside: at least I’m not American, so he comes up a lot less often for me than he will for most of you. “:-p
The Diana Gabaldon Drinking Game (you take a shot whenever one of the characters does) remains as lethal as ever. Accurate portrayal of 18th ct drinking habits, maybe, but… holy shit.
Fully-rigged-sailing-ship hair! I’ll never get over how awesome that is. (I was bored the day after I finished the book, and the train was mostly empty, so I drew a few little book reaction comics. The one with the tiny ship came out best.)
This book will go down in history as the one that made half the existing fanfic come true. John/Claire marriage-of-necessity? Check. Jamie taking John hostage at gunpoint (which probably shouldn’t be as hot as it is) to escape from the English? Check. Now, all we need is a little more porn…
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And just so I can smugly say “I called it” later ( and did so even before reading Echo): I predict a threesome to resolve the issue. Wishful thinking? Pfft! The story has been moving that way steadily for a long time! And it’d be a perfect ending, especially if you take overarching story structure and long-term character development into consideration:
- “Jamie deals with getting raped by Jack Randall” has been a major theme since the whole thing happened in book one, though it was pushed into the background somewhat in the in-between-time, it resurfaces every now and then. (Mostly when other people get raped. Which happens with alarming regularity, though thankfully in a lot less lovingly written bordering on the fetishistic detail.) Echo pointedly reminds us that he still has nightmares about this forty years later. Jamie’s long-time friendship with John despite it is a huge step towards coping. (And what better way to successfully finalise this very coping process than voluntary gay sex? That’d mean he has overcome his life’s trauma once and for all.)
- I don’t know about anyone else, but I’ve always had the impression that Jamie is at least somewhat bisexual. Clues? Let’s see: His objection towards having sex with the duke of Sandringham isn’t in the act itself, but the person. Same with Jack Randall. Even so, he contemplates agreeing to Randall’s offer instead of getting whipped, but the thought of his father’s good opinion keeps him back. There doesn’t, at any point, seem to be a general sort of distaste towards homosexual behaviour. Women apparently hold more interest for him, but that may well be due in a large part to living in the 18th century. Hell, even today being bisexual gives you the privilege of passing as straight even to your own mind’s eye. I did that myself for years! Jamie simply doesn’t have much reason to go looking beyond what he has. He is expected to like women; he likes women; his wife is great; and that’s all he needs to concern himself with in this department.
Moreover, Claire isn’t exactly a paragon of feminity, neither in the 1940s, nor at all in the 18th century. Not a strong clue, but something to consider nonetheless.
More indicative is his relationship towards John:
- Jamie likes John. Really a lot. In a far from entirely platonic way. Daring hypothesis? Not at all! Canon is on my side here. See, the John/Jamie dynamics are easily my favourite thing in the series, because they’re far from simple. The two of them start out as enemies, first at Culloden, later at Ardsmuir, but become friends fast; comfortable with each other to the point where they feel compelled to tell each other about their lost loves. As soon as John makes a pass, however, this shatters due to Jamie’s past trauma. Or does it? Not really. Jamie reacts pretty violently at first, but it would have been enough to just leave it at that, right? Maybe not have those weekly candlelight dinners anymore and pretend the whole thing never happened? No, for some reason Jamie feels that isn’t enough and forces John via legal hassle to do an involuntary (and unwitting) Jack Randall impression to remind him of the horrors of that night. But wait, he tells us what that reason is exactly -- though admittedly blink-and-you-miss-it: he needed to get rid of the temptation. (Yes, that would be the temptation to jump in bed with the man. No other temptation in sight, really.) All right then. Some pretty strong temptation if it takes a public whipping to purge.
And it’s not like it stops there. Friendship resumed after a substantial period of icy politeness, they grow close enough over the years that Jamie asks John to take care of Willie for him. This is clearly something John would be more than happy to do - hey, it’s like having a son with the man he loves! One up on Claire, too! Mysteriously, Jamie feels he needs to make that offer even more enticing, so he throws sex in the mix, offering John some in reward. (He later passes this off to Claire as a test of John’s trustworthiness, but honestly, a) they’ve known each other for years now, so this isn’t necessary, and b) I didn’t get that vibe from the actual scene at all.) When John is all affronted and won’t take sex as a mere payment from someone he loves, Jamie kisses him. Remember that none of that is technically necessary. (Do your straight friends kiss you like that? Not even when you’ve just made them very happy? Thought so.)
