Fairy Dust
Even the title of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird seems to roll off the tongue more easily than To Set a Watchman but maybe that’s just because it’s so familiar. What with an appealing young protagonist Scout, mystery surrounding the reclusive Boo Radley, a dramatic court scene dénouement and a story which is underpinned by racism and gender issues it’s hardly surprising that TKAM has been a text not only beloved by exam boards over the years but the general public too. According to an article in the BBC news magazine a poll for World Book Day placed it fifth, behind Pride and Prejudice but ahead of The Bible, with a survey of British librarians rating it the book they would most recommend. It has sold over 30m copies.
To Set a Watchman, published last year, is as bumpy and clunky as you’d expect from what would have been a debut novel. Although marketed ( many would say misleadingly ) as a sequel to TKAM, this novel is in effect a first draft of the latter and was initially rejected by Lee’s publishers who advised her to focus on the flashbacks to Scout as a child. It’s a work that’s been immersed in controversy. Lee, despite rarely giving interviews or seeking publicity, had always said she would never write another novel. Then, with Lee in her eighties and in a nursing home and her sister, her main carer, having recently died the manuscript of TSAW was discovered : understandably concerns were raised about the possibility of undue pressure being exerted. The hype before publication was extreme, with more pre-orders logged than for the latest Harry Potter.
Leaving aside this whirlpool of questions and doubts one thing is indisputable. In TKAM, set in the Deep South in the 1930s, Scout’s lawyer father, the noble, decent and handsome Atticus ( always Gregory Peck from the film in my imagination!) defends a young black man accused of raping a white woman despite facing widespread hostility from the small community of Maycomb. However, in the earlier / later book, he is at best a segregationist and at worst a racist. Moreover, this once moral Colossus is now an old man who needs help with basic functions such as eating and dressing: he is diminished in every way. Yet he still loves Scout and while the idealised father-daughter relationship of TKAM is absent, arguably Scout comes to have a more realistic view of the world. Referring to her father and people like him she says,
“ I guess it’s like an airplane: they’e the drag and we’re the thrust, together we make it fly. Too much of us and we’re nose -heavy, too much of them and we’re tail-heavy – it’s a matter of balance.”
Moreover, in TSAW Scout is shocked to discover that when the chips are down Calpurnia, the black housekeeper who bought her up, views Scout’s family as ‘other’ by virtue of their skin colour, whatever liberal attitudes might in the past have been displayed.
What I find really interesting is where this left me as a reader in relation to character. It was the literary equivalent to discovering that George Clooney is going to vote for Trump. Do I go with my heart and ditch my hero worship of Atticus or, more sensibly, accept that it’s not unusual for people, as they age, to shift from idealism to compromise and sometimes even to espousing the opposite beliefs to those they once held? Although the latter can be unattractive, if it happens in life, then why not in fiction? Or maybe it’s that we prefer our make believe worlds, however ‘realistic’, to have a sprinkling of fairy dust!
|
|
|