"Go Set a Watchman" by Harper Lee: Review and Analysis

In 1960 a tale of courage, racial injustice, and innocence lost by an unknown and unpublished female author from small town Alabama stormed its way to literary greatness. Nelle Lee, writing under her middle name Harper in the voice of 6-8 year old Jean Louise "Scout" Finch, won a 1961 Pulitzer Prize for To Kill a Mockingbird. One year after its publication, To Kill a Mockingbird had been translated into ten languages and two years later was the source for an Oscar-winning film adaptation starring Gregory Peck. Tens of millions of copies have been sold since then and the book - which has never been out of print - has been translated into over 40 languages. In 2007, Harper Lee was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honour in the United States, by President George W. Bush. Without a doubt, To Kill a Mockingbird and the story of its success breathes true meaning into painfully overused descriptors of the present day like "classic" and "phenomenon". All the more astonishing, after the runaway success of her first published novel Lee withdrew from the public eye, granted few interviews, and published no books. Until this year.

Go Set a Watchman begins after the United States Supreme Court has ruled in the case of Brown vs. the Board of Education (1954) that state laws establishing separate public schools for black and white students are unconstitutional, thereby paving the way for racial integration in the nation's schools. The comfort and quality of life for American black people in general is improving, or so it would seem to 26 year old Jean Louise Finch who for the first time sees TV antennas on the roofs of their houses as she takes the train to Maycomb, Alabama. Twenty years after the events in To Kill a Mockingbird, Jean Louise has left her home of five years in New York to make an annual visit to the town in which she was raised and to the man who raised her and her now-deceased brother Jem, an ageing Atticus Finch. Atticus continues to practice law, even as he suffers from at times debilitating arthritis. He is assisted at home by his sister Alexandra and at work by Henry "Hank" Clinton, long-time neighbour and Jean Louise's love-interest. Or disinterest. He would like her to be interested but she can't make up her mind.

The book, which unlike To Kill a Mockingbird is written in the third person, follows Jean Louise as she spends time with her family, goes out with Henry, attends church, and reminisces about her childhood. The story starts at a slow but steady pace, and provides what is at first an entertaining glimpse into the culture and characters of Jean Louise's world. Like a steam train though, the tale picks up speed and swiftly turns sinister.

Jean Louise's first Sunday back in Maycomb begins normally enough. She reconnects with her eccentric Uncle Jack. She attends Sunday School at the Methodist Church and laughs off some gossip about her and Hank that has scandalised a group of church ladies. She shares the congregation's disdain for an Anglican-sounding arrangement of the Doxology and makes an effort to listen to Mr. Stone's droning sermon from Isaiah 21:6 but is distracted by angry thoughts about the director of music. So far, so good. After dinner Atticus and Hank leave for a meeting at the courthouse, and Jean Louise finds a curious looking pamphlet entitled The Black Plague. It is about people, not a disease. Black people.

Jean Louise is disgusted that her father would allow such reading material into the house, and is appalled to find out that the meeting Atticus is attending with Hank that afternoon is that of a Citizens' Council. The book assumes a knowledge of such things on the part of the reader, but for the unaware and uninformed Citizens' Councils were a network of white supremacist organisations founded to 'protect' states rights and racial 'integrity' by campaigning against the integration of schools and more general desegregation. Worse still, Aunt Alexandra informs Jean Louise that her father is on the Council's board of directors.

In denial, Jean Louise rushes off to the courthouse. Fans of To Kill a Mockingbird will enjoy a certain nostalgia as she enters the courtroom where she often watched her father and takes her old seat in the balcony for 'Colored' people. They will be less exited by what she sees there. In a room packed with a mixture of 'white trash' and the most respected men in the county, two of the staunchest members of the Council appear to be the two men she loves most in the world, Atticus and Hank. Atticus introduces the guest speaker, a Mr. O'Hanlon and the reader is treated to disconnected snippets of his rambling, incredibly foul, stomach-churning address. At this point a sickened Jean Louise's thoughts fade into the past, to a time when her father defended a one armed black man falsely accused of raping a white woman. The case is different from that in To Kill a Mockingbird: Atticus won this time, at great personal risk. "Equal rights for all, special privileges for none" had been his creed, yet now Jean Louise sees him condoning "a man who spewed filth from his mouth." She flees the courthouse utterly devastated.

The remainder of the book is defined by Jean Louise's mental wrestling with what she saw and heard in the courthouse, and what it means - particularly for her. The common theme of identity is dealt with at multiple levels as Jean Louise struggles with disillusionment and denial, and tries to reach some resolution. Belonging, behaviour, and belief are all called into question.

