Go set a watchman

OK, first of all a couple of disclaimers:

1. The above rating is for Go Set A Watchman as a stand-alone novel. Read as a companion piece to To Kill A Mockingbird, it's still not great but more interesting. This is, of course, the only way it should be read.
2. I first read TKAM as an adult, and while I think it's a very fine novel, I don't have the intimate relationship with it that a lot of people do. Choosing not to read an unfinished early draft because you don't want your images of characters that mean a lot to you changed is a perfectly valid decision.
3. Spoilers, and the occasional quoted slur, ahead.

The biggie, if someone's avoided it: It's 20 years after the events of To Kill A Mockingbird, and Jean Louise "Scout" Finch returns from New York City to Alabama to visit her family... and, this being set in the days of the civil rights movement, realises something she's never noticed before: her entire town is the drunk racist uncle at a family reunion. Including her fiancé and her father - that paragon of the moral, upright citizen, Atticus Finch, who's now leading a committee to maintain segregation, reading pamphlets about the inferiority of the black race, protesting civil rights with arguments straight out of Birth of a Nation, and holding meetings at which other people rant about how the commie Jew niggers (or nigger Jew commies, it's all the same thing apparently) only want to destroy American society. When he takes on a case to defend a young black man charged with manslaughter, it's not because he thinks he's innocent but to rob the NAACP of a platform. Scout, being Scout, is of course outraged. But is it her father who's changed, [movie trailer voice]or the world[/movie trailer voice]?

There is more than a little bit of serendipity to this novel, in which Christian Southern (capital S) Gentlemen rant about how the Supreme Court forces them to accept black people, being released just as Christian Southern Gentlemen are ranting about how the Supreme Court forces them to accept gay people, as race and voter rights are once again political issues in the US and populist fascism once again a viable political alternative in Europe. The arguments sound depressingly up-to-date; one of the few clues that they didn't just grab a brand-new Mockingbird fanfiction sequel off the more social justice-y parts of Tumblr and slap Harper Lee's name on it, apart from the incessant use of racial slurs, is that Lee clearly wrote this with the assumption that the reader would remember details of the events of the late 50s, so if you're not familiar with every court case of the US civil rights movement you might want to have wikipedia handy.

Of course, with millions sold before anyone's read it, history will show if the epitaph of GSAW will be "Hmmm, I guess racism was always more complex than a simple court case against an obviously innocent man, and the great white saviour trope was pretty skeevy to begin with" or "See? Even Atticus Finch thinks political correctness has gone too far!" If there's anyone who's allowed to call himself Not Racist But, surely it's Atticus Finch? So anything Atticus Finch says, therefore, is Not Racist, case closed, or rather re-opened.

A phrase which, as a friend of mine pointed out, makes as much sense if you change it to "I haven't wet my pants... BUT...."


Of course there's a third possible outcome, which is simply "...Yeah, good call, original editor." One could write volumes - and I'm sure people will - on how GSAW and its characters relate to TKAM, and to the topic at hand. Yeah, yeah, but is the book any good? Eh. It's a promising first draft of a first novel, with some obvious superficial flaws that could have been fixed if the novel as a whole had held up for publication, but the first few chapters show that Lee has raw talent even if she's not yet on the level of TKAM. The characters are recognizable; I definitely believe that this is grown-up Scout, and have surprisingly little trouble buying that this, klan membership and all, is Atticus Finch, Man of Principles, or at least a workable reading of him. It's not so much a matter of him having suddenly changed his views in his dotage, as of his personal views suddenly coming into focus as they clash with Scout's. It's fully possible, GSAW argues, to be both a well-spoken, polite, kind, loving, honourable man, and a bigot who's only willing to bend so far. People can change (Lee's own father, on whom Atticus is based, did) but getting them to accept change is hard. Sure we want equal rights for others, we're good people, we're Not Racist, But why this quickly, this way, them, here, now. One could argue that TKAM needed deconstruction, and while GSAW is far from perfect there either, I do like that it tries to challenge more than comfort, to make Atticus a more complex character than just He Who Always Does The Right Thing. But the paradox: it's Mockingbird and our familiarity with it that gives Watchman its oomph. Taken on its own, after a decent start, it soon turns into a very didactic story, barely padded to novel length by awkward flashbacks, and once the conflict flares up for real it mostly becomes a series of long rants and arguments that connect to each other in ways that feel very forced. Not to mention that for a novel that wants to present a more complex image of just how difficult social change is, the actual African-Americans are still reduced to a brief (and pretty stereotypical) cameo. Go Set A Watchman is a mediocre novel but an interesting footnote, though the fact that it gets this much publicity, making it impossible to see as the mostly academic affair the publication of an author's original draft should be, leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

(Also noteworthy that the Swedish translation bowdlerizes "negro", but not "nigger".)

Go Set A Watchman takes its title from Isaiah 21, much like Bob Dylan's "All Along The Watchtower". That song is an infinite loop, with an ending that feeds back into the first verse, as the same old story repeats over and over again: "There must be some way outta here..."