Now, in Echo, we get this heart-warming little scene where Jamie gives a rain-soaked John his cloak. Of course, lending a shivering friend something to wear isn’t inherently romantic, but the way Jamie does it definitely is. (Reread the scene and visualise. I’ll wait.) There’s no reason whatsoever to put the thing around his shoulders in a black-and-white-movie gentleman’s way when he could just have handed it over, let John put it on himself, and avoided the almost-embrace.
And we aren’t even talking about the other little moments of closeness Jamie always pretends are solely for John’s benefit (even though John seems content enough to just be friends) yet. If you make a list of all those from the entire series, you can’t help but get the impression that it takes the concept of “subconscious encouragement” to wholly new levels.
So, I think you see why I have the sneaking suspicion that Jamie isn’t all that straight, and would have started something with John long ago if the whole Jack Randall incident hadn’t happened?
- As to all those who protest that John/Claire came out of nowhere: the triangle has been there from the beginning! The first time we meet John, he is trying to save Claire, whom he mistakes for a captive English lady, from Jamie and his men. When they meet decades later upon the plague ship, they seem to like each other very much, and only the mutual jealousy when they find out they’re basically competing for Jamie’s affection keeps them from becoming friends. (Also to be noted: Claire perceives Jamie’s friendship with John as a threat. Jamie’s marriage to Laoghaire pales in comparison. Even though these two actually slept together, Claire only appears to feel serious jealousy about John. Interesting, isn’t it?)
It takes the next several books for Claire to get over her raging homophobic prejudices them to make friends once more, and it came as no surprise to me that, in a pinch, they’d absolutely fake-marry. I didn’t expect actual sex to happen, but I kind of liked that it did. (Not only because I want the series to end in a happy threesome, but also because that sort of grief reaction makes a lot of sense at that moment. I didn’t like the second sex scene much, but I see that it made the point of their being emotionally compatible even without immediate presence of Jamie’s ghost. I’d still have preferred them to curl up like puppies together and just sleep.)
- Echo has been almost heavy-handed in the clue-dropping department. Yes, we get it, John wants a threesome. And no matter what he says, he doesn’t want it with just anybody - because he easily could have that with some random guys in London’s underworld (and probably did, back in the days he hung out with George Everett to much for anyone’s sanity), or Nessie and her husband, or the Count of Armagnac and his sister... But he doesn’t take any of those opportunities. It’s a set-up for John/Jamie/Claire that couldn’t be more blatant if it tried. Seriously, it’s not even remotely subtle! And I could hardly be happier! I hope Diana will go through with it. Not only for my own personal amusement, or because I believe it’d be the best ending for the characters, but also because she’s a very widely read and loved author and if she raises a voice for alternative lifestyle choices (especially if it’s the main characters, not only Jo, Lizzie and Kezzie - oh yeah, I forgot: canonically happy three-way marriage: clue, y/y?), there’s a chance at least some people who aren’t inside the queer or poly demographic already (because, let’s face it, romance novel readers are still the primary target audience) will listen. My grandma for one (who was carefully neutral before) became a lot more queer-friendly after reading the Lord John novels, simply due to sympathising with a gay hero for the presumably first time in her life. (Yes, I’m well aware that Gabaldon isn’t remotely without issues as queer lit (the vast majority of her gay characters - John and Stephan are the only main character exceptions - being either dead, weak, or evil, as Kindkit pointed out to me a while ago), but at least she’s trying and I think that counts for something.)
ETA: I’ve totally just written a ship manifesto, haven’t I? *facepalm*
ETA II: I forgot a clue! Remember the hand-reading Mrs Graham does on Claire in the first book? She tells her she has a penchant for bigamy written there. It seemed to refer to Frank and Jamie at that point, but while the emotional conundrum was of course strong, she wasn't actually married to both of them at the same point in time. Now, however she's married to John and Jamie simultaneously.
