Just Finished Reading Harper Lee's Go Set a Watchman

Last year there was a great amount of controversy in the book publishing world when it was announced that Harper Lee, the author of the classic novel To Kill a Mockingbird, had, 55 years later, come out with a sequel to it, titled Go Set a Watchman.  This was quite a surprise to many, considering that Lee had not published anything since that first book and was now in her late eighties with several disabilities, including poor eyesight.  It turned out, though, that her new attorney had seized upon the manuscripts of Go Set a Watchman from a safe and got the author's permission for publishing...HarperCollins jumped on it, heavily promoting it as a Mockingbird sequel, and watched the sales soar.  But the popular reaction of many readers was very negative: To Kill a Mockingbird's hero lawyer/father Atticus Finch is portrayed, two decades after the original story takes place, as racially prejudiced.  Well, I just had to see things for myself...and just finished reading Go Set a Watchman...

First of all, when discussing all of this, we need to realize that we are dealing with two different time frames: one is the real world's and the other is that of Harper Lee's stories.  In the real world, she had written Go Set a Watchman as the first draft for her (first) novel and submitted it to her editor...who had several reservations with it, making numerous suggestions.  Over the next three years, she rewrote her story while continually consulting with her editor.  The final product, To Kill a Mockingbird was published in 1960.  Also note that, in the "real world", the famous U.S. Supreme Court's Brown vs. Board of Education ruling on desegregation was issued in 1954, sparking a great deal of white backlash in the South.  Now to the time within Lee's stories...

To Kill a Mockingbird is set in 1935 in the town of Maycomb, Alabama.  Jean Louise "Scout" Finch, the fictional narrator and main character of that story when she was a little girl, in Go Set a Watchman returns to her childhood community twenty years later after pursuing a career in New York.  Her father, Atticus Finch, is a lawyer in Maycomb known for his sense of fairness and compassion for the blacks there.  In 1935, he takes on a case defending a black man accused of raping a white woman: this becomes the central story woven into To Kill a Mockingbird.  Yet in Go Set a Watchman, when this important case and trial comes up for discussion, its outcome and specifics contradict those of the "earlier" story.  Go Set a Watchman, set closely following that aforementioned Supreme Court ruling, has Atticus expressing views on race that he never even remotely gave a hint of believing throughout Mockingbird.  Jean Louise, who had idolized her father for his open-mindedness and being "color-blind" regarding others, is shocked upon discovering his bigotry...their struggles over this issue constitute the core of Go Set a Watchman...

I read Go Set a Watchman in the author's fictional time frame...hence, I read it as a sequel.  But it was written BEFORE To Kill a Mockingbird and is, in essence, a very different story.  Not only is Atticus Finch distinctly different between the two stories, but so is Jean Louise.  To Kill a Mockingbird mixes several interesting story lines together and creates an atmosphere of suspense for the reader...Go Set a Watchman is a rather boring treatise on how someone can idolize and hero-worship their parent in childhood but eventually must reconcile that internalized "fantasy" picture with the reality of that parent, flaws and all.  But I didn't need to read through the whole tedious book to get that lesson...I imagine that Harper Lee's original editor back in 1957 saw the same thing when he asked her to rewrite her story.  There's a good reason why Go Set a Watchman, written in 1957, wasn't published during all these intervening years...and I suppose that, with the ensuing financial windfall for the interested parties, there's also a good reason why it was eventually published last year.  Go ahead and read it if you want, but realize that it was never written to be a sequel to To Kill a Mockingbird...