'Go Set a Watchman' by Harper Lee

From the BLURB:

From Harper Lee comes a landmark new novel set two decades after her beloved Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece, To Kill A Mockingbird. 

Maycomb, Alabama. Twenty-six-year-old Jean Louise Finch – ‘Scout' – returns home from New York City to visit her ageing father, Atticus. Set against the backdrop of the civil rights tensions and political turmoil that were transforming the South, Jean Louise's homecoming turns bittersweet when she learns disturbing truths about her close-knit family, the town and the people dearest to her. Memories from her childhood flood back, and her values and assumptions are thrown into doubt. Featuring many of the iconic characters from To Kill A Mockingbird, Go Set a Watchman perfectly captures a young woman, and a world, in painful yet necessary transition out of the illusions of the past – a journey that can be guided only by one's own conscience.  

Written in the mid-1950s, Go Set a Watchman imparts a fuller, richer understanding and appreciation of Harper Lee. Here is an unforgettable novel of wisdom, humanity, passion, humour and effortless precision – a profoundly affecting work of art that is both wonderfully evocative of another era and relevant to our own times. It not only confirms the enduring brilliance of To Kill A Mockingbird, but also serves as its essential companion, adding depth, context and new meaning to a classic.

••••• 

‘Go Set a Watchman’ is Harper Lee’s first draft and “parent” novel to her 1960 Pulitzer Prize-winning, ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’.

I liked it. Quite a lot actually. And my liking the book worried me a bit at first. I thought for sure that I was simply being incapable of an unbiased opinion where Harper Lee is concerned. I found a comment left on a Wall Street Journal article about the discovery of the manuscript, and I can concede that it may well apply to me in many ways; “The author and book have been given an exalted status well beyond the quality of the book. People have projected their own opinions about race onto the book.” 

So take that concession as you will – I may well be an unreliable reviewer. 

You have been warned. 

A brief summary of the book, if you’ve been living under a rock ... While (GSAW) was written as the first draft that eventually would turn into ‘Mockingbird’, it is in fact set in Mockingbird’s future when ‘Scout’ – now, Jean Louise – returns to Maycomb, Alabama for her sixth trip home since boarding at a girl’s college in Georgia and then moving to New York. Jean Louise is twenty-six, Atticus is an old man in his 70s and riddled with rheumatoid arthritis to the point that his sister, Alexandra, has had to move in with him to help him cope.

Atticus is still practicing law, and his partner at the firm is young man Henry ‘Hank’ Clinton – orphaned at a young age, he was an old friend of Jem’s, whom Jean Louise long had a crush on and has been dating for a while now, but is putting off his many attempts at engagement. 

Early on in the book we learn (devastatingly) that Jem died rather suddenly at the age Jean Louise is now. Later we learn the reason;

 Jean Graham Finch had brought to the family the heart that killed her son twenty-two years later on the sidewalk in front of his father’s office.

The book is set in Jean Louise’s annual two-week trip home, when she has her eyes opened to Maycomb’s unchanging ways … and while the rest of the nation may be far more progressive and responsive as a result of the Civil Rights Movement, Maycomb – in fact, the entire South – lags behind in its insistence to keep the ‘colored’ population in their place. 

Jean Louise is particularly horrified to learn that Atticus and Hank share the views of the white populace in town – in particular, Atticus’s abhorrence to NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People). The novel deals with Jean Louise’s shattered worldview, her loss of the father she had built up in mind and memory;

The one human being she had ever fully and wholeheartedly trusted had failed her; the only man she had ever known to whom she could point and say with expert knowledge, “He is a gentleman, in his heart he is a gentleman,” had betrayed her, publicly, grossly, and shamelessly.

‘Go Set a Watchman’ may not speak as profoundly as ‘Mockingbird’ does on racism, but I won’t let that subtract from my high opinion of the novel. Besides, while she may not deal as deftly with the matter of racism, I do think Lee shares some profound thoughts on racists. A particular triumph of ‘Mockingbird’ was that Lee was able to discern the difference; like in the character of Mayella Ewell, and how she is unraveled to reveal a scared, ignorant girl under her father’s boot-heel. I always found Lee’s portrayal of Mayella to be a more sympathetic one than even some reader’s would allow, and that she encapsulates the very notion that racism is bred from ignorance.