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Oh, and btw, has anyone got an idea where in Germany she’s coming to on her tour this month? Because I can’t find a schedule anywhere, but I’d really like to go, in the unlikely case it happens to be nearby. Found one! She’s in Dortmund next Friday! *squee* And I have a student’s train ticket for all of NRW, so… am I going? It’d be so awesome! But I’ve never been to a book signing; how do those even work? Help?
Before I get started on the book itself, though, let me note: I recently get the impression Diana has written herself in love with Lord John as a character more than she ever intended, which is why we get his POV in a Jamie/Claire book for the first time since Drums, and there’s a new novella coming out soon (edited by GRRM, no less - finish the damn Dance with Dragons already, George, before doing other stuff… no, wait, I want this book, too! The eel excerpt is awesome!), as well as the next Lord John novel (Helwater era John and Jamie, OMG WANT!). It seems the het-only fans are starting to complain, but I hope she doesn’t listen to those too much.
Now, review.
The Bad:
The book seems disjointed in places. There are more POVs than usual, which adds depth most of the time but occasionally makes the action feel spread thin over the map, so to speak. Coherence between the different plot lines goes missing now and then, and the paragraphs sometimes feel they should be in a different order to get their point across better. Not to mention chronology. (And I don’t mean the 1770s vs 1970s chronology jumps, which work fine, as usual, but the various 18th ct POVs. A bit more editing could have done wonders there.
The ending felt unfinished. Yes, I’m acquainted with the concept of cliff-hangers, but Diana, of all people, really doesn’t have to worry about people not buying the next part! And they weren’t even good cliff-hangers, only half-baked ones! She should have cut off the book with Jamie’s “death” and Claire’s marriage to John. That’d have caused some uproar! As it is, the most interesting questions are already answered. (Do John and Claire have sex? Check. Does Jamie come back? Check. Will Jamie be incredibly pissed off? (Negative) Check.) What is left is the question as to how this little triangle (and their assorted relationships towards Willie) will eventually resolve. (Also, Jem and the French gold, but… meh.) Still interesting, but a lot less spectacular. And it would have made sense to give the John/Claire marriage more room in the next book, instead of making it a tacked-on afterthought to this one. A number of events feel too rushed this way.
Willie wasn’t as entertaining a POV character as I expected. It’s almost as if he has no innate sense of humour whatsoever - a strange thing indeed in a Gabaldon character! And while I get that he’s still got a lot to learn, he comes off as annoyingly immature and naïve most of the time.
What happened to the sex scenes? Is it just me or did there use to be more of them, and longer ones? Jamie and Claire are still handsome for their age, so where did the explicitness go, huh?
The Good:
I went in skimming for who tells how much of the story (I always do with multi-POV books), and was slightly annoyed by how much of Bree-and-Roger-in-the-20th-ct there was, but I ended up liking their parts a lot more than I expected. (Probably because I’m in love with Lallybroch. *wistful sigh*)
Everything that’s usually good about a Diana Gabaldon book: history coming to life in interesting, action-filled and often absurd ways, awesome sense of place and atmosphere, revisiting beloved characters, meeting new and interesting ones, emotionally cathartic moments, suspense, humour, disgusting medical procedures… and did I mention history? (Brief summary, but be assured all these aspects easily make up for the bad stuff mentioned above! They’re just not news, so I don’t see any point in elaborating.)
The Amusing:
You will never look at Benjamin Franklin the same way again. This wouldn’t necessarily be all that bad, except that bursting out laughing whenever he comes up in conversation isn’t usually appropriate. On the upside: at least I’m not American, so he comes up a lot less often for me than he will for most of you. “:-p
The Diana Gabaldon Drinking Game (you take a shot whenever one of the characters does) remains as lethal as ever. Accurate portrayal of 18th ct drinking habits, maybe, but… holy shit.
Fully-rigged-sailing-ship hair! I’ll never get over how awesome that is. (I was bored the day after I finished the book, and the train was mostly empty, so I drew a few little book reaction comics. The one with the tiny ship came out best.)
