Scout has lost her swagger and Atticus fans will be shocked by a satisfying novel that nonetheless vindicates the direction taken by Harper Lee’s classic debut
The first problem in assessing Harper Lee’s first published novel in the five and a half decades since To Kill a Mockingbird is whether to describe it as her first or second book. This apparently simple question has been contested in the months before Tuesday’s much publicised and heavily embargoed release of a manuscript that reportedly came to light only recently.
Chronologically, Go Set a Watchman is, in Hollywood arithmetic, a sort of Mockingbird 2, depicting the later lives of the Finch family – lawyer Atticus, his daughter, Scout, his son, Jem and their maid, Calpurnia – who appeared in Lee’s 1960 debut book about a racially inflamed rape trial in Alabama. However, in computing terms, Watchman is Mockingbird 1.0 to the Mockingbird 2.0 of the novel that was previously the 89-year-old Lee’s single published work. Some sceptical advance publicity had suggested that the new book was merely an earlier draft of the first one, representing the text before editors and publishers demanded a substantial revision.
As it turns out, however, Go Set a Watchman is of a very different order from “revised” or “alternative” editions of, for example, The Great Gatsby or Ulysses, which sought to restore or record the supposedly original intentions of F Scott Fitzgerald and James Joyce
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Chronologically, Go Set a Watchman is, in Hollywood arithmetic, a sort of Mockingbird 2, depicting the later lives of the Finch family – lawyer Atticus, his daughter, Scout, his son, Jem and their maid, Calpurnia – who appeared in Lee’s 1960 debut book about a racially inflamed rape trial in Alabama. However, in computing terms, Watchman is Mockingbird 1.0 to the Mockingbird 2.0 of the novel that was previously the 89-year-old Lee’s single published work. Some sceptical advance publicity had suggested that the new book was merely an earlier draft of the first one, representing the text before editors and publishers demanded a substantial revision.
As it turns out, however, Go Set a Watchman is of a very different order from “revised” or “alternative” editions of, for example, The Great Gatsby or Ulysses, which sought to restore or record the supposedly original intentions of F Scott Fitzgerald and James Joyce
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