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Mocking-bird or why I won’t be reading Go Set a Watchman

watchblueWhy I won’t be reading Go Set a Watchman.

I have been watching the reviews of Watchman and waiting for someone to call a spade a spade, but the first reviews were insipidly, mildly positive, only commenting on the shock to readers that Atticus Finch, now 72, has turned racist.

Anyone taking an interest in how the manuscript was ‘found’ and the present life of Harper Lee must have smelt a rat, or to use a current turn of phrase, it doesn’t pass the sniff test. We know that Harper Lee is elderly, deaf and with diminishing eyesight. We know she lives quietly in Monroeville, the town on which To Kill a Mockingbird’s Maycomb is based, and has lived there since the 60s. We know that Lee has not given interviews over the years and that Lee had a protective sister, Alice (a lawyer), who died last year.

We also know that the manuscript for Watchman was ‘found’ in a safety security box a few years ago along with Lee’s will.

It is also evident that had Harper Lee wanted to publish Watchman she could have done so at any time in the last 50 years and she would have then been able to rewrite, revise etc. Obviously, given that the depiction of Atticus (reportedly based on her father) would have been hurtful, she may have been loath to do so, yet, also obviously, she was prepared to publish in the late 50s when she presented the manuscript to a literary agent.

At the time of first writing Watchman Lee was living in New York – a young woman trying to make her way as a writer in the big smoke and, we can assume, attempting to break away from her roots in Monroeville at a time of the growing civil rights movement.

WatchorangeAfter the phenomenal success of Mockingbird, Lee retreated from public life and returned to live quietly in Alabama.

From all accounts Watchman is not a polished work but retains many of the hallmarks of a draft novel.

What writer would be happy to have a preliminary novel published without the chance to revise? It is also reported that Lee did not want anything changed on the manuscript.

One may ask oneself, who wins from this publication? Not Lee and her reputation as a novelist. She must already be a wealthy woman and so would not need the money. The novel reportedly is critical of Monroeville, albeit, in the 60s, yet Lee still lives there, and is now embroiled in the controversy that has arisen from the novel.

As they say, follow the money trail.

Of course a lot of people will read Watchman out of curiosity but if you are going to spend your money on a novel why, oh why, not spend it on the hundreds, thousands, of other brilliant novels out there by new, emerging or mid-career novelists. Yes, I know the argument that when multinational publishers (HarperCollins in this instance) have a bestseller, it fills their coffers and they can then support (take a punt on) new writers. I’ll counter that with, when a reader buys a book that is hyped up and they are then disappointed with it, they may not be willing to buy another.

I am not sorry that Watchman has been shown the light of day. It is important for literary scholars and, as many have said, it does give a fascinating insight into the antecedence of To Kill a Mockingbird and how rewriting and ‘re-envisaging’ can work so well.

The best review I have read so far is by Robert McCrum in The Guardian http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jul/19/go-set-watchman-harper-lee-review-literary-curiosity.

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Miss Timmins’ School for Girls – Nayana Currimbhoy

TimminsThis quite long novel set in India in the 1970s is an odd mixture of boarding school story, murder mystery and coming of age story of young, inexperienced teacher Charu but it doesn’t really follow the tropes of any of these genres.

Twenty something Charu who was born with a disfiguring birthmark on her face she calls a ‘blot’ takes a job teaching at a girls’ boarding school in Panchgani, a high scenic area a few hours out of Bombay. She is inexperienced but wins over some of the girls with her teaching of Macbeth, but soon she comes under the sway of a white teacher, Moira Prince, known to the girls as ‘the Prince’ or to Charu as Pin. Pin is wild and the girls steer clear of her but her freedom from convention is attractive to Charu, and she becomes involved with Pin and her friend Merch, a poetry reading, drug-taking man who lives an idle life above a dispensary in town, occasionally teaching at the school.

But no sooner do we get to know Pin, and she has started an affair with Charu, than the Prince is dead, seemingly murdered and thrown off a cliff. The rest of the novel is involved with solving this murder, in one way or another, but quite tangentially.

The middle section switches to the point of view of three of the school girls who were in the vicinity of the tragedy on that wet and windy monsoon night when it occurred. They saw something (including Charu running down from the spot) but are not sure what it all means. They begin investigating, and the main girl, Nandita, who has always liked Charu, is given a dangerous piece of evidence that will point the guilt in a particular direction.

In the last third of the novel we return to Charu’s point of view, the attempted suicide of her mother, and an old humiliation of her father that has diminished the family is revisited. We get to see Charu’s extended family, their meddling and their support, and the pressure put on women to conform. Meanwhile Charu returns to Panchgani and there are arrests and threatened violence, and nothing about the Prince’s death is as simple as it seemed.

All this makes it sound like it is a plot-driven novel but it’s not really. It’s really, I think, the author’s recollections of her own time at a girl’s boarding school and her exploration of how a person who doesn’t fit in, navigates her way around her family and society. What is wonderful about it, for a non-Indian, is a lovely insight into Indian culture that is a far cry from the stereotyped Raj or the gritty urban take on poverty and corruption. I loved the detail of the school still, in the 70s, run on British lines and the unspoken but evident divide between white and brown, the feel of the monsoon and the landscape, and the descriptions of food and family life. It’s a baggy, voluminous tale but the experience of another world is very enjoyable.