Mockingbird sequel reveals another side to Atticus Finch
One of fiction’s most saintly characters may have his reputation shattered this week when Harper Lee’s new novel appears and raises a disturbing question: Was Atticus Finch a racist?
Finch’s legal battle to save a black man unjustly accused of rape in To Kill a Mockingbird has made him a symbol of moral courage and racial tolerance to millions of readers since Lee’s novel was published in 1960.
All that could end on Wednesday when the sequel Go Set a Watchman appears, 58 years after it was written. In it, the lawyer Finch appears in a very different light: as a segregationist who believes black people are too ‘‘backward’’ to ‘‘share fully in the responsibilities of citizenship’’.
‘‘They’ve made terrific progress in adapting themselves to white ways, but they’re far from it yet,’’ he says.
As the first reviews began appearing this weekend in the United States, it was soon trending on Twitter with one reader observing: ‘‘I don’t think I’m ready for Atticus Finch to be marred yet.’’
Another said: ‘‘I guess I won’t read this book after all’’, while another despaired: ‘‘If Atticus Finch is really a racist, then I don’t want to live in this world’’.
The reaction is less about literary merit and more about the painful reality of the virulent racism that scarred the Deep South. Most British critics have so far had access only to the first chapter of the novel.
Sam Sacks, in The Wall Street Journal, warns: ‘‘ Go Set a Watchman is a distressing book, one that delivers a startling rebuttal to the shining idealism of To Kill a Mockingbird. This story is of the toppling of idols; its major theme is disillusion.’’
Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times agreed: ‘‘The depiction of Atticus in Watchman makes for disturbing reading and for Mockingbird fans it’s especially disorienting. How could the saintly Atticus . . . suddenly emerge as a bigot?’’
Lee wrote Watchman before Mockingbird, telling the story of Jean Louise returning to her southern home town of Maycomb (a thinly disguised version of Lee’s own home town of Monroeville, Alabama) in the 1950s.
It was not published and instead she was persuaded to write the story through the eyes of sixyear-old Scout (Jean Louise in childhood) who tells with beguiling innocence of her father’s struggle against injustice in the 1930s.
Finch emerged as a hero to his daughter and millions of readers as well as cinema audiences when Gregory Peck played him in the 1962 film.
However, in Watchman, Finch appears very much as a prisoner of his time, a racist who once attended a Ku Klux Klan meeting. He says, ‘‘The Negroes down here are still in their childhood as a people’’ and asks his daughter: ‘‘Do you want Negroes by the carload in our schools and churches and theatres? Do you want them in our world?’’
Wayne Flynt, a history professor and friend of the author, admits in the Alabama newspaper The Anniston Star: ‘‘I can’t believe we’ll like him [Finch] as much as we did in the old book.’’
The growing furore over the book prompted the publisher HarperCollins to issue a statement on Saturday: ‘‘Harper Lee wanted to have the novel published exactly as it was written, without editorial intervention, some 60 years after it was completed.
As her publishers, we naturally respected her wishes,’’ a spokeswoman told The Wall Street Journal.
‘‘The question of Atticus’s racism is one of the most important and critical elements in this novel and it should be considered in the context of the book’s broader moral themes. Go Set a Watchman explores racism and changing attitudes in the South during the 1950s in a bold and unflinching way.’’
Apart from Finch’s bigotry and the casual manner in which the death of one of Mockingbird’s most popular characters is announced, there are also mixed views on the literary merit of Watchman.
Although many have seen only the first chapter, Mick Brown in The Daily Telegraph pointed out: ‘‘There is one thing worth bearing in mind: there is a reason it was not published in the first place.’’ It would have been kinder to Lee and ‘‘the millions who cherish Mockingbird not to have published it at all’’, he added.
Jocelyn McClurg, in USA Today, gives the book two stars out of four. ‘‘Is it a great or even very good novel? No. Does it have its charms? Definitely. It’s also a time capsule of a troubled time in the South, as desegregation looms in the wake of Supreme Court rulings.’’
Xan Brooks, in The Guardian, says the first chapter is ‘‘gorgeous’’, with some ‘‘beautiful’’ writing that ‘‘carries us, bewitchingly, deep into the past’’.
Given the unrivalled status of To Kill a Mockingbird, anything that Lee produced subsequently was likely to struggle to meet such exacting standards.
Many feared that, as it was written before Mockingbird and remained hidden for decades, it would only lessen the author’s literary standing.
There are still, however, flashes of the charm that won Mockingbird the Pulitzer prize and made it a staple of school reading lists.
Maycomb is described as a place where ‘‘if you did not want much, there was plenty’’ and the town’s first paved street results ‘‘in skinned knees and cracked crania for the children and a proclamation from the principal that nobody was to play pop-the-whip on the pavement’’.
However, debate over the quality of the writing will pale this week beside the controversy over whether one of fiction’s most saintly characters turns out to have feet of clay.