Through the course of any human's existence, one heart may flutter in the face of many different kinds of love: the love for a pet, for a friend, for a parent and even for chocolate. For many, the most profound of all are those for a spouse and for a child. To have to choose between these loves could be the most heartbreaking decision a soul must make. Such a choice is just one of the journeys mapped out in Voyager, the third entry in Diana Gabaldon's Outlander Series.

For the first time in the series, the novel opens with Jamie Fraser as he wakes on the battlefield of Culloden on April 16, 1745, the very day of the momentous battle. A dead man's body weighs down upon his own, numbing his legs. Jamie moves the body to release the pressure. The face of the corpse is revealed and the first of many jolting shocks are unveiled along with it. Unlike his Highlander compatriots, a few ragtag scraps of men who survived the battle only to be hanged, Jamie is saved from death by a human debt.

The switch to Claire in 1968 is made at the exact earth shattering moment left in Dragonfly in Amber, the instant Roger informs Claire that Jamie did not die at Culloden. With Claire's permission, Roger returns to his research, hoping to discover what did happen to Jamie. During their work together, Claire reveals more of the circumstances surrounding her return to 1948 and her first husband, Frank, his reaction to the story of where she had been for the three previous years, and their subsequent life together.

Large portions of this thousand plus page tome switch between Jamie in 18th century Scotland and Claire in the 20th century, both in present-time and the years following her supernatural return. Once Claire makes her decision, that gut-wrenching choice between her two loves, the story of her life continues. Each story within this work is a worthy plot in its own right; however, initially, it reads a bit jumpy with perhaps a few too many point-of-view transitions.

Voyager is the story of journeys: a saga of travels to another time and another country and another life. There are the fondly remembered and well-missed characters, joined by new and naturally acquired ones who are cohesive contributors to the story, keeping the pace and tension as taut and enticing as its predecessors. Diana Gabaldon has created as shocking and twisting a plot line as that of an EKG during a cardiac arrest.

Voyager is intense and multidimensional, incorporating kidnapping, murder and the dead come back to life. Jamie and Claire are still the focal point, still nurturing a love so real and true its absence brings to stark reality the gaping hole in the lives of those who don't possess it yet yearn for it. The fate of these people, the path of their lives and the question of what may yet come, is left in such abundant ambiguity as to rival any cliffhanger in the history of literature.

Donna Russo Morin
© July 2005