To Kill A Mockingbird - Harper Lee

...lead role.

To review a book of this magnitude, it would be remiss of me not to mention a little about the writer. Harper Lee was born in Monroeville, Alabama in 1926.Before she started writing she lived in New York and worked in the reservations department of an airline. She has won the Pulitzer Prize, two honorary degrees and various other literary and library awards. This is the first book of hers that I have read.

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...rainy weather the streets turned to slop; grass grew on the side walks, the court-house sagged in the square.” This description of the town on page 5 starts to paint a mental picture that stays with the reader throughout. To Kill a Mocking Bird is almost a story of two halves. The first part of the book deals with the childhood adventures of the Finch children. With ingrained racism against the black folks never far away, Lee tells a meandering tale ... more

The BBC’s Big Read Top 21 featured some real heavyweights of the literary world. With a real shot in the arm for the reading fraternity, a number of books have come back into fashion, one of which is the Pulitzer prize winning “To Kill A Mocking Bird”. The front cover of the paperback proclaims that over 30 million copies have been sold world-wide. This might seem a little intimidating especially when coupled with reputedly one of the finest screen adaptations of any book made with the legendary Gregory Peck in the lead role.

To review a book of this magnitude, it would be remiss of me not to mention a little about the writer. Harper Lee was born in Monroeville, Alabama in 1926.Before she started writing she lived in New York and worked in the reservations department of an airline. She has won the Pulitzer Prize, two honorary degrees and various other literary and library awards. This is the first book of hers that I have read.

Set in the early 1930’s against the back drop of the Great Depression in the US, the story is of a poor middle class family living in Maycomb in the deep South (Alabama). Atticus Finch is a lawyer making his way in the legal world albeit he is still poor by our current day standards. His children are Jem, his son and Jean-Louise (otherwise known as Scout), his tomboy daughter. It’s from Scout’s perspective that the story is told.

“Maycomb was an old town, but it was a tired old town when I first knew it. In rainy weather the streets turned to slop; grass grew on the side walks, the court-house sagged in the square.” This description of the town on page 5 starts to paint a mental picture that stays with the reader throughout. To Kill a Mocking Bird is almost a story of two halves. The first part of the book deals with the childhood adventures of the Finch children. With ingrained racism against the black folks never far away, Lee tells a meandering tale of childlike adventures in a time of grinding poverty and a town whose conscience is pricked by the case of a black man accused of rape by one of the local women.

On page 7 we are introduced to Charles Baker Harris who comes to be known as Dill. A young boy of seven years old, he visits his aunt in Maycomb every Summer. “We stared at him until he spoke: ‘Hey’ ‘Hey Yourself,’ said Jem pleasantly. ‘I’m Charles Baker Harris, ‘ he said ‘I can read’” and with that simple exchange, a friendship was born.

As with all good stories, an element of danger lingers in the background. In our case, the Radley household is a constant source of mystery and adventure to the children. The Radley family is a strange group of loners who even have the effrontery to not attend church on Sundays. The trio is aware that the youngest of the Radley’s is a boy called Boo and it’s he that gives them the inquisitiveness to stray onto the Radley residence from time to time. During one balmy evening, the children are rolling Scout along the road with her in the middle of a tyre. The tyre takes matters into it’s own hands and strays into the Radley garden. Spying a shadow within the house, Gem decides to brave a look through the window only to end up running away as one of the Radleys comes to the front door with a shotgun. This is one example among many of an almost Famous Five type of adventure that appeals to both young and old in the telling.

What sets the book apart from many is the later stages of the tale. As Atticus’s children grow up, they become exposed to the institutionalised racism of the inhabitants of the County. The words and phrases in use are seen through the childlike curiosity of Scout and Gem as their attitude to this differentiation is formed by those around them. Atticus is staunchly liberal and very much against the anti-black sentiments of the town. Chosen instead of the usual lawyer to represent Tom Robinson, his is an almost impossible task of achieving an aquital for the accused. As the trial draws nearer, the naivety of the children is tested to the limit. Having got into trouble for fighting with her cousin, Scout reveals the language used by the boy, finding it confusing and difficult to come to terms with expressions like “nigger lover” aimed at her father. Their neighbour, Mrs Dubose hardly helps by compounding the notion with similar tirades against Atticus although their father treats these incidents with a certain dignity that is respected by most of the town population.

I will leave the rest of the book to your imagination as you ponder whether the poor farm hand, Tom Robinson will get justice and be found not guilty, what secrets are the mysterious Radleys harbouring and how the children turn out when exposed to subtle and not so subtle prejudice.

Let me start by saying that this is a hard book to analyse. I suspect vast essays have been written about the meanings incorporated in a work that has clearly captured the imagination of America and the rest of the world. Put in it's simplest terms, it’s the overriding message in the book that may well be the very reason why the story has attained such magnitude.

