Now look at it from Frank’s point of view (I know; readers just don’t want to even think about Frank, but there he is, nonetheless). You’re happily married, then your wife vanishes. You worry, obsess, search, grieve, finally become sort of reconciled… and then she comes back, pregnant by another man, and telling wild stories about where she’s been.
All right. Being a kind and honorable person—and still loving this woman—you grit your teeth, accept the situation and the oncoming child, and do your best. Your wife is doing her best, too, but it’s plain to you that she’s still in love with the child’s father—whoever that was. Being a professional historian, you have the tools and resources to at least begin to check into her story. It probably takes some time before you get up the resolve to do this, but once you do… well, there was a guy named Jamie Fraser, and the bits and pieces you can dig up about him do match what your wife told you… but do you really believe this?
Meanwhile, you have a wonderful daughter, whom you love desperately, and who adores you. You and your wife have some difficulties, but you still do love her very deeply. Losing your wife once was horrible, but you survived; losing both of them now would destroy you.
So what do you do?
IF you assume that the story isn’t true, OR that the Jamie Fraser you found is not the one Claire was involved with, then plainly there’s nothing you can or should do.
However, IF you assume that the story IS true, and that this IS the correct Jamie Fraser… well, then you have a slight moral dilemma.
Do you tell your wife (and by extension, your daughter)? If you do, either of two things may happen: 1) she promptly abandons you again and tries to return to Fraser, or 2) she stays with you, but only out of duty, while plainly longing for another man—which will ruin the fragile web of the marriage you’ve rebuilt with such pain and difficulty. You’d risk this, on the supposition that a wildly unlikely set of circumstances is true, and on small fragments of historical research? (Even if it were all true, you have no way of knowing how long Fraser lived after Culloden.)
If you tell your wife and she does leave, she may well try to take your daughter with her. You might stand your wife’s desertion; you can’t stand the thought of losing your daughter—or even of losing your daughter’s love, which might happen if she learns the truth, whether or not she goes with Claire.
If you tell your wife and she doesn’t leave, your marriage will be a hollow shell, and you may still lose your daughter’s unquestioning love and acceptance of you as her father. Again, you’d risk your entire life’s happiness, on a chancel Not bloody likely.
Taking into account only Claire’s feelings—if you think her sense of obligation will keep her with you, is it fair or kind to reveal the truth to her? She’s made her peace with the loss of the other man, and found some happiness and stability here with you and your daughter. Even if you disregard your own feelings in the matter, and assume the most honorable response from her—is it right to let her be tortured by the knowledge that Fraser survived, to let her agonize over the choice? And once more… on only the chance that you’re right in what you think you know. No.
At the same time, Frank is both a historian and an honorable man. He can’t, in all conscience, completely ignore what he knows or suspects. IF this is the Jamie Fraser who fathered Brianna, then there is a certain obligation toward Brianna. Frank values the truth; any historian must, even while realizing its limits.
When he learns (as he tells the Reverend) that he has a heart condition, he decides that he must make some gesture. There is a possibility that he might die in the relatively near future. Once he is gone, then the confusing multiplicity of possibilities is reduced. Once dead, he can’t be hurt by either Claire’s or Brianna’s choices—there can be no direct damage to him in their finding out about Jamie Fraser.
At the same time, he can’t bear the thought that Brianna might regard him with anger or loathing, once she learns the truth. She may feel this as a betrayal—which it is, but one in which he feels somewhat justified; he is Brianna’s father, as much or more than the man who sired her, and he will not give up her love for him, or tolerate the thought that she will remember him with scorn.
How then, to impart the truth—safely, after he is dead—and still without letting Claire or Bree know that he had withheld this knowledge from them?
