Future tense

There has been much anguish over the publication of Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman , including the serious ethical concern that the partially deaf and blind, near-nonagenarian Lee was in no shape to condone the publication of what was in effect a first draft of To Kill a Mockingbird . However, after reading the novel I was grateful that it had been published. Go Set a Watchman , from its obscure Biblical title through 280 pages of uneven, uncomfortable prose, is no classic. It is in every way inferior to its polished predecessor (successor?). To Kill a Mockingbird was wrought from the ruined clay of Go Set a Watchman , with Lee encouraged by her perspicacious editor to revise the manuscript to reflect more of her protagonist’s early recollections of life in Maycomb, Alabama. The result was an indelible fable of a sheltered small-town childhood, narrated in part by a precocious six-year-old girl, alongside the story of a trial that laid bare this idyllic small town’s bigotry, its murderous hatred of the black people it once kept as slaves.

Standing undaunted against the mobs is the girl’s father, Atticus Finch, a lawyer assigned to defend a black man falsely accused of raping a white woman. Before the law, Atticus believes, all men are equal. This paragon of integrity, of rectitude, was further marmorealised in an Oscar-winning performance by Gregory Peck, square and handsomely earnest (or earnestly handsome) as he implores a white jury to set an innocent man free. Atticus fails, of course, as he must if only to allow a scene in both book and film in which the town’s black people rise in respect for his noble failure.

For readers who remember Atticus as a saint, the revelation that he might be a racist is naturally a kind of blasphemy. Perhaps, to approve of Go Set a Watchman , in which Atticus is indeed revealed to harbour white supremacist sympathies, you need to not have read To Kill a Mockingbird in your youth. I did, but I was unmoved, finding Atticus dull and homiletic and Scout’s precocity irritating. In English class that year, I must have been about 14, we also read Alan Paton’s Cry, The Beloved Country and watched the 1951 film adaptation. I remember our teacher, a slight, well-meaning Canadian, admitting that he felt ashamed of his whiteness. His showy self-flagellation ingrained in me a lifelong prejudice against both novels. Paton, maybe, deserves better but I remain unconvinced that Lee does. To Kill a Mockingbird , by so loading the dice, by so deifying Atticus, makes it easy for the reader to indulge, as my teacher did, in the faux mortification that is really a pat on the back for having moved on from those ignorant days to the enlightenment of the present.

Go Set a Watchman may not be as evocative, as vivid as To Kill A Mockingbird but neither is it sentimental. The reader will shed no cosy tears. And for that alone, Go Set a Watchman is the more interesting, if not better constructed, novel.

It is set in the mid-1950s, a couple of decades on from To Kill a Mockingbird , just after the US Supreme Court ruled that segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. Jean Louise (or Scout) catches a train back to Maycomb from New York City for a fortnight’s holiday. Now 26, she finds herself in a place familiar to anyone who has ever left home, at once alienated and nostalgic. We need for our home to remain fixed; that it does not, just as we do not, is tragic.

The most lyrical passages in Go Set a Watchman are when Scout recalls her childhood in Maycomb, her brother Jem, her friends Dill and Henry Clinton, and when she finds “a delight almost physical” in the landscape, the gently undulating pastureland, the black cows, the “red earth... and with it tin-roofed houses set in the middle of swept yards”. The rural grace, Jem and Dill, Calpurnia and Atticus are already familiar from To Kill a Mockingbird . Despite Go Set a Watchman apparently being written earlier, it is difficult to imagine reading this book without having read To Kill a Mockingbird , without already being familiar with Maycomb. Henry Clinton though is new, a childhood friend whom Scout is considering as a potential husband. For a 100 pages the novel meanders through a series of amusing set pieces, through Scout’s memories, her flirting with Henry, her mild ribbing of her conventional, literally corseted aunt.

In chapter eight, she discovers a pamphlet on her father’s desk: “On its cover was a drawing of an anthropophagous Negro; above the drawing was printed The Black Plague.” Sickened, again literally, by what Scout interprets as her heroic father’s betrayal of his principles, she finds Atticus and Henry at a council meeting, a sort of panchayat populated by men fearful of the future. From here the novel unravels into hysterical speechifying (Scout) and evasive casuistry (everyone else — Atticus, Henry, an uncle devoted to Victorian literature). But it is in these inchoate pages that Go Set a Watchman becomes something special, something unbeautiful.

To Kill a Mockingbird was so fully realised a novel, so perfectly modulated to create its effects, that it was cloying. In Go Set a Watchman , Atticus is revealed to be what he is — a well-born Southern gentleman loath to give up his world as he’s always known it. Scout, too, for all her humanist protestations, shares her father’s attachment to the trappings of birth. In the novel’s finest scene, she visits Calpurnia, her old nanny, to discover that love cannot transcend power and privilege, that the woman she took to be a surrogate mother was an employee doing her job.

In any case, black people, living, breathing black people, are beside the point in both books. Essentially, these are novels about fathers and daughters. Race relations, however large they loom over both novels, were always ‘incidental’, as Scout realises, “to the issue... your own private war”. Realising that your father is just a man, weak, contradictory, fallible, and finding room in your heart for that diminished figure is called growing up. Who better than Harper Lee to remind fans of To Kill a Mockingbird that Atticus Finch, like Santa Claus, doesn’t exist.

S hougat Dasguptais a Delhi-based journalist

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