Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

The short version of this review is: if nothing else, Go Set A Watchman, especially when compared to the brilliance of To Kill A Mockingbird, is a testament to the power of a good editor. Watchman is told from the perspective of an adult Jean Louise (Scout) on her annual family visit to Maycomb from New York. Some passages and characters are familiar: the questionable circumstances regarding the establishment of Maycomb; Aunty’s intimate knowledge of every family (and family foible) in the county; Dill, Jem, Calpurnia, and, of course, Atticus in the courtroom. And there are flashes of Lee’s sly humor and ability to paint a vivid portrait of someone or something in one sentence: “He was a big, good man with a soft baritone, who ruled with easy tact a choir of repressed soloists, and who had an unerring memory for the favorite hymns of District Superintendents”. Yet it is the unfamiliar behavior of these familiar characters that will be startling to most readers of Mockingbird: Jean Louise confronts a Maycomb seething with tension as the civil rights movement gains momentum and the people she loves most in the world seem to be standing on the wrong side of history. The main problem with Watchman isn’t that it profanes the memory of beloved literary characters. The bigger issue is that it is a sluggish read: the ‘contemporary’ passages in particular, are not that compelling. Scout’s childhood flashbacks and the sketches of small-town Southern life were often more interesting than the racial melodrama or adult-parent coming of age story central to the book, and much of the contemporary dialogue – particularly in the later chapters – was either clunky or overly complicated. By the time the reader arrives at the climax, any interest in or feeling for these characters stems primarily from how we remember them in the past (via Mockingbird) rather than how we are introduced to them in Watchman. Lest this sound too negative, perhaps the most interesting aspect of Watchman lies in seeing glimmers of how it evolved into Mockingbird. Given that the highlights of Watchman were the flashback scenes and asides about small-town life, it is not surprising that this is the direction Harper Lee’s editor(s?) encouraged her to take in rewriting her manuscript. Although there is nothing in Watchman that compares to, say, Scout’s brief theater career as a ham, I can also see how an editor would take great interest in this young author, but not necessarily be interested in this particular book. That said, this is where the (still somewhat murky) way the book was published is a liability: often when the unpublished works of major authors are published (posthumously), they are also contextualized by scholars that unearth letters and interviews in order to piece together the editorial process. Given that almost nobody will read this book without having read Mockingbird – indeed, I doubt this book would have been published at all if it was not tied to Lee’s earlier work – I think the publishers did readers an incredible disservice by not contextualizing the book more. Hopefully future editions will include an introduction that details the evolution of Watchman into Mockingbird, but the fact that it does not invites further questions about how and why Watchman was published at this point in time. To conclude, Watchman is not a great book on its own. It is a promising early work, which clearly benefited from an editorial process that managed not only to tighten the story while adding greater complexity, but also to preserve Harper Lee’s keen eye for detail and sharp sense of humor. An account of Watchman’s transformation may make for a more interesting read than the actual manuscript itself.