Sunday, February 08, 2015

Why To Kill a Mockingbird is overrated

Mockingbird’s ‘sequel’ Go Set a Watchman was written first so it might be truer to Harper Lee’s original vision

Gregory Peck and Mary Badham in <To Kill a Mockingbird>
Mary Badham as the young Scout and Gregory Peck as Atticus in To Kill a Mockingbird. Photograph: Corbis
On Tuesday, I came out of a meeting to find a barrage of messages with the news that Harper Lee has written a sequel to her classic 1960 novel To Kill a Mockingbird and will be publishing it this summer. To say that I was startled would be putting it mildly; it was simply astonishing news. The novel’s many fans had long inured themselves to Lee’s seemingly irreversible decision not to write another novel. Her pen simply “froze”, Lee once declared, after the maelstrom of publicity and praise Mockingbird received, and she firmly rejected her loving, demanding audience’s repeated efforts to interview her or persuade her to write something more.

Then I saw the title of the “new” novel and realised that nothing had changed: Lee has not suddenly caved in to our desires and produced a sequel to Mockingbird at the age of 88. Scholars have long known of an earlier draft of Mockingbird called Go Set a Watchman (and at least one other title, if not another draft, called Atticus), and it is this book that will be published in the summer.

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