Monday, August 17, 2015

Book review: Go Set a Watchman


As you have already heard through numerous news stories and media blasts, Go Set a Watchman is not exactly a sequel to To Kill a Mockingbird. It contains familiar faces, places and situations but is, in many ways, a work of its own. Most reports say that this is an earlier version of Mockingbird that was relentlessly revised by Harper Lee and her editors to become the novel we know and love. And with the reclusive author in such poor health and the murky details surrounding Watchman's publication, many believe this new book was published without her consent. I feel like in her mind, it is still the rough-draft of a story that she never felt confident enough to share.

To me, the biggest detail that sets this novel apart from its predecessor is that fact that Jean Louise (Scout) remembers her father’s famous court case differently than it is portrayed in Mockingbird. In a brief, fleeting memory, she recalls that her father once represented a black man accused of raping a white girl and that he won an acquittal for his client. Having just re-read and re-lived the heartbreaking details of the case in Mockingbird – the case that Atticus Finch lost– this plot deviation was rather shocking to me. If Atticus had won, so many of the most potent scenes in Mockingbird would never have happened. There would not have been the silent salute of respect from the balcony once the verdict was read and Atticus walked alone from the courtroom. There would not have been the heartbreak of Tom Robinson’s desperate and fatal escape attempt. And perhaps most importantly, Atticus's oldest child Jem would not have struggled with the bitter realization that the justice system is not always just.

Atticus losing that case was the catalyst for a huge leap in Jem’s mental and emotional growth in Mockingbird. Without the lost case and the resulting conversations he had with Atticus, Jem would have been in the same place where Jean Louise finds herself in Watchman: still caught in the illusion of youth that justice is always just, fathers are perfect and truth will always prevail. And even though Jem is dead and gone in Watchman and the story focuses wholly on a grown-up Scout, I wish his memory could have been more thoughtfully preserved and his importance not cast aside.

Also, contrary to popular media buzz, the Atticus Finch portrayed in Watchman is not a racist or bigot. Watchman is the story of a young woman coming to terms with the fact that her father is human, imperfect and simply doing the best he can do in an angry, troubled town filled with angry, troubled people. Atticus does not always make the right decisions. He is a good man, not a perfect man. To 9-year-old Scout, he was a knight in shining, flawless armor. To a 26-year-old Jean Louise, he must come down from his high horse and don simpler garb. He does not have all the right answers, but he is trying to fight the good fight.

Taken as a whole, you could say that Watchman is a second chapter in the lives of Scout, her father Atticus, and the town of Maycomb, Alabama. I enjoyed grown-up Scout and her observations of a tiny Southern town stuck in their tiny Southern ways. Her many childhood memories help fill out a life just glimpsed in Mockingbird, and her grown-up conversations and observations are thought-provoking. Two new characters are introduced in this story: Henry Clinton, childhood friend and now almost-fiance to Jean Louise, and wise uncle Jack, bachelor brother to Atticus. Both fit easily into the familiar scenery and fill gaps left by Jem, Calpurnia and other beloved faces.

I don’t think I would tell a high school student to read Go Set a Watchman immediately after finishing To Kill a Mockingbird for the first time. Watchman is, in many ways, a necessary story. But Mockingbird is a better novel in style and structure as well as heart and soul.

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