WARNING: The language used in this review is there for the sake of fidelity to the text and is NOT intended to be seen as acceptable or condoned by the author of this blog.
In 1960, an altogether unknown name exploded into both the literary and public consciousness. Harper Lee's first novel To Kill A Mockingbird was an instant success. It was vibrant, it was insightful and it was beautifully pan-generational. The intellectual complexity of race and race relations had never before been so accessible. Of course, this was for many its undoing. Countless children were chained to it and examined on it by disinterested teachers and disconnected exam boards. Happily, the novel survived the mauling and it is as loved over fifty years later as it was when first released.
But it was never meant to be like this. Mockingbird was the culmination of a born-again manuscript initially rejected as a collection of anecdotes, not a stand-alone novel. But, whilst subsequent drafts evolved into a publishable book, the original was certainly forgotten if not completely lost. On its discovery and promise of publication, Go Set A Watchman became the most eagerly anticipated literary piece of its [adopted] generation. Indeed, Amazon rated it as its most pre-ordered book since the final instalment of some barely-remembered caper about a bespectacled wizard and his ginger sidekick.
Soon, however, excitement turned into controversy. Did Atticus Finch - the father of Scout and a benevolent patriarch to his readers - become nothing more than a bigoted racist and a member of the KKK? Watchman's release didn't just put Scout Finch's childhood in the dock, every Mockingbird fan was about to have its innocence cross-examined.
The story is set two decades after those halcyon days of Scout's youth. Jem is dead, Dill is somewhere in Europe and Calpurnia has moved out of the Finch household. Atticus is afflicted with severe arthritis and the now grown up if not matured Jean-Louise is returning to Maycomb from her life in New York. There is also a plethora of flashbacks to Jean-Louise's days as the irascible Scout, shooting from the mouth as much as the hip. At first it seems nothing has changed; Maycomb seems inviolable, impervious to any ravishing of time. But soon the veneer fades. Jean-Louise becomes aware that the town she remembers is changing - or worse, never existed in the first place. It overboils with the discovery of an abhorrently racist flyer for a town meeting, found amongst Atticus' personal folders. Jean-Louise follows her father to it and is appalled - undeniably by what she hears, but more by the sight of her father sitting next to the speaker as he launches into his tirade. She feels more betrayed than she had ever thought possible. Atticus, so long in her mind the conscience of the town, was central to its rotten core. At first she is unwilling to believe it - such is her faith in her father that she would rather discount her own understanding. After confronting her father, however, and being rejected by the once motherly Cal, she is forced to confront reality and feels the pain ever deeper.
So, is there any redemption for Atticus? Of course there is. However all of us, Jean-Louise included must reassess what Atticus' role in Maycomb is. Far from being the benevolent, omnipresent deity we perceive in Mockingbird, Watchman's Atticus is far more complicated, but no less benevolent. I think we can all cope with that; would we not be simply doing as Scout needed to do - see him with the mind of an adult and not the imagination of a child? Yet there is a great deal of character infidelity (possibly even assassination) in Watchman, not on Atticus but on Jean-Louise. This is the book's true Achilles' heel. The Scout of Mockingbird is something of an emotional phoenix. When awoken, whether in conflict, humour or fear, she knows of only the purity of emotion. We see glimpses of this in her reactions to the perceived betrayal of her father's attitudes to 'Negroes', her consternation when she hears her aunt call them 'niggers' and her shame when she needs to apologise for her diatribe against Atticus, but Jean-Louise's evolution is not truly one of attaining adulthood, it is simply mollification. The innocent acceptance of 'Negroes' in Mockingbird is seen as patronising bigotry in Watchman, with little more merit that the opinions of the 'nigger-haters.' Atticus and his brother, the slightly crazy Uncle Jack, deconstruct Jean-Louise's convictions against the 'white trash' behaviour of the outwardly respectable men of Maycomb to such a successful extent that we are forced to chastise her for her vanity and idealism. She does not live in the real world and she can only reconcile her father's actions when she casts off the shackles of her own misguided preconceptions.
