I just finished reading The Fiery Cross...

...by Diana Gabaldon. I adored the first two books she'd written (Outlander and Dragonfly in Amber) when I read them, and the third and fourth (Voyager and Drums of Autumn) were entertaining, though I'll probably never pick them up again. But this book - ugh.

For one thing, it needs to be about fifty percent shorter than its current length; 979 pages, and nothing happens for a good 450 of them. I do not care about how Brianna's breasts leak circles of milk onto her shift/shirt/smock/vest, nor do I care what her baby's shit looks like. I do not care how husbands Jamie and Roger's nipples/chest hair/arm hair puckers and goosepimples when their respective wives run their fingers/breasts/hair over it. I do not care how Character A's hair looks when the sun strikes it if I've already read said description fifteen other times. I don't care what Jamie/Claire/Brianna/Roger thinks when s/he looks at her mate for the tenth time in any given chapter. But Gabaldon's narrative voices sure seem to think I do. This isn't to say that I don't like slice-of-life stories, or accurate descriptions of daily life in period fiction - I do. But descriptions of the various Narrative Sue/Stu's physical characteristics, repeated ad nauseum is completely unnecessary.

At "over six feet, with curly flaming red hair" (a description Gabaldon reiterates every freakin' time someone looks at Brianna) the girl is dangerously close to a Sue even before her personality (such as it is) confirms readers' worst suspicions. It's annoying, and not anything I can't read about in online fanfic. And it serves no purpose but to bog down the narrative in excess verbiage.

More excess verbiage is devoted to painfully in-depth descriptions of the various medical calamities which befell American Colonists. Now, I enjoyed these at first because Gabaldon's narrative doesn't shy away from the unpleasantness of it. Then she had Brianna's minstrel husband hanged in a case of dastardly mistaken identity. "Damn," I thought. "She's taking no prisoners." Because Roger, the hanged man, was the only major character who didn't fit the Sue/Stu bill in this book (although he makes up for it with Teh AngstOMG!!1!, something I could also get my fill of in fanfic, but I digress...) Anyway, I was very shaken up when she killed him off, and in a bit of awe at her ruthlessness toward what is undoubtably a popular character.

Except Roger survives. Yes, he had a trachectomy. Yes, it heals slowly and his 'songbird' voice is lost. Yes, this results in Teh Angst. But being suspended by one's neck, deprived of oxegen for over an hour results in more serious consequences, like, perhaps, BRAIN DAMAGE. And yet the character in question makes a full recovery, because nothing Truly Bad will ever occur to the main characters. To exacerbate the issue, main Sue character #2, Claire, 20th century physician that she is, never even contemplates the possibility of brain damage, most likely because Gabaldon's hoping her readers won't notice what a happy implausibility it is that Roger will make a full recovery. And this is where Gabaldon's celebrated head-on approach to graphic descriptions of injury and illness loses all credibility whatsoever.

The names are also cloyingly clever. We have, for instance, Lillywhite, the corrupt colonial magistrate cum extortionist/smuggler/murderer, and Wolff, the naval Lieutenant who plots murder, rape and forced marriage to gain control of a large plantation. 'Lilly white' and 'Wolf' - get it??? Hah hah.

Now let's move on to the humor, which is for the most part not that humorous. One of the things I really liked about Outlander was the riposte between characters, the one-liners and puns, and the insightful description. This cleverness has all but vanished from the text of TFC. Tertiary characters are turned into cliched and obnoxious racial, national, and gender stereotypes (the hen-picked husband and heavyset, hysterical pussywhipping wife abound, as do the beer & saurkraut swilling, scatalogical Germans, and the whorish, boorish Russians, and the corrupt, effete Englishmen, and the fanatic, insane AIM members), the dialogue is littered with anachronisms ('Something smells fishy about this situation,' says a soon-to-be-ambushed Lillywhite. 'And it isn't just the marsh' [At that point I was just waiting for the Scooby Gang to appear]) which are even more obvious given Gabaldon's tendancy to write everything in dialect.

And then there's the Gaelic. Now, I still need a dictionary to read even intermediate Gaelic prose, but Gabaldon's Gaelic is all over the place, which is sad, as she credits people for help and corrections in the Acknowledgements. Lack of standardised spellings and misspellings abound, and she makes mistakes with the possessive and vocative cases, which are among the first things any student of the language learns, as well as being among the easiest errors to avoid. And finally, she uses bits of Gaelic in the text, with 'v', a letter that does not exist in written Gaelic. It's like fangirl Japanese, although more annoying, because Gabaldon apparently attempted to research her usuage.

And there's the blatant bias of the narrative. You see Roger's not sure that Main Mary Sue Offender Brianna's child is really his. Characters gasp and sob and agonise over this for 900+ pages, only to have it resolved in the most ridiculous manner possible at the end of the book. Yet it's the treatment of the issue that bothers me. Roger's held up as a paragon of virtue for raising the child (a highly annoying character in his own right, who appears to exist solely to provide a Deus ex Machina/plot device/'humorous' situation, when Gabaldon deems it necessary) even though he can't be sure the child is his. What Selflessness! What Honor! What Love for his Wife! And yet Claire's original husband, Frank, did just that in the earlier volumes of the series, and he is held up in this volume as Main Villain Past, for being jealous of Claire and standing in the way of her OTP with Jaime. Please.

Finally, Gabaldon submits us to chapterlets I like to refer to as, 'In Case You Missed 4th Grade Science, Dear Reader' in which readers are subjected to pages of explanation on how human fertilization, blood types (complete with semi-accurate chart!), and genetic inheritance work, to name a few. Can it, woman, I have much better biology texts on my shelf I could go and read if I was in the mood for science.

So, again. Ugh. Gabaldon was a very good writer, fun, inventive, and exciting. Well, the excitement's gone fron this volume, as has the inventiveness, and with it the fun. It's as if she's trying too hard. I hope she chills out for the next volume. My final thoughts? There's a good book in there somewhere, if only the characters taken off their Sue costumes and Gabaldon had had the courage to strike more unneeded text. I'll read the next in the series, to be sure, but I'm heartily glad I didn't pay money for this installment.