Chapter 2: Standing Stones
Having established the relationship between Claire and Frank in Chapter 1, it is now time for TIME TRAVEL!
Claire goes out with Mr. Crook for a lesson in Highland plant life. He brings her to Craigh na Dun and we get some background information about stone circles and the academic debates over their original uses.
No lack of opinions, of course. Life among academics had taught me that a well-expressed opinion is usually better than a badly expressed fact, so far as professional advancement goes.
Is Diana Gabaldon an ex-academic? Or partnered with an academic? Of course, she could learn these things as an outside observer, but there are enough comments on academic life that I think she must have some skin in the game.
Claire is intrigued by the stone circle and traipses off to tell Frank all about it. She meets him at the vicar's house, where Frank and Rev. Wakefield are doing their nerd thing.
News? Casting an eye on the grubbiness and typeface of the papers on the desk, I calculated the date of the news in question as being likely around 1750. Not precisely stop-the-presses then.
Truly, these are my people. Poor Spouse often gets an earful of 18th-century news over dinner when I'm sure they'd rather be talking about the new photos of Pluto. I, on the other hand, sometimes say "the '70s" and mean the 1770s. Invite me over, Frank and Rev. Wakefield.
Roger!
Ok, I have been spoiled here and know that this little boy becomes a character later on. I suppose that's why they made a point of including him in the TV show.
If ever I'd seen a confirmed bachelor, I would have thought the Reverend Wakefield was it.
Is Rev. Wakefield gay? Not that it matters much, but I'd be happy to learn that some gay characters in this book are nice, not all sadistic, manipulative jackasses.
Roger lost his parents in the war and the Blitz, which also killed Uncle Lamb. This is a nice reminder that Claire is living in the immediate aftermath of enormous trauma, which might go some way toward explaining some of her later choices.
We learn that Black Jack Randall was not well beloved in Scotland, though Frank isn't bothered by that.
He was what he was, and nothing I can do about it. I only want to find out.
The men start wondering whether Black Jack had a powerful friend who kept him out of trouble and Claire's eyes start to glaze over. She's rescued by Mrs. Graham, the Reverend's housekeeper, who whisks her off to the kitchen for tea and fortune telling. Let me reiterate here that the thought of spending a second honeymoon chatting with random new acquaintances sets my teeth on edge.
Mrs. Graham reads Claire's tea leaves and her palms, and all this is mostly as it was in the TV show.
And strangers there are, to be sure, several of them. And one of them's your husband.
Ouch.
TV Frank actually made some comments about the patterns on Claire's hands, but that doesn't seem to be Book Canon. Too bad — my prediction while watching the TV show was that Claire would try to get a message to Frank by writing something in the margins of one of Black Jack's papers and signing it with a drawing of her palm lines so that Frank would know it was really her. It was a good prediction, given how much the show made out of Frank drawing her palm pattern when he was thinking of her during the war. Alas. If I were to fall into the 18th century, I'm pretty sure I could leave a message somewhere in university archives where one of my scholar friends would find it. Universities deal with all sorts of strange embargoes on documents. I'll bet "open this envelope in 2015 and follow the instructions inside" would work if I placed it in a collection I knew would survive that long.
The lines in your hand change, ye know. At another point in your life, they may be quite different than they are now.
So let's put Mrs. Graham in the "Yes" column on the question of "Can the past be changed?" At least, she seems to believe in change/growth/choice rather than fixed destiny.
Question: Which hand do palm readers read? I'm looking at my palms right now and the patterns on each palm are markedly different. Are there standards for this sort of thing?
Mrs. Graham goes on to give us a rough forecast of the plot here, a life line cut up in pieces (more than one journey through the stones?), two simultaneous marriages, Claire enjoys sex, etc. Claire wonders whether the lines on her wrist indicate a potential for suicide. Foreshadowing? A reference to her blood vow to Jamie?
Frank and Rev. Wakefield have discovered that Black Jack was in league with the Duke of Sandringham and Claire could not care less.
It was seldom necessary to do more than nod periodically, saying 'Oh, really?' or 'How perfectly fascinating!' at appropriate intervals.
As much as I am on Frank's side on this specific point, I am worried about poor Claire here. At this point, she is headed for a whole lifetime of this sort of detached boredom at the hands of Frank and his Oxford colleagues, with no work of her own to keep her mind occupied and her spirit fulfilled. Again, I'm worried that Claire is going to adapt to the expectations of mid-century domesticity about as well as Sylvia Plath did.
But it seems from this that Jonathan Randall was entrusted with the job of stirring up Jacobite sentiments, if any existed, among the prominent Scottish families in his area.
Well that's interesting. I didn't really pick up that angle from the TV show. TV Black Jack just seemed to be following his own twisted whims, without much of a master plan. I'm interested to see where this goes. Is his cruelty meant to inflame Jacobite tendencies among his victims and their clans? How much is an act and how much is meant in earnest? And if the Duke of Sandringham really was a Jacobite, is Black Jack supposed to be riling up the clans in order to provoke a rebellion?
