![]() To thicken the intrigue, it has transpired that Go Set a Watchman isn't actually a sequel at all: it was actually written first. If another writer had decided to take on a Mockingbird "sequel" – in much the same way as William Boyd attempted with Ian Fleming's James Bond series – and made Atticus an old racist, they would have been accused of literary libel at best and, at worst, in modern parlance, of trolling an audience eager to see what became of the Finches of Maycomb County.īut it's the fact that Lee herself has given Atticus shocking lines such as "you realise that our Negro population is backward, don't you? You will concede that?" that will be incredibly troublesome to anyone who took Mockingbird to their hearts. For everyone else, it's the set text on heroism, idealism, fatherhood and justice. To Kill A Mockingbird, rightly, has become – as Oprah Winfrey put it – America's "national novel". This from someone who has been held up for more than 50 years as, perhaps, the man of principle in modern literature, who in To Kill A Mockingbird defends a black man falsely accused of raping a white woman in hate-filled 1930s Alabama. ![]() "Do you want Negroes by the carload in our schools and churches and theatres?" he asks, not out of spite, but genuine conviction. ![]() ![]() ![]() Of all the heartbreaking lines in Harper Lee's "new" novel, Go Set a Watchman, it's a question the now elderly, arthritis-ridden Atticus Finch poses to his daughter, Scout, that really cuts to the quick. ![]()
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