GSAW is told in third-person, where ‘Mockingbird’ was first (though told from Jean Louise looking back at several summers of her youth). I was initially a little thrown not to be inside of Scout’s head … but I finally got to thinking that GSAW’s third-person more easily allows readers to be as disenchanted by Atticus’s turn. That may not have been Lee’s intention as this was her first draft before ‘Mockingbird’ existed, but it came across that way to me at least. It is sad and almost hurtful to read Atticus has turned out this way, but that makes it all the more impacting. And by this point, Atticus has become such a literary hero – such a pillar of justice – that the one removed third-person more easily allows readers to take this hurt on for ourselves, rather than just for how it hurts Jean Louise.

I also finished reading GSAW, having recently been moved to tears by Scottish MP Mhairi Black’s maiden speech to Parliament … it is sad, but may well be the case that Atticus was more weathercock than signpost; “Weathercocks will spin in whatever direction the wind of public opinion may blow them, no matter what principle they have to compromise. And then there are signposts, which stand true and tall and principled. They point in one direction and they say, ‘This is the way to a better society and it is my job to convince you why.’”

One aspect of the novel that I read and particularly enjoyed was Jean Louise’s feminism, or rather – Harper Lee’s. Jean Louise muses on her time growing up;

… and wondered who else in Maycomb still remembered Scout Finch, juvenile desperado, hell raiser extraordinary.

Scout Finch as a rough-and-tumble tomboy was a statement in itself in ‘Mockingbird’, and Lee continues to make similar ones with Jean Louise as a twenty-six year-old woman. There’s a particularly delicious scene at The Coffee (when Aunt Alexandra invites all of Jean Louise’s old schoolgirl classmates round for coffee and gossip) – Jean Louise archly notes the various camps of women, from those who are newly married to the recent mothers. She is withering and wary of them all, and it is a scene that rings like something out of Kathryn Stockett’s ‘The Help’ (oh, I would love Jean Louise to meet Skeeter!), particularly for how many of the women spout their husbands’ views of ‘negroes’ as lore.

Then there’s the fact that Jean Louise is a holdout to Hank’s proposals of marriage. He teases her for not being a more complacent woman who agrees with everything he says … and while it is teasing, there’s a subversion going on too. I will say that Jean Louise and Hank’s exchanges offer some of Lee’s clunkiest dialogue – a lot of “baby” and whimsy that’s hard to slog through at times – but there are still charmingly dissenting statements to be found there.

The feminist push-back in me even wonders if a lot of the critics’ resounding dismissal of GSAW stems from the fact that a big focus of the novel is on Jean Louise’s rejection of settling into marriage and babies, and the overall feminist subversion … it is very much a "woman's story". 

Though I would never have thought it before, GSAW got me thinking that there is something rather masculine about ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’. The two quiet heroes of the book are men – Atticus and Boo Radley – and Tom Robinson acts, along with Boo, as a symbol of the book’s underlying message. Scout and Jem are very pointedly devoid of much feminine company, since their mother died when Scout was two. There is even a rape trial at the heart of the book, concerning a woman who is very clearly lying. ‘Mockingbird’ is in many ways, a very masculine fare … but then again, most books deemed “classics” or universally praised tend to be. Natalie Kon-yu recently wrote for The Conversation, about how few award-winning novels are actually about women’s stories – the successful literary books tend to feature male characters, and male-centric stories. ‘Go Set a Watchman’ is very pointedly not that.

This book concerns Jean Louise’s disillusionment of her father, her rejection of feminine ideals (mentions of her Aunt Alexandra’s bone corset sort of wallop you over the head for symbolism, but they’re there nonetheless), and turning down a man’s many proposals of marriage. At one point, Aunt Alexandra even muses to Jean Louise;

 Men in this age have turned the Other Woman into a psychiatrist’s couch, and at far less expense, too.

Heck, Jean Louise even tells a long flashback story of getting her ‘curse’ (period) and discovering that a girl in her class was sent to an orphanage when it was discovered that her sister had gotten pregnant by the girl’s father. GSAW certainly has a stronger cast of women than ‘Mockingbird’, if only for Aunt Alexandra being on the scene … and the Finch’s old housekeeper, Calpurnia, features in one of the book’s strongest, most heartbreaking scenes (Jean Louise also pointedly acknowledges that she was raised by a white man and black woman –  again, this felt like Stockett’s ‘The Help’ was somewhat prophetic).

