
This is a tricky one; let’s ease into it by talking about the quality of the writing, which is, at best, inconsistent. Some reviews have given positive notice to the chapter recounting the morning tea (called a “coffee”) given for Jean Louise on her return to Maycombe, and it is pretty well done. On the other hand, some sections appear to have undergone no editing at all after being spewed out by the author in one sitting. Following a particularly clunky passage, I found myself thinking, “this reads like juvenilia”, and suddenly realised I had found the key to how to think about this novel. It’s the first go round of a woman who became a good writer, but wasn’t yet. The characters are studies for a later novel that was good, but shouldn’t be thought of as continuations of the same people. The characters underwent development; they were fleshed out; aspects were discarded and others enlarged upon. The two books do not, in other words, occupy a continuum. After all, Jane Austen published six novels (two posthumously); we also have works like “Love and Friendship”, but nobody makes the mistake of treating them like canon.
The most discomforting part of the novel is the race aspect. I’m aware that even being able to think of it in terms of “comfort” is a reflection of my overwhelming white privilege: for others, racism in Alabama in the 50s (or, indeed, today) was and is a life-and-death matter. In order to talk through my feelings about this aspect of the book, it’s necessary to revisit Mockingbird briefly. If you ask 100 high school English teachers, at least 99 of them will say they teach it as a book about race, but I think that’s an overly simplistic, not to say incorrect, approach. Both Mockingbird and Watchman are, essentially, books about white people. Because those white people interact in a racially-charged environment, themes of racism creep in. But they’re not primarily about race, because it’s impossible to be a white person and write a book about race in which no major character is non-white. You might think you have a book about race, but you’re wrong. What you have is a book about white people.
Mockingbird, at its heart, was a coming-of-age story about Jem. Read it again and think about the ways in which, through the uncomprehending eyes of Scout as narrated by an adult Jean Louise, we see Jem coming into a world of knowledge about adult behaviours and motivations. I honestly believe that Mockingbird, in this respect, is almost a perfect novel. It’s miraculous. Jem lives in a world of racism, and part of the knowledge that he gradually acquires over the course of the novel is the knowledge of who he is, as a man required to respond to a racist environment. That’s what I take from it. But then, I’m white, and I take from the novel what I bring to it. As Papa Barthes taught us, the text, ultimately, is opaque.
Watchman has, in fact, almost an identical theme. It’s a book about a grown woman who is suddenly forced into the realisation that she’s still a child at heart when it comes to her relationship with Atticus, and is forced to grow up. In order for her to have that realisation, Atticus has to reveal his clay feet; in this case, his failing is his part in a movement resisting desegregation. It’s at this point that things start to fall apart, because I’m not sure it was strictly necessary to have Atticus participate in racist activities in order to kill Jean Louise’s idols. The denouement is a series of confrontations between Jean Louise and her relatives about the Supreme Court decision in Brown v Board of Education (that is, the desegregation of schools) and the appropriate response of the Southern state and local authorities. From a strictly narrative perspective, it’s not much of a climax compared to the assault at the end of Mockingbird; as a reading experience, it’s…it’s just terrible. I can accept that the Southern restoration following the civil war was brutal, and that it’s still in the living memory of some of the characters, but guess what? That’s what happens when your economy is based on owning people. Will desegregation require a similar adjustment period and result in the loss of a chunk of Southern culture? Yes. Because that’s what happens when you have a shitty culture. To a modern audience, it’s unconvincing, and even putting aside (if that’s possible) all the things that it’s simply unacceptable to say or think, large chunks of the conversations the characters have just don’t make sense. At their best, they read like disingenuous sophistry. I can’t honestly believe that anyone took a red pencil to it at any point in the last sixty years. Even Jean Louise, who is supposed to be the voice of liberal enlightenment, is hung up on the activism of the Supreme Court and its trespass on states’ rights. For a non-lawyer who is also a non-racist, that’s a weird and specific attitude to have, and I can’t see that it serves any narrative purpose. Get it together, Harper.
Ultimately, my attitude to this novel is that it’s not great, serves no real purpose other than as a series of studies for a later, better book, and above all that its publication now, at this time, was a terrible, terrible idea. Right at the moment when the confederate flag is being removed from public buildings across the South, Heinemanns pushes this regressive bullshit into the public sphere? There can be no reason to do it that isn’t based solely on dollar signs lighting up their eyes.
Read it if you want to. I was worried that doing so would reduce Mockingbird for me, but surprisingly it didn’t have that effect: I think this novel is so obviously inferior and disparate as a reading experience that I have no problem separating the two in my mind.
Try not to pay for it, though.