A review of Go Set a Watchman by Harper Lee

My hopes for this book were actually fairly low; I wasn't expecting to be knocked off my feet as I was by To Kill a Mockingbird. Unfortunately, I nevertheless found myself disappointed with Go Set a Watchman.

The book was marketed as a sequel but, in reality, it's pretty much an earlier draft of Mockingbird. Rediscovered in the last year, it seems to have been published as it was found, with little or no revision. As such, there are many inconsistencies with the original book, including the outcome and significance of Tom Robinson's trial. Because of this, the book is less a sequel than it is a reflection and examination of Mockingbird's themes from a different perspective.

I knew all this going in. I knew how the character of Atticus was going to be portrayed, I knew the novel was going to have a far less optimistic tone than that of Mockingbird. Going into Watchman I was hoping for an alternate story that would serve to compliment and shed new light on Mockingbird, which remains one of my all time favourite books.

In part, Go Set a Watchman succeeds: it sheds new light on the characters and themes of Mockingbird, challenging them and revealing a way things could have been. Unfortunately, the manner in which it goes about doing so is incredibly clumsy. Go Set a Watchman reads like a first draft. The messages are delivered rather ham-handedly; the subtelty and elegance that made Mockingbird so powerful is almost entirely lost. Characters progress in haphazard ways, and there are stretches of incredibly stunted dialogue, not to mention pages and pages of poor writing.

All of these problems can be owed to the fact it is an early draft. But, then, that's the biggest problem with the book: a first draft should never be published without extreme revision, all the more so if it's going to be held up against a book like To Kill a Mockingbird.

I knew before I started it that the novel would lack one of Mockingbird's finest aspects: a young, idealistic Scout as the lead character with an older, retrospective Scout as narrator. Unfortunately, I don't think I was prepared for how much that absence would reflect on the quality of the story. I think, perhaps, that To Kill a Mockingbird succeeded only because of that character and narration, the window through which the story and its universal themes are viewed. With this in mind, Go Set a Watchman was always doomed to fail.

That being said, there were a few very enjoyable and very insightful passages, particularly during the last third of the book. Jean Louise's conversations with her uncle and her angry tirade against her father were quite powerful.

Overall, Go Set a Watchman was not a bad book. Unfortunately, it lives under the shadow of it's predecessor. If Go Set a Watchman had been published independent of that shadow, I might have enjoyed it more, though I doubt I would have loved it. People were worried the book might shatter their image of To Kill a Mockingbird, but the simple fact is that Go Set a Watchman is neither well written enough, nor consistent enough with the original book, to be capable of such a feat.

If you're interested, I just found this article that sums up some of my thoughts surrounding the book's quality and the circumstances of its publishing. Worth a read. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/25/opinion/joe-nocera-the-watchman-fraud.html?_r=0

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