There is something quite romantic about creating a beautiful piece of art and then refusing to create anything else.
This appeared to be what Harper Lee had done with To Kill a Mockingbird until recently. The 89 year old author’s second published novel has had some controversy surrounding the circumstances of getting it published. It has been claimed that she is being taken advantage of in her old age to go back on her promise to not publish any other work.
The sequel, Go Set a Watchman, was actually written prior to To Kill a Mockingbird when Lee was asked by her editor to write something about the earlier lives of her characters.
It seems that this release could have done with a bit of editing prior to release. Not only are there obvious errors (such as constantly switching a gender of a teacher) but blatant inconsistencies with Mockingbird – most notably the outcome of Tom Robinson’s trial which is mentioned in passing.
Whilst it could be claimed that you shouldn’t be reading it as a sequel as such, it is difficult not to do so when the book contains the same cast of characters along with elements of a shared universe, and this is probably something that HarperCollins should have addressed before letting the book loose in the big wide world.
Whilst the theme of race relations is central to Watchman’s narrative, the elements of Mockingbird that made it so engrossing – the trial, the events afterwards involving Bob Ewell and the qualities of Atticus Finch as a good man in a bad world – are all missing.
Whilst the book is enjoyable in general, I can’t help but feel that where it not be for Mockingbird, this book would never have been released and is not even in the same ballpark in terms of quality and emotional depth.