Articles

Announced on Tuesday; Harper Lee will be publishing Go Set a Watchman, the sequel to her classic 1960 novel To Kill a Mockingbird. Called Go Set a Watchman this is Lee’s first draft of Mockingbird but from the perspective of Scout as an adult. Right on cue the backlash has started. Everyone’s favourite teen novel, To Kill A Mockingbird, is apparently not as good as it’s washed up to be. It has a ‘rather inchoate moral system’ according to the Guardian’s Sarah Churchwell. That may be true. I suspect that most of us haven’t reread the novel since we were thirteen, when our own moral compasses were not yet finely tuned and that another generation was won over by the carefully tailored looks of Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch in the film version of the book. Be that as it may I will be in the queue on publication day when Harper Lee’s ‘new’ sequel is published. And I will be as eager as any Harry Potter fan for the final instalment.