Like a lot of American students, I was assigned to read “To Kill A Mockingbird” as an underclassman in high school. I agreed with the teacher it was a good, well-written book, but I kindly informed her “Harry Potter” and “Ender’s Game” and “Artemis Fowl” were all much more interesting.
I think a lot of people made to read “Mockingbird” at that age felt the same way.
But I reread the 1960 classic in preparation for the release of Harper Lee’s “Go Set A Watchman” and found myself sucked back into a world I hadn’t visited in years, only this time, the descriptions were more vibrant, the punches hit harder and the characters spoke louder.
I knew during my reread no matter what I thought of “Watchman,” I’d be grateful it existed if for no other reason than to send me back to “Mockingbird” as a young adult.
If you haven’t read “Mockingbird” since high school, it might be time to go back to Maycomb, Alabama, to engage again in the mystery of Boo Radley and to revisit the scary realities of a segregated south.
“Mockingbird” explores the dangers of tribalism big and small, whether it’s a race acting superior to others or a family doing the same. And Lee presented this masterpiece in the distinct voice of little southern tomboy Scout Finch.
By the time you reach the final chapters, you begin to feel panicked. You don’t want the book to end. You want to keep reading. You don’t want to leave Maycomb, even if the story is through.
Because of this unwillingness to leave, picking up “Watchman” is inevitable once you’ve made it through “Mockingbird.” I would do anything to be sucked back into Scout’s world for another 300 pages.
The unfortunate reality is that you can never go back.
The two books were released 55 years apart, but “Watchman” was written first. The two tell similar stories about racism and family and follow the same characters, because “Watchman” was an earlier draft of “Mockingbird”—the first draft Lee submitted to her publisher. Sent back to refocus the novel, Lee painstakingly reworked the entire story and crafted the novel we all had to read as teenagers.
As an earlier draft, “Watchman” is missing the unique voice that endeared so many to “Mockingbird.” The ideas presented and discussed in “Watchman” are less developed and the emotional dilemmas are less poignant. The characters themselves are flatter and in some cases have entirely different roles in the newly released narrative.
A lot of discussion in online forums and bars has been about Atticus’s transformation from the civil rights knight-in-shining-armor we loved from “Mockingbird” into the quietly racist Klan-sympathizer we find in “Watchman.”
First, our perception is twisted by release dates. Lee imagined Atticus first as the racist and then transformed him for the later draft into the character we meet in “Mockingbird.”
Second, “Watchman” would work no other way.
Mirroring the reader’s return to Maycomb, Scout, now a 26 year-old New York liberal, comes back to visit an aged and dying Atticus. The prejudices and judgments of very Christian mid-1900’s Alabama are as prevalent as ever, but her heroes—the brave few who stood up to the rest—are dead or, worse, no longer heroes.
There is no happy homecoming for Scout and no happy homecoming for us. Lee is a very old woman with no intention of writing or releasing anything else and when she passes, the wonderful descriptions of Maycomb, the wonderful vocabulary of a southern girl who hated the idea of becoming a southern belle, the wonderful, tearful emotions evoked by an innocent man trying to do what’s right in the face of so much ugliness—all of it will go with her.
A lot of people hate “Watchman.” I won’t call it a great book, but it is a meaningful book, perhaps made more meaningful by its lackluster storytelling.
I envy those of you who have yet to read “Mockingbird” as an adult because you have one more trip back to Maycomb County, Alabama still ahead of you. I urge you to take it because there’s probably a great deal you missed when you were told to ‘finish the book by Friday.’
And once you’ve reread “Mockingbird,” when you’re thirsting for more of whatever made that book so good, go ahead and tear through “Watchman” in a desperate, futile attempt to quench that thirst. Learn what “Mockingbird” was written to tell you: there is no return to that place you loved. Learn you will never quench it. Know you will die thirsty.
