Andrew Cattanach asks, is it such a bad thing that Atticus Finch has a darker side? A day ahead of the release of Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman, the long awaited sequel/parent/companion to To Kill a Mockingbird, and the reviews are beginning to emerge. Predictably, they’re mixed, with many journalists somehow expecting Watchman to be on a par with, or even eclipsing, Mockingbird. This was never going to be the case although, as our own John Purcell noted earlier last week to Better Reading: ‘If Go Set a Watchman was the seed and To Kill a Mockingbird the flower, there will be enough in the former to make it an essential companion to the latter.’ Many early reviews focus on surprise bigotry of the older Atticus Finch. One of American literature’s great heroes in Mockingbird, Watchman finds Finch, now 72, voicing his displeasure at the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to desegregate schools and tells the older Scout that he once attended a Ku Klux Klan meeting. This has led, despite only a handful of people in the world actually having read the book, to a twitter meltdown… Atticus Finch has been my husband since 8th grade and I don’t...
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