The Outlandish Companion - Diana Gabaldon [216]
I know Jamie and Claire are in that battle, because I have written about the events that transpired after it.39 I’d be really surprised if they didn’t meet Hamish again, but you never know. A heck of a lot of things happened during that battle.
Q: I read an excerpt on your Web page from King, Farewell, in which Jamie writes a letter to Claire, and was distressed that he seemed to have lost his charming Scottish accent. Why is this?
A: Well, it was a letter, rather than dialogue. Most people who speak with accents don’t write with accents, you know. A Southern gentleman, for instance, would probably begin a letter to a female acquaintance as “Dear Mary,” rather than, “Hey, darlin’,” even if the latter was his common mode of address in person.
Q: I’m confused about one thing; if Geillis went through the stones in 1968, for the first time, how is it that she was there before Claire?
A: We don’t yet know everything there is to know about the intricacies of time travel (though I imagine we’ll find out more as Claire, Roger, and Brianna put their heads together and compare experiences and make deductions). Remember that Gillian Edgars used a blood sacrifice when going through the door for the first time—it may have been that she was right about this giving her power, and thus traveled farther—or the sacrifice may have been irrelevant, but some other factor was operating.
Q: When Claire, Brianna, and Roger were trying to find out what happened to Jamie at and after Culloden, couldn’t they have saved themselves a lot of work by reading Frank’s books? I don’t recall seeing it mentioned anywhere that anyone actually read his books, and didn’t he write of that time period? Had he followed up on Jamie?
A: Claire couldn’t bring herself to read the books because—convinced Jamie was dead—she couldn’t bear to relive the days of the Rising. Roger is a scholar of the period, though, and Brianna loved and admired her father, and wanted (originally) to follow in Frank’s footsteps as a historian. They’ve almost certainly read the books—and since they didn’t mention anything in them connected to Jamie Fraser, there probably was nothing in the published books about him. However, Frank’s correspondence with the Reverend
Wakefield makes it clear that he not only looked for Jamie Fraser—he found him. Now, what he found, and what use he chose to make of the information… well, that we may learn in time.
Q: Do you ever have any objections from Scottish readers regarding “appropriation of voice”? That is, do they object to you writing about Scottish characters and issues, when you aren’t Scottish?
A: Well, my own opinion is that imagination is its own country. Also, I don’t think much of the notion that one can only write about a particular ethnic or geographical group if one happens to have a genetic membership in that group. Still less, the notion that one can write well about a given group only because one belongs to it.40
Fortunately, however, I haven’t had any complaints whatever by Scottish readers. The books luckily have been very popular in Scotland; in fact, Drums of Autumn came out at number two on the Scottish bestseller list (right under the new Scottish Parliament’s Green Paper, which was number one) and I regularly get fan letters from Scotland, many of them asking, “How long did you live in the Highlands before moving to Arizona?”41
When I did my first book tour in Scotland, I was thrilled to discover my books placed in the “Scottish Fiction” section of each bookstore I went into. Scots being very proud of their literary and cultural heritage, I was more than flattered to find my work placed with that of Robert Louis Stevenson, John Buchan, Lady Antonia Fraser, et al.