The world of modern commercial fiction reminds me of Hollywood in the 1980s. Thanks to the success of Harry Potter and Game of Thrones, publishers have become obsessed with sequels. The idea of a standalone novel has become anathema to them. The few publishers that accept unsolicited manuscripts often want to know if a submitted novel is one of a planned series.
That attitude is all well and good if an author has conceived a multi-part epic from the outset, but there has been a disturbing trend in recent years for writers to pen ‘sequels’ to some of their most beloved novels a generation later. Stephen King, for example, released a sequel to The Shining (which often rates among his top three books in reader polls) more than 30 years after the original, and the result – Doctor Sleep – was an absolute disaster. King tried to blame unfavourable reader reaction on nostalgia, but he was deluding himself. Doctor Sleep wasn’t half the book The Shining was, by any measure.
So when I heard there would be a sequel to one of my all-time favourite books, To Kill a Mockingbird, I was both excited and apprehensive. Go Set a Watchman, I thought, would either be a second volume of one of the great tales of 20th century literature, or it would sully that book’s legacy forever.
It proved to be more the latter than the former, although it is far from the appalling mess that was Doctor Sleep.
There is little plot to speak of in Go Set a Watchman. Jean Louise (aka ‘Scout’) Finch is now in her mid twenties and living in New York. She visits her home town in Maycomb, Alabama, and discovers things have changed. The civil rights movement is in full swing and the status quo (or, more accurately, lopsided equilibrium) that has existed between black and white folks has been cast into disarray. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) has been clamouring for equal rights in the south and many of the old timers in Maycomb are more than a little unsettled by the whole business.
When Scout attends a town meeting and sees the father she has idolised for twenty years, and her potential husband-to-be, among those listening to an old white man spout off about ‘uppity niggers’, her whole world comes crashing down. Has Maycomb changed, or was the ‘colour blind’ Jean Louise also blind to its rampant bigotry? Could Atticus really be a racist and a hypocrite?
The prose in Go Set a Watchman is, of course, exquisite. Harper Lee is among the finest in a long succession of fine authors to emerge from America’s south. She has a keen insight into humanity’s moral and social clockwork and I was especially impressed with this metaphor, which in many ways sums up the central theme of Go Set a Watchman: I guess it’s like an airplane: they’re the drag and we’re the thrust, together we make the thing fly. Too much of us and we’re nose-heavy, too much of them and we’re tail-heavy – it’s a matter of balance.
So the novel succeeds as social commentary; as a story much less so. Great literature should serve both purposes, and those novels that neglect either will never, in my opinion, be great. Mockingbird got the balance just right. Watchman often feels more like a lecture or a play (in two instances, there are pages and pages of argumentative, intellectual discourse that only someone who belongs to the upper echelons of the literati could believe sounds like real-life dialogue), and there are slabs of expository back story that rapidly become tiresome.
What Scout discovers in the course of the novel – about herself and about the world – is that saints aren’t always good people and good people aren’t always saints. She also learns that change might be worthwhile, even necessary, but it will also shatter what is familiar – and being fearful of that destruction doesn’t make a person evil. But she is so self-righteous and self-pitying in acquiring this wisdom that she is difficult to like. That’s is not what you want from a main character.
It doesn’t help, either, that the reader is given almost no information about her life in New York, which means her motivations are and point of view are hazy. It’s really only in one condescending speech towards the end of the book that we get some clue as to why Maycomb seems like such a cultural backwater to the more world-wise Scout.
Go Set a Watchman comes across as a potentially great novel in need of a serious rewrite. But since that was never going to happen, perhaps the publishers in charge of Harper Lee’s book could have had the decency to let it be lost to antiquity. It’s by no means terrible, but it does nothing to improve a great author’s literary legacy.