This book will go down in history as the one that made half the existing fanfic come true. John/Claire marriage-of-necessity? Check. Jamie taking John hostage at gunpoint (which probably shouldn’t be as hot as it is) to escape from the English? Check. Now, all we need is a little more porn…
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And just so I can smugly say “I called it” later ( and did so even before reading Echo): I predict a threesome to resolve the issue. Wishful thinking? Pfft! The story has been moving that way steadily for a long time! And it’d be a perfect ending, especially if you take overarching story structure and long-term character development into consideration:
- “Jamie deals with getting raped by Jack Randall” has been a major theme since the whole thing happened in book one, though it was pushed into the background somewhat in the in-between-time, it resurfaces every now and then. (Mostly when other people get raped. Which happens with alarming regularity, though thankfully in a lot less lovingly written bordering on the fetishistic detail.) Echo pointedly reminds us that he still has nightmares about this forty years later. Jamie’s long-time friendship with John despite it is a huge step towards coping. (And what better way to successfully finalise this very coping process than voluntary gay sex? That’d mean he has overcome his life’s trauma once and for all.)
- I don’t know about anyone else, but I’ve always had the impression that Jamie is at least somewhat bisexual. Clues? Let’s see: His objection towards having sex with the duke of Sandringham isn’t in the act itself, but the person. Same with Jack Randall. Even so, he contemplates agreeing to Randall’s offer instead of getting whipped, but the thought of his father’s good opinion keeps him back. There doesn’t, at any point, seem to be a general sort of distaste towards homosexual behaviour. Women apparently hold more interest for him, but that may well be due in a large part to living in the 18th century. Hell, even today being bisexual gives you the privilege of passing as straight even to your own mind’s eye. I did that myself for years! Jamie simply doesn’t have much reason to go looking beyond what he has. He is expected to like women; he likes women; his wife is great; and that’s all he needs to concern himself with in this department.
Moreover, Claire isn’t exactly a paragon of feminity, neither in the 1940s, nor at all in the 18th century. Not a strong clue, but something to consider nonetheless.
More indicative is his relationship towards John:
- Jamie likes John. Really a lot. In a far from entirely platonic way. Daring hypothesis? Not at all! Canon is on my side here. See, the John/Jamie dynamics are easily my favourite thing in the series, because they’re far from simple. The two of them start out as enemies, first at Culloden, later at Ardsmuir, but become friends fast; comfortable with each other to the point where they feel compelled to tell each other about their lost loves. As soon as John makes a pass, however, this shatters due to Jamie’s past trauma. Or does it? Not really. Jamie reacts pretty violently at first, but it would have been enough to just leave it at that, right? Maybe not have those weekly candlelight dinners anymore and pretend the whole thing never happened? No, for some reason Jamie feels that isn’t enough and forces John via legal hassle to do an involuntary (and unwitting) Jack Randall impression to remind him of the horrors of that night. But wait, he tells us what that reason is exactly -- though admittedly blink-and-you-miss-it: he needed to get rid of the temptation. (Yes, that would be the temptation to jump in bed with the man. No other temptation in sight, really.) All right then. Some pretty strong temptation if it takes a public whipping to purge.
And it’s not like it stops there. Friendship resumed after a substantial period of icy politeness, they grow close enough over the years that Jamie asks John to take care of Willie for him. This is clearly something John would be more than happy to do - hey, it’s like having a son with the man he loves! One up on Claire, too! Mysteriously, Jamie feels he needs to make that offer even more enticing, so he throws sex in the mix, offering John some in reward. (He later passes this off to Claire as a test of John’s trustworthiness, but honestly, a) they’ve known each other for years now, so this isn’t necessary, and b) I didn’t get that vibe from the actual scene at all.) When John is all affronted and won’t take sex as a mere payment from someone he loves, Jamie kisses him. Remember that none of that is technically necessary. (Do your straight friends kiss you like that? Not even when you’ve just made them very happy? Thought so.)