Harper Lee sets out her stall to make the point that times are a changing. What was once taken for granted is no longer true and the appointment of a lawyer in the form of Atticus Finch when a much softer option was available tells the reader that there is some doubt amongst the town population. We are made aware that in a straight white word against a black word situation, it is customary for the jury to take the word of the white person no matter how unlikely it is that the person in question is telling the truth. Lee exacerbates the point by using the Ewells as the offended. As it turns out, not only is there a clear pecking order of white and black but within the white fraternity, there is a league of acceptance of which the Ewells are at the bottom. Referred to by some as trash, the hypocrisy of Atticus’s sister, Alexandra serves to show just how complicated the social ladder of that time may have been. Remember when this book was originally written. Published in the UK in 1960 but even earlier in the States, racism was very much a part of life even then in the Southern States. Despite the supposed emancipation following the American Civil War and the fine words of leaders like Abraham Lincoln, in some parts of the US little had changed in the white attitude to black people. It is true to say, though, that things were changing. Martin Luther King was appealing to the conscience of the American population at large and the almost Apartheid-like conditions in states like Alabama was being tested to the limits in the form of both individual and group protest. This particular book sat well with the movements of the era.

What Harper Lee does extraordinary well in this book is to show the change in perception through the generations. It’s almost like cutting into a rock and seeing the different colours and layers that have built up over time. In this case, people like Mrs Dubois, Aunt Alexandra and the Ewells represent old school thinking while the liberal Atticus is the hub at the heart of change bringing his children up to think and feel in an open-minded, non-prejudicial manner. Maybe it’s no coincidence that the Finch family cook is the black Calpurnia and here again, Lee puts her metaphorical hand in the water to cloud the issues. On a visit to the alternative and exclusively black church, Calpurnia has to shout down opposition to her white charges attending the service by black folks. Furthermore, Lee’s attention to detail is served well again as the minister sings out the lines of the hymns one by one so that the congregation can copy him due to the lack of hymn books.

A further example of deceptive, institutionalised racism is the apparently liberal teacher, Caroline Fisher. In conversation she proclaims that Hitler’s prejudicial acts against Jews in Germany is appalling and yet she finds little time to view Black people as equals by clearly condemning Tom Robinson despite the overwhelming evidence suggesting him to be innocent.

“Shoot all the Blue Jays you want, if you can hit ‘em, but remember it’s a sin to kill a Mockingbird”. Atticus finds himself reminiscing about the advice his father gave him as a boy as a precursor to his son Jem getting his first rifle. Contained within this is the central analogy of the book. Now, I suspect that this may be the subject of much debate as to whether the analogous bird is meant to be Tom Robinson or Boo Radley (for reasons that become clear towards the end of the book). For me, it has to be Radley but, either way, the sentiment of innocence being tainted with malevolent intent is made plain as the image of an innocent singing bird being shot for sport underlines the intended fight for equity that makes the book so significant.

Moreover, Dolphus Raymond typifies the ideal liberal vision. Seen as the local oddity, Raymond has numerous half cast children sired by several black women. He manages to avoid attention under the pretence of being a drunk but one day, Gem discovers that the brown paper bag with straws in leads to nothing more than soda. Dolphus Raymond is much cleverer than the town give him credit for as he continues to live his life outside of conventional acceptance with little or no interference from others. However, his children find themselves shunned by both black and white alike as their colour disenfranchises them from both social strata. Ultimately, this illustrates the insidious nature of prejudice amongst all people and not just the more obvious black and white struggle.

So did I enjoy the book? At 309 pages it looked, on the face of it, a short read. However, I did find it hard going at times. The attention to detail is simply stunning and written by someone who cares a great deal. Harper Lee must have lived and breathed these social issues to bring such a degree of passion into her work. Even so, I found it dry at times. Maybe I was expecting a courtroom drama rather than a Huckleberry Finn/Tom Sawyer type of yarn and so maybe I found the first half of the book a trifle slow. Not withstanding that, the message is so important and, unfortunately, just as relevant today.

If I had to capture the ethos at work in this story it would be in the words of Atticus at his summing up in the trial. “The witnesses for the state, with the exception of the sheriff of Maycomb County, have presented themselves to you gentlemen, to this court, in the cynical confidence that their testimony would not be doubted, confident that you gentlemen would go along with them on the assumption – the evil assumption – that all Negroes lie, that all Negroes are basically immoral beings, that all Negro men are not to be trusted around our women, an assumption one associates with minds of their calibre….Which gentlemen, we know is in itself a lie as black as Tom Robinson’s skin, a lie I do not have to point out to you. You know the truth, and the truth is this: some Negro men are not to be trusted around women – black and white. But this is a truth that applies to the human race and to no particular race of men…”

Fine words from a great writer.

Thanks for reading

Marandina

ISBN 0-09-941978-5

I bought this paperback version from Tesco for £3.73. Copies will be available over the Net from places like Amazon and, of course, Ciao links.

 

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