First off, I want to make two points clear. One is perhaps fairly obvious: don’t read Go Set a Watchman if you haven’t already read To Kill a Mockingbird; you will be bored out of your mind. The second is that I do not recommend this book to anyone who treasures their images and memories of the characters in Mockingbird. If you do wish to read Watchman, it’s best to proceed with patience and an open mind.
Go Set a Watchman is not actually a belated sequel to Mockingbird—it is the manuscript for Mockingbird’s first draft. Harper Lee, now 89 years old, nearly blind and deaf, and confined to assisted living, had apparently consented to publish this manuscript (having previously stated that she would never publish another book) after her longtime guardian, Alice Lee, died.
If the situation is scrutinized, it looks rather like a case of exploitation and elder abuse on the part of HarperCollins: several investigations were launched in April 2015, but Lee was found “capable of giving consent.” The company denied all accusations.
Still, there were numerous boycotts and petitions against the publishing of Go Set a Watchman, and one bookstore in Michigan—Brilliant Books—began offering full refunds for it after receiving a complaint from a long-time customer that the novel was not as advertised. The controversy surrounding Watchman may compel some to avoid reading it purely on an ethical standpoint, and I can’t blame those who do so.
The book itself is not poorly written per se, but definitely reads like an unpolished and unedited work. It is best divided into two halves, both of which have a fatal flaw—the first half, constituting about 140 pages, has literally no plot whatsoever.
The grown-up heroine, Jean Louise Finch (formerly known as Scout), had been living in New York City, and the novel begins by describing her return to her hometown of Maycomb, Alabama. Upon her return, she walks around, talks to some people, walks around some more, and talks to some more people, all the while with embarrassingly unrealistic dialogue. Uh, ok.
The book also has a habit of randomly time-skipping back to when Jean Louise was still Scout, the kid we all knew; those scenes actually have some of the best writing in the novel and make me wonder why the whole book wasn’t written from that perspective (oh wait).
Once the reader plows through the somewhat pointless exposition, though, the second half of the novel kicks in, and this part just hurts. All the beloved characters of Mockingbird are revealed to have changed drastically in the twenty years since we first met them—Atticus and his sister Alexandra are both revealed to be racists, Calpurnia is disillusioned and isolated, even Jean Louise’s boyfriend Henry (who was not, incidentally, in Mockingbird) is a white supremacist.
Even having been informed beforehand that this was the case, I was still shocked. “Do you want Negroes by the carload in our schools and churches and theaters? Do you want them in our world?” Atticus asks Jean Louise. This is the same man who staunchly defends the black man for justice in Mockingbird, who is sneered at by vituperative whites as a Negro sympathizer but idolized by his family and peers.
What’s even worse is that this shock value is the only memorable part of Watchman. The flashback scenes are well-written, sure, but those belong more in Mockingbird and make the pacing of this novel awkward. Atticus is so difficult to sympathize with after reading the things he says that it makes one wonder how exactly Lee expected first-time readers to do so, like Jean Louise does in the end, while writing her manuscript; only after reading Mockingbird does one feel any such inclination despite the fact that the Atticus there is essentially a different person altogether from the Atticus in Watchman.
And yet, Watchman is hardly even a finished novel without the companionship of Mockingbird. I have to admit I did enjoy the second half of the novel by itself, connecting the characters to Mockingbird while simultaneously treating Watchman as a separate entity. But it’s not worth the moral and spiritual cost. If you must read the novel, keep your expectations low and an objective viewpoint, and you may not end up too disappointed.