Now, in Echo, we get this heart-warming little scene where Jamie gives a rain-soaked John his cloak. Of course, lending a shivering friend something to wear isn’t inherently romantic, but the way Jamie does it definitely is. (Reread the scene and visualise. I’ll wait.) There’s no reason whatsoever to put the thing around his shoulders in a black-and-white-movie gentleman’s way when he could just have handed it over, let John put it on himself, and avoided the almost-embrace.
And we aren’t even talking about the other little moments of closeness Jamie always pretends are solely for John’s benefit (even though John seems content enough to just be friends) yet. If you make a list of all those from the entire series, you can’t help but get the impression that it takes the concept of “subconscious encouragement” to wholly new levels.
So, I think you see why I have the sneaking suspicion that Jamie isn’t all that straight, and would have started something with John long ago if the whole Jack Randall incident hadn’t happened?
- As to all those who protest that John/Claire came out of nowhere: the triangle has been there from the beginning! The first time we meet John, he is trying to save Claire, whom he mistakes for a captive English lady, from Jamie and his men. When they meet decades later upon the plague ship, they seem to like each other very much, and only the mutual jealousy when they find out they’re basically competing for Jamie’s affection keeps them from becoming friends. (Also to be noted: Claire perceives Jamie’s friendship with John as a threat. Jamie’s marriage to Laoghaire pales in comparison. Even though these two actually slept together, Claire only appears to feel serious jealousy about John. Interesting, isn’t it?)
It takes the next several books for Claire to get over her raging homophobic prejudices them to make friends once more, and it came as no surprise to me that, in a pinch, they’d absolutely fake-marry. I didn’t expect actual sex to happen, but I kind of liked that it did. (Not only because I want the series to end in a happy threesome, but also because that sort of grief reaction makes a lot of sense at that moment. I didn’t like the second sex scene much, but I see that it made the point of their being emotionally compatible even without immediate presence of Jamie’s ghost. I’d still have preferred them to curl up like puppies together and just sleep.)
- Echo has been almost heavy-handed in the clue-dropping department. Yes, we get it, John wants a threesome. And no matter what he says, he doesn’t want it with just anybody - because he easily could have that with some random guys in London’s underworld (and probably did, back in the days he hung out with George Everett to much for anyone’s sanity), or Nessie and her husband, or the Count of Armagnac and his sister... But he doesn’t take any of those opportunities. It’s a set-up for John/Jamie/Claire that couldn’t be more blatant if it tried. Seriously, it’s not even remotely subtle! And I could hardly be happier! I hope Diana will go through with it. Not only for my own personal amusement, or because I believe it’d be the best ending for the characters, but also because she’s a very widely read and loved author and if she raises a voice for alternative lifestyle choices (especially if it’s the main characters, not only Jo, Lizzie and Kezzie - oh yeah, I forgot: canonically happy three-way marriage: clue, y/y?), there’s a chance at least some people who aren’t inside the queer or poly demographic already (because, let’s face it, romance novel readers are still the primary target audience) will listen. My grandma for one (who was carefully neutral before) became a lot more queer-friendly after reading the Lord John novels, simply due to sympathising with a gay hero for the presumably first time in her life. (Yes, I’m well aware that Gabaldon isn’t remotely without issues as queer lit (the vast majority of her gay characters - John and Stephan are the only main character exceptions - being either dead, weak, or evil, as Kindkit pointed out to me a while ago), but at least she’s trying and I think that counts for something.)
ETA: I’ve totally just written a ship manifesto, haven’t I? *facepalm*
ETA II: I forgot a clue! Remember the hand-reading Mrs Graham does on Claire in the first book? She tells her she has a penchant for bigamy written there. It seemed to refer to Frank and Jamie at that point, but while the emotional conundrum was of course strong, she wasn't actually married to both of them at the same point in time. Now, however she's married to John and Jamie simultaneously.
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Oh, and btw, has anyone got an idea where in Germany she’s coming to on her tour this month? Because I can’t find a schedule anywhere, but I’d really like to go, in the unlikely case it happens to be nearby. Found one! She’s in Dortmund next Friday! *squee* And I have a student’s train ticket for all of NRW, so… am I going? It’d be so awesome! But I’ve never been to a book signing; how do those even work? Help?