He hits upon the idea of the false gravestone, placed near his own kinsman’s. Brianna has always been interested in history, has helped him with his own work, knows about Jack Randall. If she thinks of Frank much after his demise, chances are good that eventually she will go looking for Jack Randall’s resting place—as indeed she does. IF she then finds the false grave, and tells her mother… well, then it will be up to Claire to tell her daughter the truth. Brianna will learn who her father really is, thus satisfying Frank’s feeling of obligation to her and to the truth—and at the same time, will never know that Frank had kept the knowledge from her.
This is not a completely honest method, and Frank knows that; still, it’s the most he can bring himself to do, under the circumstances. He does, however, feel the need to confess what he’s done—and why—and chooses to tell the Reverend, whom he knows will keep his secrets.
So that’s what’s behind Frank’s letter, and why he did what he did. What Roger—and Jamie—choose to do with the knowledge… well, that’s their moral dilemma. It’s worth noting, maybe, that Jamie has no hesitation in choosing to tell Claire everything, trusting that the knowledge will not damage her love for him. Frank had no such assurance.
Q: Are any of the fictional characters based on real historical figures?
A: Yes, several of them are. Hard to write about the ’45 without mentioning Charles Stuart, after all.
Beyond that—there’s a “real” female witch (late sixteenth century) named Geilis Duncane in Daemonologie, a treatise on witches by King James of Scotland (later James I of England…). The book is about the trial of a coven of witches who James believed tried to assassinate him via black magic (you know how women are always teaming up with the devil to do things like that). I figured anybody up on Scottish witchcraft would know the name, and for anyone who wasn’t, it didn’t matter.
It is, of course, not Outlander’s witch’s real name—we meet her in Dragonfly under (what we suppose is) her original name of Gillian–she took Geillis deliberately as a name because of the original, whom she of course was familiar with, owing to her researches into witchcraft. We’ll hear a bit more of this when Roger finds his ancestress’s grimoire.
Jack Randall is not real—so far as I know, anyway.
Now, Mother Hildegarde was a real historical person, though she lived in the twelfth century, rather than the eighteenth. Likewise, Monsieur Forez, the hangman of Dragonfly, was a real public hangman in the Paris of the eighteenth century. Bonnie Prince Charlie and many of the Jacobite lords were naturally real people, as well. (See Part Two, “Characters.”)
Q: Who is the ghost in Outlander?
A: The ghost is Jamie—but as to exactly how his appearance fits into the story, All Will Be Explained—in the last book of the series.
Q: How is Sassenach pronounced?
A: SASS-uh-nak. It’s actually a little guttural on the end, a bit like the German “ach,” but not quite so throaty. That’s close, though. I asked a kilt salesman I met at a Highland Games, and his pronunciation was later verified by assorted Scots.
Q: Have you ever thought of writing children’s books?
A: I included this question because people really do ask it of me quite often, but I haven’t the faintest idea why. Do I look like someone with a deep-seated urge to write children’s books? Does something in what I do write suggest to these questioners that I am currently in the wrong line of work? Whatever the reasons behind the question, though, I’m afraid the answer is no, I can’t say I ever have had any particular desire to write children’s books—though several years ago, one of the neighborhood children down the
street asked me if I would someday write a book for him. I said dubiously that I supposed I might try, though I couldn’t say how long it might take. He asked what the book would be called, whereupon I told him (I can’t imagine why; first time a good title has ever popped into my head without prompting) it would be called The Tree That Ate Small Children. So if you ever see a book with this title on the shelf in the children’s section of the bookstore, you will know I finally got around to it. I have a few other things to do first, though.
Q: When is Jamie’s birthday?
A: May 1. I had one reader argue with me about this, insisting that he had to be a Leo, but I assure you he isn’t. My husband and kids are all Tauruses, and I know what they’re like. May 1 it is. [See “Horoscopes,” in Part Two.]
Q: Is the story of the Dunbonnet and the laird who hid for seven years true?
A: Leap o’ the Cask is real—so is the story of the laird who hid in the cave for seven years, whose tenants called him the Dunbonnet, and his servant, who brought the ale to him in hiding. The laird’s name? Ah… James Fraser. Really.
