BOOK REVIEW: Go Set a Watchmanl

It is impossible to talk about Harper Lee's GO SET A WATCHMAN without referring to To Kill a Mockingbird. In fact,if it has been awhile since reading Mockingbird, it might be a good idea to watch the movie at least. The background is important.

GO SET A WATCHMAN finds a twenty-six- year-old Scout returning to Maycomb, Alabama to visit her aging father Atticus. She has been living in New York City and now prefers to be called by her real  name, Jean Louise. Again we meet most of the well known characters from Maycomb, with some sad and surprising changes.

The almost twenty years have brought political tensions to Maycomb. Especially the race situation has become ugly and  Jean Louise is not prepared to find people that she thought she knew filled with bigotry and hatred. When she learns that her father is a member of an organization that is associated with the Klan, she is sick. She feels that this makes everything that she believed that he had taught her to be a lie. The man who stood for fairness and honor has betrayed her.

I do not agree with the many reviews that vilify Atticus. He was and is a man who lives for the fairness of the law. Again, he is willing to defend a black man who is accused of murdering a white man. Although it was an accident that was more the white man's fault, Atticus knows that it will bring the NAACP and national attention to the trial.

Considering that GO SET A WATCHMAN was supposedly written in the mid-1950's, Harper Lee had a very good understanding of the time and place of her characters. The ladies at Aunt Alexandra's Coffee Social and their cliche statements on the blacks were so well drawn that the scene gives us a glimpse of how far Jean Louise has grown from her home town. Henry, Jean Louise's old boyfriend, knows that he has to go along with the current feelings of white superiority in order to fit in. Even Calpurnia is now a stranger and not willing to cross black/white lines.

But it is Atticus and his feelings on the racial situation that make Jean Louise feel that she has been lied to and betrayed, that all that she believed Atticus had stood for has been a lie.

GO SET A WATCHMAN is not a particularly good book. Lee's style of writing is more appropriate for Scout than for Jean Louise. The flashbacks to Scout, Jem and Dill in their Mockingbird days are the only spots of charm in the novel. I can not picture it becoming required reading or of being made into a classic movie.

The publisher that had originally turned the manuscript of GO SET A WATCHMAN down and told Harper Lee to write  about Scout as a young girl was right. Because of his insight we have To Kill a Mockingbird, a book that stays on top of my list of all time best books written. I have always felt that if an author has decided that one of his works is not good enough to be published, we should listen to him. GO SET A WATCHMAN will never get the acclaim that To Kill a Mockingbird so richly deserved, but it still makes for an interesting quick read if only to see how life changes in a small Southern town from the 1940's to the 1950's and what happens to some of Scout's old friends.