The set-up is that Scout, now 26 and known as Jean Louise, has come home from New York to find Maycomb changed. In Go Set a Watchman, society finds Tom Robinson innocent yet the individual who defended him is shown to be full of prejudice. The message of To Kill a Mockingbird – in which Atticus’s innocent client, Tom Robinson, is convicted by the jury – was that individuals must behave honourably, even if societies can’t change overnight. In a flashback to the central court case in To Kill a Mockingbird, Atticus is said to have “won acquittal for a coloured boy on a rape charge”. What’s more, there is a crucial discrepancy in plot terms – which Lee’s editors have said she specifically did not wish to correct. Mary Badham as Scout and Gregory Peck as her father Atticus Finch in the 1962 film 'To Kill a Mockingbird'Ĭredit: Everett Collection / Rex Features He has among his papers a tract entitled “The Black Plague”, and appears to condone the views of a visiting speaker who talks about “n-” who will “mongrelise the race”. We learn that he once joined the Ku Klux Klan – “when the Klan was respectable, like the Masons”. The main source of shock will be the transformation of Atticus, now 72, into a racist. But really, it’s more like a ghost: the spectre of Lee’s restless, ardent thoughts in progress. Because the action takes place 20 years later than the story of To Kill a Mockingbird, it feels like a sequel. Last summer, the manuscript of Go Set a Watchman was found in a safe deposit box, and considered to be sufficiently distinct from To Kill a Mockingbird as to be publishable as a separate novel.
She wrote this book in 1957, and reworked it with her editor for years until it became To Kill a Mockingbird – the only book she ever published. Lee is now 89, and living in a nursing home in Alabama. Go Set A Watchman is the “parent”, as Harper Lee has put it, of To Kill a Mockingbird. Atticus, the namesake of thousands of boys born since 1960 now it seems their parents might as well have called them Adolf. Atticus Finch, the moral conscience of 20th century America. Those words – and many more like them – come from none other than Atticus Finch, known to readers of To Kill a Mockingbird as the heroic lawyer who couldn’t live with himself unless he took on the doomed case of a black man accused of raping a white woman. “The Negroes,” he explains, “have made terrific progress in adapting themselves to white ways, but they’re far from it yet”. “Do you want your children going to a school that’s been dragged down to accommodate Negro children?” asks a character in Harper Lee’s newly published novel, Go Set a Watchman. As Harper Lee's death is reported, we revisit our review of her 2015 "comeback", Go Set A Watchman.
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