Q: Who/what is Master Raymond? What is his significance?
A: He’s a prehistoric time-traveler. I think he came from somewhere about 4000 B.C. or perhaps a bit earlier (not technically prehistoric, but they certainly weren’t using written records where he started out), and the eighteenth century is not his first stop. I think I won’t say more about him just now, though—other than to note that we’ll tell his story in a later series of novels, after the Outlander cycle is complete.
Q: Were Jonathan Randall and the Duke of Sandringham lovers?
A: No, the Duke and Randall weren’t lovers, though the Duke certainly understood Randall’s psychology, and no doubt used it to control him. The Duke was simply a practicing homosexual, whereas Randall was a sadist of indiscriminate appetites. Given their relative social positions—and the Duke’s taste for manipulation and power—Randall couldn’t possibly have assumed the necessary psychological dominance over the Duke for a sexual relationship between them to exist, nor would he willingly have submitted to the Duke. And while the Duke might have forced Randall to oblige him, it’s not likely; Randall was an effective tool for him, and engaging Randall in a sexual relationship would have destroyed that effectiveness. The Duke might also have found Randall not quite to his taste—which evidently ran to young, handsome, fair-skinned boys, given his early attempt on Jamie’s virtue.
“Lovers,” as a term, implies a certain emotional equality, which certainly didn’t exist in this case.
Q: How is Laoghaire pronounced? Where did the name come from?
A: I got Laoghaire off a map. And no, I had no idea how it was pronounced, though I had a guess. Geraldine James, who does the abridged audiotapes of the books, pronounces it “Leery,” and Davina Porter (who does the unabridged versions) pronounces it “Lee-yur”—and a couple of Scottish correspondents have given me slightly different pronounciations (one person said this was her grandmother’s name, and that the grandmother pronounced it “L’heer.”).
Q: How is Geillis’s name pronounced?
A: I don’t know. For what the observation is worth, Geraldine James (on the abridged audiotape) calls her GAY-liss or GAY-lee, and Davina Porter (unabridged) pronounces it GEE-liss (GEE as in “geese”) and GEE-lee. Either or both of them may be right. I recently met a Scot who pronounced it “JILL-is.”
Q: Why doesn’t Jamie use the endearment “mo duinne” in Voyager or Drums?
A: Er… well… cough. He doesn’t say “mo duinne” in Voyager because between Dragonfly in Amber and Voyager I acquired the gracious assistance of a native speaker of Gaelic, one Iain MacKinnon Taylor (who kindly advised on all the Gaelic bits in Voyager and Drums).32
Mr. Taylor informed me that while “mo duinne” had the right words for what I meant to convey, it wasn’t idiomatically correct—that is, the proper expression would be “mo nighean donn.” So I used that in the subsequent books, wishing (as always) to be as accurate as possible.
Q: Who were the Paleolithic lovers in Dragonfly in Amber? What was their significance?
A: I didn’t really have anything specifically in mind about the Paleolithic lovers—they were simply a metaphor for the briefness of life and the importance of love—but then again, often I write something that I intend to be only color, and it turns into something else in later books.
There’s that ghost in Outlander, for instance.…
I got the lovers from the National Geographic, as a matter of fact. The original were a couple from Herculaneum (or possibly Pompeii) whose skeletons had been found during the excavation, lying in the manner I described in Dragonfly—his arms around her, trying to protect her when the fire came down on them. One of the most touching and dramatic pictures I’ve ever seen. It’s stuck in my mind for years, so it was there when my subconscious needed it as an image of mortality and love.33
Q: As a scientist, what do you really think about the Loch Ness Monster?
A: Well, when someone hauls one in, I’ll look at it and tell you. Anything else would be hypothesizing without the benefit of data, which is rather unsound, scientifically speaking.