The novel concludes with the idea that Jean-Louise should return to Maycomb and settle down and, in doing so, not to compromise on her convictions, but to take on Atticus' approach of delicately steering if not leading the town to a more enlightened understanding; change comes slowly - perhaps too slowly - but it comes naturally and peacefully, in its own time. Whilst there is merit in this, the problem is what it can symbolise. We are given a privileged insight into the thought processes of Jean-Louise as she sees her father sitting next to an ardent racist and we are also given Atticus' justification. But in hundreds of similar meetings, across southern America, an outsider has no such guidance. All he can see is at best tacit agreement with opinions considered heinous by any modern moral standard.
Watchman's success is in its highlighting the cause of such deep rooted racism in the south. It also does a great deal to prove that much of the institutionalised racism was fuelled by the rowdy few, and that there were many who, like Atticus helped to move opinion on delicately and slowly. Yet such an approach is anathema to the Scout we knew and loved from Mockingbird. The message is that her idealism is irrational and impractical. But in order to grow up, Scout doesn't learn, she dilutes. And when she dilutes, she becomes more like Atticus well-rounded, far-seeing and deeply philosophical. Yet flawed. In the real world we have seen the extraordinary failure of Atticus's methodology. Laws have changed, but the mentalities have not. Consequently we are left with unarmed black teenagers being shot by white cops and incidents like the Charleston shootings: appalling atrocities, yet distressingly unsurprising. Whether intended or otherwise, the message of Watchman appears to be that these prejudices are perilously close to being part of the South's DNA, and as such we must tread extraordinarily delicately. So, it is the Scout that needs to be killed and replaced with Jean-Louise. It his her that needs to be ashamed for her ignorance and lack of trust in her father's role in Maycombe.
But now, just as in 1960, maybe what the question of race relations needs is the maverick. it needs its Scout Finch, full of an unshakeable idealism that can be realised. It needs a whirlwind of such inescapable righteous fury that barriers are ripped up, rather than shaved off little by little. In short, it needs its Martin Luther King Jr who compels us to change rather than subtly hints at it. I have a worrying feeling that had Atticus sat and listened to Dr. King's famous 'I have a dream' speech, he would have dismissed it as the ill-informed ardour of his firebrand daughter. My abiding memory of Watchman is that Scout is badly let down by Jean-Louise, Atticus and potentially even Harper Lee. Even if it is unintentional, it is reckless to leave a suggestion that racism in the South should be allowed to die out gradually as attitudes change at their own pace. This has been the status quo for too long and it is simply not working.
There are also structural problems with Watchman. It crams in far too much in too short a time scale. The whole chronology is no more than three days and the book really suffers for it. Jean-Louise goes from being happy and ignorant of her father's race beliefs to being in complete knowledge, totally destroyed and hating her father, then back to trusting him (albeit more maturely) all within that time period and it's just not effective enough. The book's final quarter is a cataclysmic battle for the legacy of Scout Finch between Jean-Louise, Uncle Jack and Atticus. It works as an unconventional climax (flawed racial ideology notwithstanding), but would be far more effective if more time and so more credence was dedicated to the prelude. Far too much is built up by the flash backs and it is torn down far too easily, resulting in Jean-Louise looking conceited and capricious in her loyalties. Indeed, it would border on vacuous were it not for the groundwork laid by Mockingbird.
Personally, I don't think it should have been published and certainly not in its original guise. Mockingbird is the zenith of the characters' achievements and whilst there is no doubt scope and essence for a sequel set in the future, but it's a case of 'either do it well, or don't do it at all'. As Jurassic Park 2, Jaws 3 and the Matrices 2 & 3 have taught us, sequels have a nasty habit of leaving an audience cheesed off, short-changed or regretful of the damage caused to the original (or, in the case of The Phantom Menace, all three. Why did you allow it, Lucas?). Mockingbird has withstood the obliteration of GCSE studying, so it will probably stand up to a bad sequel, but Watchman needed desperately to deliver so much more.