Jean Louise doesn't know where she belongs, or with whom. Hank is a hypocrite at best, participating in racist meetings to be accepted by, advance in, and better influence society. In his old age, Atticus, like many men of his day didn't have a personal problem with black people, showed them respect, and did what he could to help them - so long as they didn't disrupt the familiar comfort of his world. Now that the federal government has gotten involved and the Supreme Court is telling the states what to do, things begin to move too fast for Atticus, whose knee-jerk reaction has led him to now ask questions like "Do you want Negroes by the carload in our schools and churches and theatres? Do you want them in our world?" The answer he anticipates is "no." Aunt Alexandra is hostile toward Jean Louise and supportive of her brother and his involvement in the Council. The young women who attend a coffee morning at the Finch house are insufferably insular and racist. Uncle Jack, who is the only man in Jean Louise's life not at the meeting in the courthouse, doesn't make sense to her when she initially seeks his advice. And she doesn't feel much more welcome in the black part of town: the old family maid Calpurnia who lovingly raised Scout in the absence of a mother now seems cold, distant, untrusting, and embittered. There seems to be no place for Jean Louise, at least not in Maycomb.

Furthermore, Jean Louise doesn't know how to behave. Everything she learned about human decency came from her father, but he himself has devolved to a level far below the standard of love, integrity, respect, and equality he set for his children. Jean Louise is confused that "the man who could not be discourteous to a ground-squirrel had sat in the courthouse abetting the cause of grubby-minded little men." What does this mean for her? Will she ever be able to speak respectfully to and love her father again? Should she end her relationship with Hank? Should she leave Maycomb early and never come back? Or could it be that she is the one in the wrong, that the problem is with her and everyone around her is normal?

Finally, Jean Louise is not sure what she believes. In theory, she supports the idea of states rights to a degree that on one level exceeds that of her father. She is angered that the Supreme Court took the matter of school integration into its hands and that the federal government in Washington is interfering in the complex business of the states. She is also frightened by the implications this could have for law making in the future. In practice though, Jean Louise supports the decision of the court and recognises that they had no choice but to do it eventually. Trying to explain her seeming inconsistency to Atticus, she says "The time has come when we've got to do right." At a less political and more spiritual level, she wonders again if the problem is with her and not the shameless hypocrites around her, that maybe they are in fact Christians as they claim and she is the one who is not. After all, Mr. O'Hanlon said things about preaching the gospel and warned against twisting it in his speech at the Council. "Why doesn't their flesh creep? How can they devoutly believe everything they hear in church and then say the things they do and listen to the things they hear without throwing up?", she ponders.

Jean Louise has no choice but to eventually confront her father. Their conversation begins with a somewhat wooden, slightly forced discussion of political theory that accelerates into Jean Louise's stirring, but somewhat messy, emotional meltdown in front of the progressively silent, measured stability of Atticus. Although right, she is broken, because her idol has been destroyed. She deified her father as someone who could do no wrong, who was immutably consistent, strong, and uncompromising, a man of integrity who treated all with equality. Uncle Jack tells her that "every man's watchman is his conscience", and Jean Louise's conscience was undoubtedly her once-wise father. Only by coming to terms with his imperfections and freeing herself from the controlling influence he has over her emotions is she truly able to think, speak, and act for herself and so to grow up. She, and the reader, might briefly see him as a demon, but the book concludes with Jean Louise and Atticus's reconciliation, a statement of his pride in her for standing firm on what is right, and her acceptance of him not as a god or a demon, but simply a human.

Perhaps had Go Set a Watchman been published closer to the time in which it was written, its impact and importance would be more keenly felt. The book is, nevertheless, itself a watchman of its own - not into the future, but into the past with a message for the present. Like Isaiah's watchman (Isaiah 21:6) and Jean Louise's liberated conscience, it proclaims what it sees and what it sees is not always pretty but it leads to redemption and healing; In its vision of a broken society, there remains the beauty of the Saviour. Jean Louise knows that as a child, Atticus did not teach her "that Jesus loved all mankind, but there are different kinds of men with separate fences around 'em." Only that Jesus loved all mankind. And while she throws it angrily in Atticus's face to spite him, it is precisely that gospel reality that makes her ultimate forgiveness of her racist father every bit as acceptable as his one time love for and defence of an allegedly criminal black man in a town of white supremacists.

Go Set a Watchman was the manuscript that Lee originally presented to her publisher in 1957. She was sent back to the typewriter to completely re-craft her concept into what became To Kill a Mockingbird. One would be wrong though to disregard Go Set a Watchman as merely a throw-away first draft, an interesting case study in writing and the editorial process that should exist only as a filed away and forgotten relic in a university library. Go Set a Watchman tells its own story in its own style with a message that complements rather than contradicts that of its editorial descendant and chronological ancestor. It is neither To Kill a Mockingbird's inferior or superior, but its companion. Go Set a Watchman maturely grapples with serious themes of race, politics, hatred and hurt, right and wrong, parent/child relationships, identity, hypocrisy, and disillusionment, woven through a bitter-sweet redemptively iconoclastic tale of humanity and growing up.