Claire looks over little Roger's genealogy. Rev. Wakefield expresses disappointment that he can only trace his own family back to 1762. As an historian, I share his disappointment. As a non-WASP, I can only shrug. My own grandfather didn't even have a birth certificate and my family had to go 10 rounds with Social Security trying to explain that even if every country had a modern bureaucracy (which they don't), the wars of the 20th century made rather a mess of paper records in a lot of the world. And who cares if he was born on the 27th or the 28th of the month? He is clearly here now and in need of medical care. But sure, let's find someone with a donkey to go up to the remote mountain village where he was born and see if the parish baptismal register still exists. And that was the 1920s, not the 1720s.
Frank babbled happily of spies and Jacobites most of the way back to Mrs. Baird's.
I like Frank.
Until all of this, that is:
"I couldn't feel properly toward a child that's not . . . well, not of my blood . . .I'm afraid a child from outside, one we had no real relationship with, would seem an intruder, and I'd resent it.
Gross, Frank. Gross. I mean, I guess it's good that he's trying to examine his own feelings about adoption, but this attitude cancels out a lot of the warm fuzzies I've had for Frank up until this point. I know people in my own life who hold this attitude and have deployed it in ways that devastated the people around them. So just no, Frank.
This seems like it is going to be a major question in these books. Do blood ties matter? More specifically, what is a parent? and what is the connection between parent and child? We have two orphans being raised by uncles (Claire and Roger), worries about infertility, and Frank's opposition to adoption, all in the first 25 pages of the book. Knowing from the TV show that there will be lots of talk about clan loyalties and obligations later on, this looks to be one of the big themes of this book.
Next, Claire and Frank go on a trip to Loch Ness, where they get more lessons in Highland legends. We hear the story of the doomed lovers Mary Grant and Donald Donn. I looked this one up and it seems that Mary and Donald were long dead by 1743, so we won't be meeting them unless there is other time travel in later books. Let's hope this legend is not included as foreshadowing, as it ends with Donald being beheaded.
Claire asks about the Loch Ness monster, but the tour guide seems not to be a believer.
Claire tells Frank about Craigh na Dun and he's all excited about getting up early to see a sun-feast ritual.
Getting up once in the dark to go adventuring is a lark. Twice in two days smacks of masochism.
I wonder again whether Claire has thought through this whole baby thing. I can just see her dealing with the demands of a newborn and Frank expecting her to still be charming at faculty parties on no sleep and frayed nerves. From all we've seen of Claire so far, it's hard to see how she wouldn't just explode with resentment and frustration. Which raises the question: Even if she didn't go back in time, would Claire have found another way to run away from her life as a faculty wife and mother?
The pagan women show up and Claire and Frank watch them dance in the stone circle.
They should have been ridiculous, and perhaps they were.
I will tuck this away as meta commentary.
The dancers finish their ritual and Claire and Frank poke around, commenting on the ancient rite. On the way back down the hill, Frank trips over a sardine can and Claire takes advantage of the situation to initiate sex in the grass.
This seems to be the book version of the TV scene where Frank goes down on Claire in the ruins of Castle Leoch. Gotta say, I prefer the TV version. In the book, Claire takes pains to observe that Frank is "skilled" and "accomplished," but this scene lacks the concise revelations of the TV scene. In the TV version, Claire communicates precisely what she wants and Frank is only too happy to oblige. This book scene does not convey the same things that I learned from the TV scene, which were:
- Claire and Frank are communicative, compatible sex partners
- Claire is not afraid to advocate for her own pleasure
- Frank is also invested in Claire's pleasure
- both Claire and Frank are adults in an adult relationship, not timid kids
- This television show is committed to serving a female audience.
In terms of Claire's relationship with Frank, the TV scene did more to make me root for them than this book scene does. So score one for the TV writers.
I do like the description of Claire as "terrifyingly practical." We will see whether she lives up to it.
Claire is still wondering about the plant she saw on Craigh na Dun and Frank urges her to go back to get it. He also confirms that this is indeed Beltane, which means that World War II can't be quite over yet, unless it is actually 1946 (though it clearly says it is 1945 on the first page of chapter 1). Maybe this is one of the reasons that the TV show made this all happen at Samhain instead? Though that gets forgotten pretty quickly, as all of season 1 clearly happens in the spring and summer, not the winter.
Claire goes to the stone circle and hears a buzzing sound. She touches the tallest stone and all hell breaks loose.
The stone screamed . . . There is no way to describe it, except to say that it was the sort of scream you might expect from a stone.
Ok.
Claire staggers around and accidentally(?) steps through the cleft in the stone. She experiences a sense of "complete disruption" and comes back to full consciousness as she stumbles toward the bottom of the hill. The mystical stuff fades and she hears "the normal sound of human conflict."
So there we are.
At this point, I must say that I appreciate how well the TV show adapted these first two chapters. They stayed pretty close to the source material, and I think the changes they made were generally for the better (i.e. the castle cunnilingus scene).