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Book 10 - "To Kill a Mockingbird" by Harper Lee
Tuesday, February 8th, 2005 19:35Read for the Motley Fool book club.
I had never read this book before, or seen the film with Gregory Peck, and all I knew about it was that there was a little girl whose lawyer father defended a black man who had been charged with raping a white woman, so the Boo Radley sub-plot came as a surprise to me. But once Scout and Jem found the presents he had been leaving for them in the tree, I somehow knew that he was going to end up saving the children from danger at some point in the story. I hadn't realised before reading it that the book was set as early as the mid 1930s, I had assumed it was set in the 1950s or thereabouts, nearer to the time of the civil rights movement.
It is so well written, capturing the thought processes of a child who sees everything that is going on, without really understanding the subtleties of adult behaviour and the hypocrisy of the townsfolk. Towards the end, when her teacher is praising the Jewish people and condemning Hitler for his prejudice without seeming to connect that with her own prejudice against the local black population, Scout's confusion is obvious even though she can't articulate it properly yet.
One thing that was really struck me was Atticus Finch telling him children that the worst thing you can do is to attack, con or steal from someone black (I've taken the book back to the library and can't remember exactly how he put it). When I thought about it I realised that he said this because in Alabama in the 1930s there was no way that a black person could retaliate in any way against a white person, without risking extreme and disproportionate consequences, so it was unfair of white people to take advantage of them.
I wonder why Harper Lee never wrote another novel. Maybe To Kill a Mockingbird was such a personal story that nothing could ever come up to its standard in her mind.
I had never read this book before, or seen the film with Gregory Peck, and all I knew about it was that there was a little girl whose lawyer father defended a black man who had been charged with raping a white woman, so the Boo Radley sub-plot came as a surprise to me. But once Scout and Jem found the presents he had been leaving for them in the tree, I somehow knew that he was going to end up saving the children from danger at some point in the story. I hadn't realised before reading it that the book was set as early as the mid 1930s, I had assumed it was set in the 1950s or thereabouts, nearer to the time of the civil rights movement.
It is so well written, capturing the thought processes of a child who sees everything that is going on, without really understanding the subtleties of adult behaviour and the hypocrisy of the townsfolk. Towards the end, when her teacher is praising the Jewish people and condemning Hitler for his prejudice without seeming to connect that with her own prejudice against the local black population, Scout's confusion is obvious even though she can't articulate it properly yet.
One thing that was really struck me was Atticus Finch telling him children that the worst thing you can do is to attack, con or steal from someone black (I've taken the book back to the library and can't remember exactly how he put it). When I thought about it I realised that he said this because in Alabama in the 1930s there was no way that a black person could retaliate in any way against a white person, without risking extreme and disproportionate consequences, so it was unfair of white people to take advantage of them.
I wonder why Harper Lee never wrote another novel. Maybe To Kill a Mockingbird was such a personal story that nothing could ever come up to its standard in her mind.
