Three days before its launch, The Guardian and The Wall Street Journal published the first chapter of Harper Lee’s hotly anticipated novel Go Set a Watchman, a sequel to the iconic To Kill a Mockingbird. Mockingbird was released in 1960, just before the American Civil Rights movement peaked. It went on to become a bestseller, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1961, and was adapted into an Academy award winning film in 1962.
The reclusive 89-year-old Lee was never expected to publish another novel after Mockingbird, which is why the February 2015 announcement of the impending publication of Watchman was particularly explosive. It is already the most pre-ordered title of all times on Amazon.com. Questions have been raised about whether Lee consented to have it published, which have been settled in court.
Go Set a Watchman was actually written before Mockingbird, featuring a 26-year-old Scout going home to Alabama for a visit. Her editor at the time was impressed enough by the flashback scenes to ask her to develop them into a novel of its own, which eventually became To Kill a Mockingbird.
While it is widely hailed as a classic of modern literature, Mockingbird has also been accused of what experts call a lack of complexity – specifically, in the words of critic Allen Barra writing in The Wall Street Journal in 2010, its “bloodless liberal humanism”.
While it will be fascinating to see how it treats the same issues of race, class, and gender that are so central to the story of Mockingbird, here’s what we learned from the first chapter.
It’s told in the third person
This is immediately striking, even jarring, because it replaces Scout’s distinct point of view with a third person narrator. However, it is still her thoughts the reader is privy to, not the other characters who feature in the chapter. While there are strong indications that this narration will stick to Scout’s inner life, it will also help the reader to make the shift into Watchman as a different story, not merely an extension of Mockingbird.
She’s called “Jean Louise”, not Scout
This is another important shift, reorienting the reader to the grown-up Scout. The reader encounters her on a train journey to Maycomb. She’s 26, lives in New York, and this is the fifth time she’s visiting home since moving away. She has transformed from an “...overalled, fractious, gun-slinging creature into a reasonable facsimile of a human being”.
Atticus is suffering from debilitating pain
At 50, Scout and Jem’s father was already “old” to them in Mockingbird. At 72, he’s taking pain medication for rheumatoid arthritis. Scout takes the train instead of flying because she doesn’t want him to have to drive to get her, but she’s palpably surprised when he doesn’t show up to meet her at the railway station. She learns on her way home that his illness is so bad that he has to depend on his sister, Alexandra, to do basic things like doing his buttons.
Jem is dead
Readers looking forward to meeting Jem will be sorely disappointed. His demise is mentioned in one brutal sentence – “Just about that time, Jean Louise’s brother dropped dead in his tracks one day, and after the nightmare of that was over, Atticus, who had always thought of leaving his practice to his son, looked around for another young man.” It is reasonable to expect that the story of Jem’s death and its aftermath will be told properly in the course of the novel.
Alexandra is still disapproving and protective of the Finch name
Mockingbird satirised the importance given to the family name in the American South of the 1930s. This desire to protect and valorise is still strong in her conservative Aunt Alexandra, who holds up Scout’s late cousin Joshua Singleton St Clair “as a family example not lightly to be discountenanced”. Lee famously said in a 1964 radio interview that she aspired to be the “Jane Austen of south Alabama”, and she continues to expose the ludicrousness of placing a contrived idea of social standing over integrity.
There’s a rather unpleasant new character
Scout is met at the railway station by Henry Clinton, “her lifelong friend, her brother’s comrade, and if he kept on kissing her like that, her husband.” Although Henry’s regarded highly by the community, his sexism and his unrealistic sounding banter with Scout are both irritating. Here’s a choice quote: “First,” he said dispassionately, “hold your tongue. Don’t argue with a man, especially when you know you can beat him. Smile a lot. Make him feel big. Tell him how wonderful he is, and wait on him.” Scout’s responses to Henry could pave the way for the novel to have some interesting and complex commentary on gender in 1950s USA.
There are a lot of deliberate references to “new” technology
The reader learns that Scout usually flies to Alabama from New York, and she notes the changes in the train since she last took it: “...a fat genie of a porter materialized when she pressed a button on a wall; at her bidding a stainless steel washbasin popped out of another wall, and there was a john one could prop one’s feet on.“ Then there’s Henry’s driving of the car, which leads us to the clunkiest part of the chapter: “With green envy, she watched Henry’s effortless mastery of the automobile. Cars are his servants, she thought. ‘Power steering? Automatic transmission?’ she said.”
Despite the years, Scout’s best loved qualities are intact
Scout is as rebellious and strong-willed as ever. She was always set up to be someone who notices and cares about issues of race, gender, and class, and there’s no reason for this to have changed. One of the central lessons of Mockingbird was Scout learning to have empathy, and it will be interesting to see how she uses these early lessons in her dealing with the institutionalised sexism of people like Henry. She uses both affection and her strong will to assert herself. To Henry, she says, ““I’ll have an affair with you but I won’t marry you.” It is worth noting here that the only mention of race in the entire chapter is Scout’s delight at the TV antenna she spots atop an African American house.
There are dark revelations about Atticus – but not yet
Reports reveal that there are revelations about Atticus’s attitude to racism later in this novel that will shatter assumptions about his character as a champion of racial equality. This is not made immediately apparent. The glimpses afforded of Atticus in chapter one remind the reader of the same incomplete truth about Scout’s father told by Mockingbird, which will, one hopes, go a long way in demonstrating the ingrained nature of racism in even the most seemingly well-meaning people:
We welcome your comments at
letters@scroll.in.
