Outlander (the book)

I got interested in Outlander through the advertisements in Entertainment Weekly. I'm always interested in TV shows that are a little (or a lot) out of the ordinary. First, the pictures attracted me, and then I watched the free first episode on the Starz website. I was a little worried about the amount of sexual content the show would have, being on Starz, and my worry was warranted. When I finished the first episode, I had mixed feelings. I was undeniably curious about where the story was going, but I was put off a little by the sexual gratuity. I would have continued to watch more of the show anyway if I could have, but I don't have access to Starz on TV. So, the show was done for me, at least until DVD. But fortunately for me, it was based on a book, and I figured that was a better way to satisfy my curiosity anyway.

The attraction of the story lies in this: Claire is a war nurse from 1945 who, while trying to reconnect with her husband on a trip to Scotland, finds herself transported through time to 1743. There, she becomes captive to a Scottish clan and is eventually forced to marry. It's certainly an interesting premise. But that's not all the story has going for it. Once I started to read, I was fascinated by the land and people that the author, Diana Gabaldon, describes so well. There's a wealth of detail in this book.

There's also an intriguing moral question. If a person is married, and happily so (though that doesn't affect the morality of the question), but finds herself two hundred years in the past with no knowledge of whether or not she will ever get back, is it right to get married again and essentially be married to two men at once, though in two different times? I'm not sure the book gives a satisfactory answer, though it is certainly addressed.

(SPOILERS ahead.) The shock value of this situation is not singular in this story. And I have mixed feelings about this, too. Gabaldon seems to rely on providing as much shock value as she can throughout the book. While this pulls the reader further into the story, I think it also hinders her story in two ways. First, the story seems a little less likely. (I mean, it was never that likely to begin with, but all the details do create a fairly believable world.) Second, the shock value often goes hand-in-hand with moral depravity. For instance, Claire encounters a predecessor of her 1945 husband in 1743. He looks nearly identical to her husband but ends up being the villain of the story. He attacks Claire, creating a link between her first husband's face and violence. He's a sexual sadist and gets pleasure particularly out of violating men, both body and spirit. All that seems a little over-the-top. Speaking of sadism, the one scene that almost stopped my reading was toward the middle of the book when Claire's new husband (1743) whips her with a belt. It's to punish her for nearly getting him and his men killed, but he gets some pleasure out of it, too. The book does a remarkable job of explaining the situation and relating the fallout of it (I did keep reading, after all), but it made me so mad. I won't spoil every instance of shock value for you, but these should give you an idea.

And unfortunately, on top of a lot of shock value, Gabaldon is at least as graphic as the one episode I saw of the TV show, though the TV show added details that weren't in the book. Now, I've never read Fifty Shades of Grey and don't plan to, and I'm not really comparing the two books, but I doubt Fifty Shades could be much more graphic. There are pages and pages of details about Claire and her 1743 husband's sexual explorations. Later in the book, there are details about the villain's homosexual sadism. Not much is left to the imagination. As far as the sex scenes involving Claire go, I was at least happy that she was married. Morally, that is acceptable. But is it morally acceptable for a person to read all that explicit sexual content? Perhaps there are people out there who can read it with impunity. Their consciences are whole, and they are unaffected by what they read. I admit, I can't. And I think a lot of people who do read that stuff shouldn't. I think it hurts us, raises expectations that can't be met, causes us to long for a fantasy that isn't real. It's not harmless. Our culture says it's harmless, and we've become much more sexually "free," or so we believe. We give our hearts and souls away for nothing. We are free...to lose everything. And through books like these, we numb our consciences until we believe the lie.

Soap. Box. Sorry. But it needed to be said.

Outlander begins an eight-book (eight major books so far, but there are also extra related books) series. The first book was published in 1991, and the latest book was published this year. So, there's quite a lot of content. But as interesting as some of the details about Scotland and the livelihood of people from the 18th century are, I think I am already done with this series. Perhaps it's just that these are very long books, and it took me awhile to get through Outlander, and I'm ready for something else right now. But also, I think I need to be careful about searing my conscience with images that are meant to shock and entice. From what I know of the latest book, I don't think that aspect of Gabaldon's books goes away. I do know the series continues on years into Claire's future (in the past), and I'm sure there's a lot of great stuff in there. But for now, it's not for me.

I give it three out of five stars.

Looper in Theaters Now

I was so excited to see this movie that I even let my husband fork out the extra cash to see it in a nice theater in a big city on my birthday getaway. But what a disappointment!

Looper stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Bruce Willis in a science fiction flick about time travel and murderers-for-hire. I guess I missed the part about them being hired guns and was more excited about the time travel aspect and the actors. My mistake.

Joe is one of these Loopers. He takes care of criminals who are sent to him from the future, where time traveling is illegal. Killing people in the past leaves no trail to follow. When a Looper has served enough time, he is sent his own future self to dispose of, along with enough gold to set him up for the next (and last) 30 years of his life. Loopers close the "loop" by killing their future selves and then get to live in peace until it's time to be on the other end of that gun. Neat and clean (the process, that is; not the movie).

The movie is rated R. I think it should be rated higher, like NC-17 or something (I don't even know what the next level is). Looper is brutally violent, and there is far too much (any is too much) upper female nudity, which I wasn't expecting at all. And when children are murdered for the "greater good," that crosses the line for me in the violence department.

