Go Set a Watchman

Go Set a Watchman – Harper Lee

It’s hard to know where to begin with this one. It is difficult to know where to position a novel that comes both before and after To Kill a Mockingbird, contains similar themes and characters but with crucial details changed. In fact, it almost doesn’t seem real to be reading it, a book to accompany one of my favourite novels, the one from which I can quote whole passages and have read more times than I can remember.

The reception so far seems to be that having read Go Set a Watchman, To Kill a Mockingbird can never be read in the same way again, and to a certain extent I agree. However, I do not think that it ruins it or prevents it from being the literary great it has come to be. Go Set a Watchman was never going to be another To Kill a Mockingbird, but it does have a lot to say and a lot we can learn from.

One of the first differences that struck me was the narrative style. To Kill a Mockingbird, written from the first person child’s point of view but with the hindsight of the adult narrator allows a double voice and leads us through the story so that understanding unfolds gradually as Scout learns important life lessons and faces difficult circumstances. Here, though, the novel is written in the third person, somewhat more distanced. Yet, the narrative still closely follows Scout (or Jean Louise as she now calls herself, aged twenty-six) and sometimes takes on her thoughts through the use of free indirect speech.

Other crucial differences include the outcome of the trial: when this is mentioned, we hear that Tom Robinson was acquitted, a verdict that seems at odds with To Kill a Mockingbird and the way in which we are shown that Atticus made progress just in keeping the jury out for so long – a ‘baby step’, a move in the right direction. To get him off entirely seemed impossible and the main focus of Atticus’ courage was that he knew he was going to lose but he fought anyway. This difference, which apparently Harper Lee insisted was left in, makes me wonder whether we should actually be taking these novels separately.

Central characters are also missing: Jem, I was shocked to learn, died from a heart attack, Dill has moved away, Miss Maudie is no longer there to offer them cake and explain Atticus’ words. Calpurnia seems turned against them, unable to see Jean Louise as the girl she raised but merely as ‘white’. We do, however, have flashbacks to their childhood, idealised by Scout and reminiscent of the Mockingbird we know and love. For example, laugh-out-loud moments such as a time when Jem, Scout and Dill are playing one of their games and decide to ‘baptise’ Scout naked in the pond, just as the Reverend is arriving for dinner. Atticus has to leave the dinner table to go outside where he cries with laughter.

Yet, these flashbacks are tainted with sadness. Scout reminisces outside her old house, now an ice cream parlour. She feels like a stranger in her own home and a strong nostalgia, “reaching out with yearning […] making secret trips to long ago”. She even wonders if it was all a dream.

Atticus has been held up as a literary hero and the epitome of not just a moral man but of morality itself. However, in To Kill a Mockingbird he is not entirely perfect. No one can be. He underestimates danger, he fails to understand that the Sheriff is trying to protect Boo Radley and he does not offer to take Tom Robinson’s case but it assigned it. But his views do seem clear: he does not accept prejudice and he is not a hypocrite. He has taught Scout everything she knows. She has grown up, but she is still the same girl, dependent on her father’s judgement until this point, and this is shown to be the problem.

The first and only time in this novel that we see Atticus in the courtroom, he is working alongside those to whom he would usually be opposed. But Uncle Jack points out sometimes you have to conform to the ways of a community in order to help it. Certainly the novel is less plot-driven, less detailed and spans a much smaller time frame but it is more grown up, more challenging personally. The whole novel seems centred around this one moment when Scout comes to learn a shocking truth about her father. It makes her physically sick and causes her to question everything and everyone she has ever known and loved. She wants to run away but her Uncle Jack prevents her, forcing Jean Louise to come to terms with her discovery so that in the end it seem bearable. The reader is able to follow this emotional journey, also shocked at the change in Atticus and wanting to believe that it is all a misunderstanding.

Perhaps Scout is another mockingbird; her innocence to the idea that her father is fallible just like every other human being, along with her being ‘colour-blind’, has left her sheltered to the racial complexities of the time. When Jean Louise confronts her father and shouts at him for several pages, Atticus says: “I’ve killed you Scout, I had to”. Maybe sometimes ‘killing a mockingbird’ is necessary.

Lee’s title is taken from Isaiah 21:6, “For thus hath the Lord said unto me, Go, set a watchman, let him declare what he seeth.” Uncle Jack speaks to her in these terms; in this novel, he is the one to impart wisdom: “every man’s island, Jean Louise, every man’s watchman, is his conscience […] you confused your father with God […] you were an emotional cripple, leaning on him […] assuming that your answers would always be his answers”. When she realises that her father is flawed and strongly disagrees with his actions, Scout’s conscience pulls apart from her father’s and she is brought into the world as distinctly her own person.

This novel, although not as polished or as monumental as To Kill a Mockingbird, still illustrates Harper Lee’s powerful ability to portray the human condition: in Jean Louise waking up, at first at peace until she remembers what she was worrying about yesterday, and in Uncle Jacks’ warning: “it’s always easy to look back and see what we were […] it is hard to see what we are”. I hope that this book will not diminish the enduring influence of what remains a great novel.