Speaking UNscientifically, my best guess is the one that Claire and Roger come up with in Voyager—that there’s a time-gate under the loch, and various creatures have come and gone through it over the years, each staying in the present-day loch for varying periods. This accounts for a) the occasionally conflicting descriptions of the creature, and b) the fact that periodic searches by boat and sonar have failed to find any large-bodied creatures (not that this necessarily shows that there is no large creature there; it’s impossible, practically speaking, to search a large body of water with any certainty).
Q: What kind of dinosaur is Nessie?
A: The one Claire saw is probably a plesiosaur. I have one of the British Museum models of it on my bookshelf. The model is blue… and so is Claire’s monster. The small details of appearance are based on a knowledge of basic reptilian anatomy, though.
Q: Where will the story end?
A: I think the Outlander books will end in about 1800, in Scotland. If this txsèlls you anything, more power to you.
Q: Will the story have a happy ending?
A: Oh, yes, the last book will have a happy ending, though I confidently expect it to leave the readers in floods of tears, anyway.
Q: Will there be any movies based on the book?
A: Heaven knows; I don’t. The books have been optioned before, and quite possibly will be again, but the process hasn’t gone further than that.
I have distinctly mixed feelings about having a movie made of the story. It could be a perfectly brilliant adaptation, and I’d be thrilled and delighted. However, knowing what I do about the movie industry, chances are about nine hundred to one that it would be horrible, and I’d hate it. For one thing, the average movie is two hours long. As I say to people who tell me how much they’d love to see the books made into movies: “Fine. Which forty pages would you like to see?” Now, if the BBC wants to come along and offer to do a twenty-eight-week mini-series, no problem!
That would also take care of another small difficulty; i.e., that any American production company would almost certainly insist on using American actors. You want to see Tom Cruise play Jamie Fraser? I don’t.
As for the people who keep asking me who I’d cast as Jamie… well, the polite answer is that I’ve never seen an actor who looks like Jamie Fraser.34 Liam Neeson comes close for size, presence, and accent, but I rather think he might have trouble playing a twenty-three-year-old virgin. Not that it wouldn’t be fun to see him try…
Q: What is the significance of the letters—Q, E, and D—that Jamie shows Claire in Voyager?
A: QED is the abbreviation for a common Latin expression, “Quod erat demonstrandum”—“Thus it has been shown.”35 In the olden days (when I went to school), one would do a proof of a theorem, and then write at the bottom of it, next to the resul
t, “QED.”36
In terms of Jamie and the story, though, he keeps the slugs of lead type as a reminder not to overlook alternative answers to what seem insoluble problems. As you may recall, he tells Claire the story of how an acquaintance was urging him to write something, and he was demurring, saying that it was impossible because of his difficulty with a pen—not realizing, until the acquaintance pointed it out, that he had been setting type with great facility (i.e., “writing”) all through the discussion. In other words, “thus it has been shown” that there was another way—and one which he promptly adopted.
Q.E.D.
Q: What does Roger mean by his comment in Drums—“Eat your heart out, Tom Wolfe”?
A: Just me being too literarily cute for my own good. He’s referring (obliquely) to Thomas Wolfe’s (not Tom Wolfe; the earlier one) work, with its reiterated theme of “You can’t go home again.” I.e., Roger is sardonically recognizing both the truth of that statement—and the contradictory fact that the manse under Fiona’s mangement seems just as it did when it was his home.
Q: Will we see Young Ian again?
A: Given that the Mohawk did fight in the American Revolution, I’d say you can bet on it.
Q: Who is really the father of Brianna’s baby—Roger or Stephen Bonnet?
A: Boy, you think I know?37
I’m afraid that the answer to this—along with the scads of other questions I get regarding future events in the Fraser/MacKenzie axis—will have to await the proper time and place, which is in one of the forthcoming books.
For one thing, I don’t always know whether this, that, or the other will happen—I don’t plan the books out ahead of time. For another, even when I think I know what’s going to happen, it often turns out differently than I expected. So I won’t speculate in advance; even some things that get written change before their final inclusion in a book. I do think you’ll find out eventually, though.
The Outlandish Companion Page 49