Besides the time travel thing, there is one other science fiction aspect, involving telekinesis. This barely affects the plot except where it has to do with the main bad guy. Otherwise, it's poorly integrated and feels like a superfluous plot device to make the bad guy simultaneously more evil and cool.

After such a depressing story, it's rather amazing that the movie pulls off some redemptive value. Looper is not worth paying the money to see, but if you did, by accident, you won't leave in utter despair. In the end, love wins, and not just any love...a mother's love. That's pretty powerful. It's just buried by a load of images that are powerfully harmful.

Sure, Willis and Gordon-Levitt do a great job acting like the younger and older versions of the same person. Emily Blunt also has a great role as a protective, tortured single mom. The acting is fine. Even the story could have been acceptable with little improvements here and there. There's just no moral center to it.

I heard this movie compared to Inception as far as its capability to blow your mind. In no way does it stand a chance against Inception. The time travel leaves questions that are mind-blowing, certainly, but that's because they just don't make sense. Time travel always seems to have a hole somewhere. Dr. Who has a name for this: it's timey-wimey. That's okay for Dr. Who. Dr. Who blows my mind with its goodness. What does Looper have going for it if not a tightly woven time travel history? Sex and gore, and those don't fly on this blog.

The Map of Time

Felix J. Palma's novel, The Map of Time, is a deceptive little thing, and by "little," I mean gargantuan three-parter. It's an unusual (but not unheard of) read for me for two reasons: 1) it's written by a man, and 2) it's not young adult fiction. The Map of Time is not a lot of things. For instance, most of it is not about real time travel (and by "real," I mean that which is considered real in a fictional world); two of the three parts have to do with people pretending they have time machines. Additionally, the novel is not about one person. Each part focuses on a different main character or two, and though they are all woven together into the story as a whole, it's somewhat upsetting and wearying to swap main characters like that and, for the most part, be done with their stories while two-thirds or a third of the book remains.

So, what is this strange, not-so-little novel about? Set in Victorian England, The Map of Time is about the sensational stir the idea of time travel causes after the publication of H.G. Wells' The Time Machine. Mr. Wells, in fact, makes appearances in all three parts of the book and stars in the third. In Part One, a man loses his lover to Jack the Ripper and wishes to go back in time to kill the man before the murder takes place. In Part Two, a woman falls in love with a Captain from the future but does not realize he is merely an actor, and he, unwilling to crush her spirit, concocts an elaborate hoax to keep her from finding out the truth. In Part Three, H.G. Wells attempts to help solve a murder case in which the assault weapon appears to be futuristic and the words of a novel he's barely finished and not yet shown to anyone are scrawled on the wall above the victim.

The plot may sound intriguing here, but it annoyed me to no end while reading it. The first of the three stories is about a man who falls in love with a prostitute. Okay, who am I to judge? I love the book Redeeming Love, by Francine Rivers, which is all about a man falling in love with a prostitute. But is it love if the relationship is based wholly on sex and the man pays for every encounter? Call me crazy...but I think not. The second story is about a man who takes advantage of a woman falling in love with the person he is pretending to be and tricking her into getting into bed with him though they don't know each other. And might I reiterate, all this takes place in Victorian England. Though I'm well aware that there were prostitutes at that time, too, I'm not convinced that every wife was a cold, dead fish in bed and that every man was a hormonal sex machine like the book so ridiculously implies. Not one of the men in the book stays true to one woman all his life. Jane Austen is turning over in her grave.

It was kind of ironic to me that after the author seemed to have no scruples about writing about sex, he suddenly veered away from a bedroom scene he had been meticulously and detailedly leading up to. But the "Aha" moment came later when the scene was described in detail through a letter. The only defense I can offer up for such writing is that it is presented more or less factually and not too graphically. It's a little crude at parts, but it doesn't dwell or sensationalize. Still, I was rather stupefied as to why two-thirds of a novel that was supposedly about time was spent talking about fake time machines and relationships based entirely upon sex. I guess I shouldn't be surprised that modern "literature" takes on the face of modern people, even if it is set in other eras. But I'd rather be surprised by a novel that exudes talent and goodness. Do those exist anymore? I used to think young adult fiction (which, I remind you, this is not) was beginning to have more sex in it than adult fiction, but I think it's all the same. Both genres have it, and the only difference is how the author approaches the subject. I've been happy lately, however, to find slightly less of it in the young adult novels I've been reading. Maybe I'm just learning to pick my titles better.

The minor redeeming value of The Map of Time is the way it is written. It has a lyrical quality and reads beautifully, which is all the more remarkable since the book is translated from Spanish. The narration is quirky, too, as the narrator addresses the reader directly, frequently reminds the reader that he is omniscient in the story, and ends the book by having H.G. Wells suggest that in a parallel world somewhere someone might be writing about him, wink, wink.

You might wonder why I, self-proclaimed morality gateway to book and movie entertainment, would continue reading this book after the first part's dismaying plot line. I think the gist of it was curiosity (I was searching for that blasted real time machine!) and the compelling readability of the book. I kept thinking, this will get better just around the corner, and though it eventually did, it may have been too little too late. If you want to wade through the odd, morally ambiguous plot to get to the glimmers some people are calling "brilliant," it's your call. But if you trust me, take my word for it and read something a little less gutter-stuck and a bit more satisfactorily happy. I'll let you know if I find such a thing in reviews to come.