GSAW is far from perfect. One of my favourite articles read in connection to the book was in the New York Times, about Harper Lee’s editor Tay Hohoff – which reveals how much Lee benefitted from her editor’s mentorship and guidance. It’s a great read for offering us a glimpse into this fascinating partnership between editor and author – and got me thinking that the same way ‘Mockingbird’ inspired many to the law, ‘Go Set a Watchman’ may well ignite interest in a lot of would-be editors. It sure is fun to try and imagine where some threads in GSAW carried Lee into what would become ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’, and they can mostly be found in Jean Louise’s recollecting the lazy days of her childhood …

“What made you think of Dill?” she asked. 

“I don’t know. Just thought of him.” 

“You never liked him, did you?” 

Henry smiled. “I was jealous of him. He had you and Jem to himself all summer long, while I had to go home the day school was out. There was nobody at home to fool around with.” 

She was silent. Time stopped, shifted, and went lazily in reverse. Somehow, then, it was always summer. Hank was down at his mother’s and unavailable, and Jem had to make do with his younger sister for company. The days were long, Jem was eleven, and the patterns was set:

But you can definitely tell that Lee was improved by Hohoff’s suggestions and patient guidance as GSAW turned into ‘Mockingbird’. Her dialogue needed improving, particularly the Southern-drawl, long-way-round writing that’s so distinctive in ‘Mockingbird’ but was sometimes bloated in here;

 With the same suddenness that a barbarous boy yanks the larva of an ant lion from its hole to leave it struggling in the sun, Jean Louise was snatched from her quiet realm and left alone to protect her sensitive epidermis as best she could … 

I rather loved ‘Go Set a Watchman’ anyway. There are more than a few flashes of the writer Harper Lee would turn out to be, and some paragraphs and lines cut the reader right to the bone;

 The knife hit deep, suddenly; “Jean Louise, your brother worried about your thoughtlessness until the day he died!” 

It was raining softly on his grave now, in the hot evening. You never said it, you never even thought it; if you’d thought it you’d have said it. You were like that. 

Rest well, Jem.

True, ‘Go Set a Watchman’ is no ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ nor is it better. It’s different, as are all of the surviving characters – some for better, some for worse. I think I mostly enjoyed having new words from Harper Lee – more so than from Jean Louise ‘Scout’ Finch, since we’re not in her head for this portion of the journey. I really did enjoy ‘Go Set a Watchman’ though; a book, I would argue, more about feminism than racism … it’s also about a different sort of ‘paradise lost’ than the journey away from childhood, but is instead about needing to hold long-held beliefs up to the light for scrutiny.

Thank you, Harper Lee – it was a privilege to read you for the first time again, and always.

4/5

'To Kill a Mockingbird' by Harper Lee (and why I'll be reading 'Go Set a Watchman')

 Shoot all the Bluejays you want, if you can hit ‘em, but remember it’s a sin to kill a Mockingbird.

Atticus Finch gives this advice to his children as he defends the real mockingbird of this classic novel - a black man charged with attacking a white girl. 

 Through the eyes of Scout and Jem Finch, Lee explores the issues of race and class in the Deep South of the 1930s with compassion and humour. She also creates one of the great heroes of literature in their father, whose lone struggle for justice pricks the conscience of a town steeped in prejudice and hypocrisy. 

•••

It’s a very special month in publishing as Harper Lee's second book is released on July 14; a sequel written before her Great American Novel (perhaps the greatest American novel), To Kill A Mockingbird. Go Set A Watchman will soon be released worldwide, and I am celebrating by looking back at one of my all-time favourite books – the book that changed it all for me, in many ways.

I first read To Kill A Mockingbird when I was about 9 or 10. And I read it because I wanted to read all my mum’s favourite books, and this was her favourite book of all time (to the point, I was told, that I was nearly named Scout – and I’ve never quite forgiven my mum for not following through with the naming).

It was the first time I read a book and recognised that there was an author behind it – that there were big thoughts and ideas in these words, and that someone wanted to gift them to me. This was amazing. Especially because I was reading it at the same age as Scout Finch was in the book, so I felt like I could definitely be as courageous and thoughtful as Scout.

I remember quite vividly being more caught up in the story of Boo Radley – and Scout, Jem and Dill trying to make him “come out” – more so than in the trial of Tom Robinson. Which, of course, is Harper Lee’s intention. It’s why this novel is the perfect example of “paradise lost” – a young girl’s world that’s only as big as her old town and the extent of true danger is the spooky house on the corner and mean old lady Dubose. But suddenly the world starts expanding beyond Maycomb, as the three children become more and more aware of what Atticus Finch is doing with this latest court case, the trial of a young black man accused of raping a white woman.

