To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee (Heinemann Ltd 1960)

Before I can live with other folks I’ve got to live with myself.

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What is it about this book? Over 30,000,000 copies sold, a Pulitzer Prize winner, translated into more than 40 languages; and now the furore over its prequel Go Set a Watchman (which I haven’t read). Well, let’s see.

It’s Scout Finch’s first-person narrative, recounted after ‘enough years had gone by to enable us to look back on them’. The voice is an adult’s but the perspective is a child’s – Scout and her brother Jem are figuring out how Maycomb’s grownups operate, as events lead them up to the opening and closing detail of the book: Jem’s broken arm. And the child’s-eye view of everything from tying shoelaces to race relations is very nicely done.

Maycomb is a town in the Deep South which suffers from ‘the usual disease’. As Scout puts it early on, none of this would have happened ‘if General Jackson hadn’t run the Creeks up the creek’. It’s the 1930s and all are suffering the after-effects of ‘the crash’, some more than others. Jem and Scout, thanks to their plain-talking father Atticus, are aware of the complex bindings of ‘entailments’ and ‘mortgages’, and have a notion of who’s hardest up in the town and why. Atticus is the irreproachable lawyer hero of the novel (which I gather is why the prequel has upset some fans) whose convictions about justice, compassion and civic duty drive his family towards catastrophe. He is a relentless reader – admirable to some townsfolk, suspicious to others – and a single father who succeeds in being simultaneously distant and warm, and devoted to his work as well as his children. The case he’s working on – ‘something that goes to the essence of a man’s conscience’ – is of increasing fascination, importance and danger to Jem and Scout; and the family’s drama is a microcosm of the town’s which, in turn, is a microcosm of the whole country’s. But the novel’s allegorical aspect rarely intrudes – Scout’s storytelling is too good for that.

The description is excellent – ‘the darkness was desolate with the barking of distant dogs’, austere Aunt Alexandra ‘was cold and there’ – and those miraculous moments of childhood are deftly conveyed, such as ‘achieving two bows from a snarl of shoelaces’. But I think what makes it such a successful book is the way its grand themes converge to form the narrator’s coming-of-age experience. It is through her developing understanding of them that she moves, if not quite from girl to young woman, then from naivety to a kind of wisdom. And it is her imperfect girlhood understanding that maintains the novel’s suspense: the reader usually realises what’s going on before Scout does. Moreover, this partial understanding also prevents the book’s central ideas about conscience and behavior from seeming trite.

These features, along with the hidden presence of Boo Radley and the ‘pocket Merlin’ Dill, make a story in which characters (and some readers, no doubt) take ‘just…a baby-step’ away from the ‘ugly…facts’ of a certain type of life. It’s as important today as it was in 1960.