books
Idealistic Atticus Finch depicted as racist in new Harper Lee novel
Harper Lee's just and gentle lawyer Atticus Finch in "To Kill a Mockingbird" is depicted as a bigot and racist in the author's upcoming new novel, which is being published this week 55 years after her portrait of racial injustice in the American South.
Early reviews of "Go Set a Watchman", set 20 years after Lee's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, reveal that Finch attends a Ku Klux Klan meeting and opposes desegregation efforts.
This portrayal of Finch, one of the most beloved figures in American literature, sharply contrasts with the small town Alabama lawyer who defends a black man charged with raping a white woman in "Mockingbird". That image was immortalised by Gregory Peck in the 1962 Oscar-winning movie of the book.
"Go Set a Watchman", set in the mid 1950s, finds Finch in possession of a racist tract called "The Black Plague", and sees him scolding his adult daughter Scout for her progressive views on equality, according to New York Times, Los Angeles Times and Wall Street Journal reviewers, who received advance copies.
"Do you want Negroes by the carload in our schools and churches and theatres? Do you want them in our world?" Finch asks Scout in "Go Set a Watchman", the reviews say.
The book in fact was Lee's first novel, and came to light only in recent years, setting off a literary furour. It will be published on Tuesday and is already the most pre-ordered novel on Amazon.com since the 2007 release of J.K. Rowling's last book in the "Harry Potter" series.
Lee, now 89 and living in an assisted living facility in her Alabama hometown, has done no publicity for the novel, whose contents have been a closely guarded secret.
The book shows Scout, a six-year-old tomboy in "Mockingbird", as a sexually liberated woman in her 20s who returns home from New York to visit Atticus, now 72 and arthritic.
Now known as Jean Louise, she is shocked and disillusioned by her father's views and has furious arguments with him.
Sam Sacks at the Wall Street Journal wrote that for the millions of admirers of Finch in "Mockingbird", Lee's new book will be a test of tolerance and forgiveness.
"At the peak of her outrage, Jean Louise tells her father 'You've cheated me in a way that's inexpressible.' I don't doubt that many who read this novel are going to feel the same way," Sacks said. – Reuters, July 13, 2015.
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