That storyline – the true purpose of the book – came as a shock to me, just as much as it does to Scout. Even as this story is an older Scout looking back on her life, there’s a sense of disbelief in her telling this part of her childhood tale. Like she still can’t quite believe the way things turned out, how this injustice could play out.

Gregory Peck once did a promo for Universal Pictures, announcing that the book would be adapted into the 1962 film. And I love what he said about this book, which cuts to the duality of the story; on the one hand it’s based around the local myth of Boo Radley, and then it slowly leaks into very real horrors of American society …

 The world never seems as fresh and wonderful, as comforting and terrifying as good and evil as it does when seen through the eyes of a child. For a writer to capture that feeling is remarkable. Perhaps that is why one book in the last few years has been so warmly embraced by tens of millions of people.

Speaking of Gregory Peck and the film adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird. This may have been my mum’s favourite book, but that is one of my dad’s favourite films (he really doesn’t read) – so I was very lucky to have him insist that I watch the film after reading the book. It really is one of the best films of all time, and Gregory Peck is perfection.

“Miss Jean Louise, stand up, your father’s passin'” never fails to slay me.

I re-read To Kill a Mockingbird at least once a year, and I’m always struck by just how masterful a storyteller Harper Lee is. I’m forever holding this book up like a prism and catching new light with it. Ditto the film – to the point that I even recently stumbled across this piece of cinematic trivia via IMDB and the moment I read it, I started crying;

Atticus Finch is modeled on Harper Lee's own father, Amasa Lee, an attorney whose 1923 defense of a black client inspired the novel's trial. Gregory Peck met with Amasa Lee - then 82 years old - and formed a strong bond with him. Unfortunately Lee died during filming, so his daughter Harper gave Peck his watch and chain. Peck was wearing that same watch and chain at the Academy Awards the following year when he won the Oscar for Best Actor.

I love To Kill a Mockingbird. So very rarely does a book make you feel like you wouldn’t be the person you are today if you hadn’t read it.

And I am so looking forward to reading Go Set A Watchman, while at the same time I am terrified of it. I’ve grappled with whether or not I should read it at all – given the controversy surrounding. But how could I deny myself the chance to catch up with these old friends I owe so much of myself to? And that is truly how I feel, as so many others must too – that Scout, Jem, Dill and Atticus are my dear friends I catch up with in this Neverland place where they never grow old. I can’t refuse the opportunity to read how they grew up.

•••

I’m also going to read this book because I cannot deny that the world is in need of Harper Lee’s wisdom. There is an eerie feeling of fatefulness that surrounds this book, and the fact that To Kill a Mockingbird was released in the thick of America’s civil rights movement, and right now modern-day American feels like early-1930’s Alabama once again (heck, a lot of the world feels that way these days. Australia included).

(Bree Newsome takes down the flag. Reuters Media Express/Adam Anderson Photos)

Between Black Lives Matter, and the terrorist attack on a Charleston Church back in June – and the fact that it was that shooting which sparked debate around why the Confederate Flag is still unfurled in the American South … and like I said; Australia isn’t doing much better.

Our politicians throw around the term “boat people” when talking about asylum seekers and refugees, as though it’s against the law to seek asylum – though it is now against the law to speak out against child abuse within detention centres, thanks to that Border Force Act which both major parties supported. The United Nations is telling us that we are treating people inhumanely, as cruelly as the countries from which they are fleeing, and instead of doing something – anything – to change that, our Prime Minister instead calls for the resignation of the woman who is telling the Australian people that our Government is threatening our democracy and human rights conventions. Let me just make this clear: The United Nations finds Australia’s treatment of asylum seekers violates the Convention Against Torture. Against torture! And then there’s the everyday racism that still permeates our nation. That Dawn Fraser can say; “go back to where you came from!” and not even see the inherent racism in her remark. That the Australian public don’t seem to pay much mind to the startling numbers of Aboriginal deaths in custody. It's the fact that in the year 2015, Australia still does not have marriage equality because our Prime Minister won’t even allow a vote - that is draconian. And to top it all off - this week Cabinet Minister Mark Coffey wore a goddamn Confederate Flag shirt.

I don’t know about you, but I find myself in desperate need and want of a new Harper Lee book. If only for some of her wisdom, because there seems to be a serious lack in society at the moment;

“The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience.”