It will upset some readers, but this new Mockingbird has sharp lessons about race today
From the best-selling author of Chocolat, first full review of the book everyone’s talking about
Atticus Finch will never again be our white knight A devastating blow shatters all our beliefs
BACK in 1952, the writer Ray Bradbury published a story called A Sound Of Thunder, in which a time-traveller on safari accidentally steps on a butterfly, creating a series of repercussions that follow him back through the centuries.
His return to the present day shows a world ominously changed: details out of place; an election changed from victory to defeat.
Reading Harper Lee’s Go Set A Watchman is a similar experience: uncomfortable, fascinating, haunting; but accompanied by a sense of something irretrievably altered.
This is the book that, without the intervention of her editor, might have been Harper Lee’s legacy. To Kill A Mockingbird — one of the most cherished novels in American literature — might never have existed. Harper Lee’s astonishing work has stood alone for more than 50 years, inspiring readers all over the world.
The author’s refusal to give interviews or even comment on her book, as well as her close friendship with fellow author Truman Capote, has fired much speculation, including persistent rumours that Capote (who inspired the character of Dill in Mockingbird) might have written — or at least helped write — it.
I see no justification for these conspiracy theories, based on nothing but a childhood friendship and the inherent sexism of an age in which it was hard for the literary world to believe that a 35-year-old woman from Monroeville, Alabama, might have written such a poised and accomplished first novel without the help of a successful male friend.
(As far as I know, no reciprocal rumours accompanied the publication of Capote’s 1970 book, In Cold Blood, which Harper Lee helped him research.)
In any case, when Lee submitted Go Set A Watchman to her editor, it was rejected, with the advice to expand upon the flashback scenes and to write an alternative novel focusing on the protagonist’s childhood and her life in small-town Alabama.
The result was To Kill A Mockingbird, published in 1960 and celebrated for half a century as a plea for justice and racial equality. Meanwhile, Go Set A Watchman remained hidden away for 60 years, forgotten and unpublished. Reading it now is the closest thing to time travel we have. It has not been re-edited, but stands just as Harper Lee wrote it, with no concession to changing times or racial sensitivities.
It has much in common with Mockingbird. From the first page, we inhabit the landscape: we can smell the verbena; see the red earth of the unpaved roads; the houses in the black districts, with their tin roofs and neatly swept yards in the shade of chinaberry trees.
Small details are familiar — even the old spittoon in Atticus Finch’s office, now used as a receptacle for golf balls. Nothing much seems to have changed in Maycomb, Alabama — except for the TV antennae on the houses of the poor and the butterfly effect of a new perspective.
To Kill A Mockingbird was written in the first person from the perspective of nine-year-old Scout. Here, Scout — now Jean Louise — is 26 and the narrative is in the third person, but that voice remains the same: strong, humorous, unsentimental; the unmistakable voice of Harper Lee.
This is not juvenilia. The book once described by the author as ‘a pretty decent effort’ is much more than that, but because of its close links with Mockingbird, it is almost impossible to read it in isolation.
I read it not as a sequel, but as the prequel to Mockingbird, which I see as a series of flashbacks, echoing those of Watchman.
Go Set A Watchman begins with the return of Jean Louise Finch to Maycomb. Having lived in New York, she is concerned for the health of her father, Atticus, a lawyer in his 70s, suffering from rheumatoid arthritis.
Her beloved brother Jem is dead — of a heart attack years ago — and her old friend Dill, ‘the friend of her heart’ — who appears in an extended (and touchingly hilarious) flashback — is somewhere in Europe, never to return.
Jean Louise is an adult version of Scout: ‘juvenile desperado, hell-raiser extraordinary’. New York and university have not robbed her of her defiant spirit. She wears slacks, to the disapproval of her well-corseted aunt Alexandra (who looks after Atticus, following the retirement of their housekeeper, Calpurnia).
She scandalises Maycomb by swimming in the creek with Henry Clinton — once a childhood friend, now a lawyer, working for Atticus.
Henry is in love with her and urges her to marry him. Jean Louise, though acknowledging she would enjoy an affair, is unsure on the subject of marriage. She is a free spirit, passionate and honest; the thought of becoming like the other women in Maycomb — powdered and simpering; going to coffee mornings; talking about their husbands — fills her with despair.
We sense she has never quite left the happy days of her childhood; a state of grace in which she lived innocent of racial tensions, politics or the moral ambivalence of the adults around her.
But returning to her childhood home, Jean Louise finds herself unable to recapture the simplicity of childhood.
Her friends are gone; Calpurnia, the black housekeeper who raised and loved her as a child, now calls her ‘ma’am’. Their meeting is cruelly painful. Uncomprehending, Jean Louise says: ‘She sat there in front of me, and she didn’t see me, she saw white folks. She raised me, and she doesn’t care.’
Worse still, she comes to understand that her father, whom she idol- ised, is not the fearless champion for racial equality she has always believed him to be.
Instead, he is a man who tolerates speeches about the ‘mongrelising’ of the race; who collects pamphlets with names such as The Black Plague; who once attended a Ku Klux Klan meeting; who views the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) as a dangerous and disruptive organisation with ‘shoddy ideas of government’.
His passion for justice once drove him to acquit a black man of rape (in this alternate reality, Tom Robinson — convicted in Mockingbird — went free), but now he speaks of taking on the case of a black man accused of manslaughter so it does not fall into ‘the wrong hands’ — NAACP lawyers, with their alarming demands for black jurors and their attempts to ‘force the judge into error’.
Describing them as a ‘backward people’, he asks Jean Louise: ‘Do you want Negroes by the carload in our schools and churches and theatres? Do you want them in our world?’
Jean Louise is horrified by this new aspect of her father. Everything she thought she believed has been brought into question.
Henry, who sees himself as Atticus’s natural successor in Jean Louise’s affections and the law practice, also tolerates racism — but for weak and practical social reasons.
It is a devastating double blow that shatters Jean Louise’s trust. It is no less of a shattering blow to the reader, who until now has seen only a child’s eye view of Atticus Finch, unblemished and unquestioned.
To discover that he has feet of clay — that despite his principles, he is still the product of his time and surroundings — is likely to upset and hurt some readers of To Kill A Mockingbird. In yesterday’s Mail, Emily Rhodes argued that turning Finch into a racist was a mistake. But others may see in this darker, more ambivalent, more overtly political work a startling reflection of the unease and racial tensions at work today in the U.S.; a chance for us to re-examine the myth of integration.
This is not an easy book. It is a story about coming of age, brutally, into a changing world.
It is a story about putting aside childish beliefs and certainties. It is a story of acceptance — self-acceptance most of all.
But reading it, we can begin to see how far we have already come towards Scout’s dream of equality and how far we still have to go.
We have travelled into the past and returned to find that our present is not quite the same as we left it. Atticus Finch will never again be the white knight we once thought him.
And yet the mockingbird still sings — no longer a song of innocence, but maybe one of experience; a song that combines sorrow, forgiveness — and, ultimately, a kind of hope.
GO SET A Watchman by Harper Lee is published today by Heinemann at £18.99.