The reclusive 89-year-old Lee was never expected to publish another novel after Mockingbird, which is why the February 2015 announcement of the impending publication of Watchman was particularly explosive. It is already the most pre-ordered title of all times on Amazon.com. Questions have been raised about whether Lee consented to have it published, which have been settled in court.
Go Set a Watchman was actually written before Mockingbird, featuring a 26-year-old Scout going home to Alabama for a visit. Her editor at the time was impressed enough by the flashback scenes to ask her to develop them into a novel of its own, which eventually became To Kill a Mockingbird.
While it is widely hailed as a classic of modern literature, Mockingbird has also been accused of what experts call a lack of complexity – specifically, in the words of critic Allen Barra writing in The Wall Street Journal in 2010, its “bloodless liberal humanism”.
While it will be fascinating to see how it treats the same issues of race, class, and gender that are so central to the story of Mockingbird, here’s what we learned from the first chapter.
It’s told in the third person
This is immediately striking, even jarring, because it replaces Scout’s distinct point of view with a third person narrator. However, it is still her thoughts the reader is privy to, not the other characters who feature in the chapter. While there are strong indications that this narration will stick to Scout’s inner life, it will also help the reader to make the shift into Watchman as a different story, not merely an extension of Mockingbird.
She’s called “Jean Louise”, not Scout
This is another important shift, reorienting the reader to the grown-up Scout. The reader encounters her on a train journey to Maycomb. She’s 26, lives in New York, and this is the fifth time she’s visiting home since moving away. She has transformed from an “...overalled, fractious, gun-slinging creature into a reasonable facsimile of a human being”.
Atticus is suffering from debilitating pain
At 50, Scout and Jem’s father was already “old” to them in Mockingbird. At 72, he’s taking pain medication for rheumatoid arthritis. Scout takes the train instead of flying because she doesn’t want him to have to drive to get her, but she’s palpably surprised when he doesn’t show up to meet her at the railway station. She learns on her way home that his illness is so bad that he has to depend on his sister, Alexandra, to do basic things like doing his buttons.
Jem is dead
Readers looking forward to meeting Jem will be sorely disappointed. His demise is mentioned in one brutal sentence – “Just about that time, Jean Louise’s brother dropped dead in his tracks one day, and after the nightmare of that was over, Atticus, who had always thought of leaving his practice to his son, looked around for another young man.” It is reasonable to expect that the story of Jem’s death and its aftermath will be told properly in the course of the novel.
Alexandra is still disapproving and protective of the Finch name
Mockingbird satirised the importance given to the family name in the American South of the 1930s. This desire to protect and valorise is still strong in her conservative Aunt Alexandra, who holds up Scout’s late cousin Joshua Singleton St Clair “as a family example not lightly to be discountenanced”. Lee famously said in a 1964 radio interview that she aspired to be the “Jane Austen of south Alabama”, and she continues to expose the ludicrousness of placing a contrived idea of social standing over integrity.
There’s a rather unpleasant new character
Scout is met at the railway station by Henry Clinton, “her lifelong friend, her brother’s comrade, and if he kept on kissing her like that, her husband.” Although Henry’s regarded highly by the community, his sexism and his unrealistic sounding banter with Scout are both irritating. Here’s a choice quote: “First,” he said dispassionately, “hold your tongue. Don’t argue with a man, especially when you know you can beat him. Smile a lot. Make him feel big. Tell him how wonderful he is, and wait on him.” Scout’s responses to Henry could pave the way for the novel to have some interesting and complex commentary on gender in 1950s USA.
There are a lot of deliberate references to “new” technology
The reader learns that Scout usually flies to Alabama from New York, and she notes the changes in the train since she last took it: “...a fat genie of a porter materialized when she pressed a button on a wall; at her bidding a stainless steel washbasin popped out of another wall, and there was a john one could prop one’s feet on.“ Then there’s Henry’s driving of the car, which leads us to the clunkiest part of the chapter: “With green envy, she watched Henry’s effortless mastery of the automobile. Cars are his servants, she thought. ‘Power steering? Automatic transmission?’ she said.”
Despite the years, Scout’s best loved qualities are intact
Scout is as rebellious and strong-willed as ever. She was always set up to be someone who notices and cares about issues of race, gender, and class, and there’s no reason for this to have changed. One of the central lessons of Mockingbird was Scout learning to have empathy, and it will be interesting to see how she uses these early lessons in her dealing with the institutionalised sexism of people like Henry. She uses both affection and her strong will to assert herself. To Henry, she says, ““I’ll have an affair with you but I won’t marry you.” It is worth noting here that the only mention of race in the entire chapter is Scout’s delight at the TV antenna she spots atop an African American house.
There are dark revelations about Atticus – but not yet
Reports reveal that there are revelations about Atticus’s attitude to racism later in this novel that will shatter assumptions about his character as a champion of racial equality. This is not made immediately apparent. The glimpses afforded of Atticus in chapter one remind the reader of the same incomplete truth about Scout’s father told by Mockingbird, which will, one hopes, go a long way in demonstrating the ingrained nature of racism in even the most seemingly well-meaning people:
Her father had a way of undermining his sister’s lectures on the innate superiority of any given Finch: he always told his daughter the rest of it, quietly and solemnly, but Jean Louise sometimes thought she detected an unmistakably profane glint in Atticus Finch’s eyes, or was it merely the light hitting his glasses? She never knew.
