Go Set a Watchman

Go Set a Watchman
by Harper Lee
William Heinemann (UK publisher)
14 July 2015

I wasn't going to read this book, at least not yet, as I hate getting on bandwagons. But there it was, at Sainsbury, copies nicely displayed in rank and file, at a low price, and with a free DVD of To Kill a Mockingbird as part of the deal!  I couldn't resist.  I succumbed.

(I will save the DVD until the younglings and I have read TKAM together.)

 I had enjoyed TKAM, had appreciated the story, the themes, and the writing, but it had never been something I loved and wanted to read over and over again. That might be because I had had to read it in school and as Mark Twain commented about humor, things die when they are dissected.  I had heard many negative things about Go Set a Watchman.   It repeated sections of description, the characters were racist, it was unpolished or not complete as a novel, etc.   Certainly nothing to commend it. 

And I certainly didn't enjoy it very much when I began reading it.  I never did grow to like Scout at any point of the book but in the beginning I really didn't know if I were going to finish the book because she grated on my nerves so badly.  A peevish young thing with an attitude of superiority - almost stereotypically "small town girl goes to New York City and comes home thinking she's better than everyone else."   Just plain irritating with no depth to redeem her character.

I enjoyed Ms Lee's descriptions of people and places, and her conversations, especially those involving Uncle Jack.  Her writing is definitely Southern and even her minor characters and events are decidedly Southern as well.

During the Depression, Mr. Finckney Sewell, a Maycomb resident long noted for his independence of mind, disentombed his own grandfather and extracted all his gold teeth to pay off a mortgage.  When the sheriff apprehended him for grave-robbery and gold-hoarding, Mr. Fink demurred on the theory that if his own grandfather wasn't his, whose was he?  The sheriff said old Mr. M. F. Sewell was in the public domain, but Mr. Fink said testily he supposed it was his cemetery lot, his granddaddy, and his teeth, and declined forthwith to be arrested. (p 191)

I love that!  It is definitely in the South that one could might find a local character so cussedly independent-minded as to do such a thing, and then "decline forthwith to be arrested!"

You'll find plenty of synopses and reviews on the web so I won't try to give a run-down on the story.  I'll limit this to a few of my decidedly personal observations.   I think one of the most prominent thoughts that I have after reading this book is that how one reacts to it will not only depend on one's personality and beliefs, but very much on one's age and one's origins.   I'm not from the Deep South but I am from the South (Tulsa and Oklahoma on the whole being an odd mix of South, Mid-West, and South-West cultures).  The story is set before my time yet I did grow up when "de-segregation" was very much a part of public policy, particularly noticeable in schools.   Busing students from one section of town to another (as I recall it was mostly black students to mostly-white schools) was part of life at the time.

I think people younger than myself, even from the South, will be bemused and horrified by some of the attitudes and beliefs of some of the characters.  It can't be helped, somewhat, as we all have to look at the world through our own eyes and if we haven't learned another's point of view and have been taught only certain parts of history we tend to read things from the past through our own moral lens which has been formed more recently.   So, many of the characters' statements and views will seem reprehensible to many readers, even those raised in the South.  To those younger people raised elsewhere the characters might seem even more backward, ignorant, and perhaps even evil. 

But we have to place the characters in their time in history.  Atticus Finch, if he was in his 70s in 1955, would have been born in the 1880's, only 15 or 20 years or so after the end of the War Between the States, during the Reconstruction Era (which, although it officially ended in 1877 some historians believe that in reality that era ended in the 1890s).   How ignorant it would be to think that his and his family's and other peers' views would mirror-image those formed by people born and raised in the late 20th Century!  Of course his views will seem strange to modern readers, and also to his own daughter who was raised in an entirely different world by the time she came along - even though she was raised in the South which hangs onto tradition like the oaks hang onto moss.

I don't think that Harper Lee was necessarily trying to promote the views of certain characters through this book, like I have read some reviewers say.  I think rather that she was reflecting on what she was seeing and hearing during a time of great change for the South.  I would not like to make any assumptions about what her views really are.  It is certainly possible to create a protagonist with attitudes that are at odds with your own (Dorothy Sayers and her character Lord Peter Wimsey come to mind here).

Besides the theme of race there are the themes of growing up and of learning to look at people and places in a different way, of realising that people are a mix of good and bad.   There seem to me to be two major periods of growing up: one is when one leaves childhood and enters adolescence, and the other is when one leaves adolescence or young adulthood and enters real adulthood.  The latter is when those last remnants of childish thinking and acting are finally done away with.  Some people never really get through that second stage.   Scout goes through at least part of the second growing up in a very painful and dramatic way in the second half of the book. 

There is a theme very worth talking about, I think, and I would love to have some conversations on this, and that is "how do we combat evil or wrong-thinking?"  Again we have a generation gap, I believe, with younger people believing one thing and older people having another view.   Jean Louise has quite a lot of learning to do in this regard.

Harper Lee brings a lot of her own life into this book.  She was the daughter of a lawyer and moved away to New York City.  I don't know what she felt when she came back; again, I do not want to speculate.   I do think that disdain for your hometown after being away is not an automatic thing; something that must appear in someone that lives away for a while.  It's more apt to be present in someone in their 20s and who is searching for something deep they're not finding in their life in their hometown.  Although different lifestyles/locales may suit different people better or worse (I'm definitely a country or small town mouse, as opposed to a city mouse), much of what people are searching for is not going to be found elsewhere if they aren't finding it where they already are.

This book isn't going to win any prizes, I think.  I ended up enjoying it more than I thought I would, although not as much as I wish I could have.  In the end I am glad I read it.  Almost more important than the book itself, in some ways, to me, is reading other people's reactions to the book.   I'd really like to hear more from older people who lived through some of the things talked about and get their views on this book.