Go Set a Watchman’s third-person viewpoint is less engaging, but also more disenchanted: perhaps this is why, stripped of his daughter’s admiring gaze, Atticus emerges as a flawed spokesman for smalltown small-mindedness.īut it also means the narrative voice has to take us on the journey back to Maycomb at arm’s length. A key part of To Kill a Mockingbird’s perennial appeal is surely Scout’s endearing first-person narration. Lee made some critical changes when, on the orders of her editor, she went back to the drawing board with Go Set a Watchman. While it isn’t one of the most sophisticated novels on race in America, it is an intriguing document of its volatile age. The novel offers a critical observation of the sectional tensions of the 1950s, and Lee uses it to rehearse arguments about segregation and states’ rights. In that sense, he feels less like the paragon of virtue we encountered in Mockingbird, and more like an ordinary man of his times. Here in Go Set a Watchman, Atticus Finch bristles with all the threatened white masculinity that would hardly have been unusual for a 72-year-old man in 1950s Alabama. Knowing this makes the recent howls of betrayal over Atticus’s racism in social and print media seem rather simple-minded: it isn’t really the same character, but a character with the same name. After all, this isn’t a sequel as such, but another novel altogether. twm1340/Flickr, CC BY-SAĬomposed before To Kill a Mockingbird, but set many years afterwards, some of Go Set a Watchman’s character trajectories and plot points don’t quite match up. Where once she was a native, her urban worldliness now jars against hometown conventions. The prodigal daughter, having fled for a life in the progressive big city, returns to the nostalgia-tinted backwater of her youth.

The plot itself is a variation on a classic. But here we have it nonetheless – a late and unlikely sibling for one of American literature’s most beloved of only children.

The murky circumstances of Go Set a Watchman’s publication have been the subject of much speculation. Then, mysteriously, suspiciously, the dreamt-of sequel came to light: a manuscript “discovered” in a vault by a lawyer and – we are insistently told – published with the knowing consent of its ailing 89-year-old author. A follow-up was always rumoured, but apparently abandoned by Lee.

The back story is familiar enough by now: it is 55 years since Lee published To Kill A Mockingbird – a book that has managed to sustain that rare alchemy of huge popularity and genuine critical respect. It has been a long time since a new novel has attracted as much clamorous attention as Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman.

To kill a mockingbird follow up