Go Set a Watchman review: Story 'an apprentice effort'.

By Emily Clark.

Harper Lee’s new novel Go Set a Watchman will be released on Tuesday, 55 years after her only other book, To Kill a Mockingbird, was published before being canonised as an American classic.

Go Set a Watchman will be released to early reviews that called the new Lee story “distressing” and “disturbing”, after critics pored over the book’s first chapter which was made available early.

Lee completed Go Set a Watchman 60 years ago, before To Kill a Mockingbird, so the author was careful not to describe it as a “sequel”.

Harper Lee's second novel Go Set a Watchman will be released on Tuesday 14 July.

Some reports said Lee submitted Go Set a Watchman to her publishers in 1957 and was asked to rewrite it into what became To Kill a Mockingbird.

Her United States publisher Harper Collins said Lee wanted the novel published now unchanged from how it was originally written.

Here are eight points reviewers of Go Set a Watchman made after reading chapter one.

1. Novel has 'distressing narrative'

In her review, New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani questioned how Go Set a Watchman, "a distressing narrative filled with characters spouting hate speech", could have evolved into a "redemptive novel associated with the civil rights movement".

Go Set a Watchman is set in the 1950s — 20 years after To Kill a Mockingbird — when main character Scout is 26 and travels from New York to Alabama to visit her father Atticus Finch.

2. Readers share Scout's 'horror, confusion'

"Shockingly in .. Go Set a Watchman Atticus [Finch] is a racist who once attended a Klan meeting," Kakutani said.

How did a lumpy tale about a young woman's grief over her discovery of her father's bigoted views evolve into a classic coming-of-age story about two children and their devoted widower father?

Scout is shocked to find, during her trip home, that her beloved father, who taught her everything she knows about fairness and compassion, has been affiliating with raving anti-integration, anti-black crazies, and the reader shares her horror and confusion.

- New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani

"The depiction of Atticus in Watchman makes for disturbing reading, and for Mockingbird fans, it's especially disorienting."

Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird, insisted her second book Go Set the Watchman be published as it was originally written 60 years ago.

3. Story's 'major theme is disillusion'

Wall Street Journal reviewer Sam Sacks called Go Set a Watchman a "practice run for To Kill a Mockingbird", saying: "It existed before anybody could have known that small-town Alabama lawyer Atticus Finch would become a symbol of the nation's moral conscience."

Go Set a Watchman is a distressing book, one that delivers a startling rebuttal to the shining idealism of To Kill a Mockingbird. This story is of the toppling of idols; its major theme is disillusion.

- Wall Street Journal reviewer Sam Sacks

4. Pace of novel is 'meandering'

Critic David L Ulin from the LA Times said Lee's two novels were "related in a complicated way".

He called the pace of Go Set a Watchman "meandering" but said it "sharpened" when Scout discovered her father's racist dark side.

The one human being she had ever fully and wholeheartedly trusted had failed her.

The only man she had ever known to whom she could point and say with expert knowledge, 'He is a gentleman, in his heart he is a gentlemen', had betrayed her, publicly, grossly, and shamelessly.

- excerpt from Go Set a Watchman

Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)... reviewers say readers will have "horror and confusion" over the character in Go Set the Watchman.

5. Story 'an apprentice effort'

Ulin said Scout's discovery made for "a vivid set-up, and it indicates the promise Hohoff recognised in this draft nearly 60 years ago".

Promise, however, remains the operative word, for Go Set a Watchman is an apprentice effort, and falls apart in the second half.

- LA Times critic David L Ulin.

6. New book 'shows where Lee began'

Ulin also questioned how Lee developed the To Kill a Mockingbird story from the "literary artefact" Go Set a Watchman.

"How did Lee take the frame of this fiction and collapse it to create To Kill a Mockingbird, finding a narrative fluency only hinted at within this draft?" he said.

"How did she refine her language, her scene construction, discover a way to enlarge what are here little more than political and social commonplaces, to expose a universal human core?"

Regardless of the answers, Go Set a Watchman shows where she began.

It is a starker book than To Kill a Mockingbird, more reactive to its moment.

- LA Times critic David L Ulin.

7. 'Deep disappointment runs through novel'

Natasha Trethewey from The Washington Post said while reading Go Set a Watchman, "one sees the imprint of the earlier draft", referring to To Kill a Mockingbird.

"Whole passages repeated nearly word for word: descriptions of the fictional town of Maycomb, Alabama; character studies of its residents seemingly in preparation for the work it would become," she said.

Trethewey said: "A deep disappointment runs through the heart of the novel as the Finch family struggles with personal conflicts brought on by the social upheaval of the 1950s South."

If Atticus is not willing to accept desegregation, Jean Louise also is resistant to change and anxious about it, even as she knows it must occur.

A significant aspect of this novel is that it asks us to see Atticus now not merely as a hero, a god, but as a flesh-and-blood man with shortcomings and moral failing, enabling us to see ourselves for all our complexities and contradictions.

- Washington Post reviewer Natasha Trethewey.

Reviewers said the relationship between Atticus Finch and Scout in Go Set a Watchman is far different than in To Kill a Mockingbird.

8. Book a 'pleasure, revelation and genuine literary event'

Mark Lawson from The Guardian said in Go Set a Watchman Atticus Finch "is found behaving, in the 1950s, in a way that admirers of print and film versions of his earlier life will find painful and shocking".

If the text now published had been the one released in 1960, it would almost certainly not have achieved the same greatness.

This is not so much due to literary inferiority, but because Go Set a Watchman is a much less likeable and school-teachable book.

- Guardian reviewer Mark Lawson

In his review, Lawson said: "Go Set a Watchman shakes the settled view of both an author and her novel."

"And, unless another surprise for readers lies somewhere in her files, this publication intensifies the regret that Harper Lee published so little," he said.

This post originally appeared on the ABC and was republished here with full permission.

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Tags: current-affairs , entertainment-3

Reviewers are calling Harper Lee's new novel 'disturbing'.