Harper Lee’s ‘Go Set A Watchman’ Is Already Dividing The Critics

This piece contains spoilers for Harper Lee’s forthcoming novel, Go Set A Watchman.

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This week, Harper Lee’s controversial follow-up to To Kill A Mockingbird, Go Set A Watchman, will be released, ending a long debate about whether it should have been published in the first place.

To drum up buzz, the first chapter has been released across a variety of publications, all owning it as ‘exclusive’; you can read it in Fairfax’s Saturday supplements, or over at The Guardian, where it’s been presented as an interactive, replete with animated train graphics, ‘ambient sound’, and Reese Witherspoon reading it to you.

There's every chance your news organisation doesn't have "exclusive" extracts from Harper Lee's book.

— Tom McIlroy (@TomMcIlroy) July 10, 2015

The novel was written before To Kill A Mockingbird, but takes place 20 years after the events of that book, with Scout now a 26-year-old women returning to the South from her home in New York. (Lee’s editors asked her to focus on Scout’s childhood instead, and thus Mockingbird was born).

For fans of the book, there’s something comforting about the first chapter. It only takes a couple of paragraphs for you to be completely enveloped in the rhythm of Harper Lee’s words once again, gently rocking you like the train Scout is riding on her way home to Maycomb. Lee’s writing has always had bite though, using cosy, pretty language to convey horrible truths — announcing without much fanfare, for instance, that Jem “dropped dead in his tracks one day”. Jem! :(

But the main sticking point for critics (and Mockingbird fans who haven’t read the book yet) has been the revelation that Atticus Finch, once a crusader for civil rights, is now an old racist.

In New York Times’ review, Alexandra Alter describes Atticus as “an aging racist who has attended a Ku Klux Klan meeting, holds negative views about African-Americans and denounces desegregation efforts. ‘Do you want Negroes by the carload in our schools and churches and theaters? Do you want them in our world?’ Atticus asks his daughter, Jean Louise”.

As you can imagine, this revelation has left people pretty upset.

So before you chuck in your pre-order, here are what some critics have been saying about Go Set A Watchman:

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Wall Street Journal: “Go Set a Watchman is a distressing book, one that delivers a startling rebuttal to the shining idealism of To Kill a Mockingbird. This story is of the toppling of idols; its major theme is disillusion.”

Time: “Watchman is more successful as an amplification of characters it shares with Mockingbird, where they are better-developed. Watchman is both a painful complication of Harper Lee’s beloved book and a confirmation that a novel read widely by schoolchildren is far more bitter than sweet.”

Slate: “All I can say from this excerpt is that Lee’s delicious mode of understated deflation—an undermining bent redeemed and warmed up by a sense of humor—is such a pleasure to encounter again. Next chapter, please!”

Los Angeles Times: “Most interesting, however, is the glimpse it offers of Jean Louise as an adult, her desire to stake out a territory of her own.It is difficult, knowing the history of both this novel and its author, not to read those longings as belonging to Lee herself, the reasons for her own long New York exile, her silence in the wake of To Kill a Mockingbird. That, too, raises questions we can never answer, about why Go Set a Watchman is being published now.”

New York Times: “How did a story about the discovery of evil views in a revered parent turn into a universal parable about the loss of innocence — both the inevitable loss of innocence that children experience in becoming aware of the complexities of grown-up life and a cruel world’s destruction of innocence…The depiction of Atticus in Watchman makes for disturbing reading, and for Mockingbird fans, it’s especially disorienting.”

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Go Set A Watchman will be released on July 14.