New Harper Lee novel presents an unsaintly Atticus Finch

“Go Set A Watchman” takes place about 20 years after the events of “To Kill A Mockingbird“, Lee’s only other novel, which won a Pulitzer Prize and is regarded as one of the greatest works in the history of American literature.

The first chapter of Go Set a Watchman, Lee’s sequel to To Kill a Mockingbird, is available on United Kingdom paper The Guardian’s website. “They’ve made terrific progress in adapting themselves to white ways, but they’re far from it yet”, he says.

Go Set A Watchman is released on July 14.

“Go Set a Watchman” begins with Scout, otherwise known as Jean Louise Finch, returning by train to Lee’s legendary Maycomb, Alabama, on one of several annual visits she makes from New York, where she is greeted by young Henry Clinton.

A tearful, appalled Scout tells the man she worshiped growing up: “You’re the only person I’ve ever fully trusted and now I’m done for”.

She writes that Watchman also seems fuelled by “alienation” and is sceptical about the civil rights movement: “It seems to want to document the worst in Maycomb in terms of racial and class prejudice, the people’s enmity and hypocrisy and small-mindedness”.

Breaking an global embargo, the New York Times ran a review yesterday revealing the contents of Watchman and the news that Atticus Finch, a hero of American liberal values, had been conceived as a flawed racist has upset many fans of Lee’s original book.

No longer the tomboy we know from “Mockingbird”, Scout has transformed from an “overalled, fractious, gun-slinging creature into a reasonable facsimile of a human being”. The miraculous discover sounds somewhat farfetched already, but given that Lee, who has seen her health decline in recent years, was ecstatic that the novel was found because she thought it was lost many years ago. The Supreme Court had ruled unanimously in 1954 that segregated schools were unconstitutional, and the arrest of Rosa Parks in 1955 led to the yearlong Montgomery bus boycott.

There is nervous talk of blacks holding public office, and marrying whites. Atticus says. It has been called by Amazon.com its most popular pre-order since the last Harry Potter story. Anticipating fierce resistance to the portrayal of Atticus, publisher HarperCollins issued a statement late Friday.

Bozeman said readers should not be too harsh judging this book alongside one that was voted “Best Novel of the Century” in 1999, among its many accolades. “”‘Go Set a Watchman” explores racism and changing attitudes in the South during the 1950s in a bold and unflinching way”, the statement reads.

“This is the largest printing of any novel in American history”, said Lee Sentell, Director of the Alabama Tourism Department.

The current book will certainly raise questions, only some of which only Lee can answer. Why did she approve the book’s release after seemingly accepting, even welcoming, the fact that “Mockingbird” would be her only novel?

Lee has poor hearing and vision and resides in an assisted living facility in her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama. “At its heart, it is the coming-of-age story of a young woman who struggles to reconcile the saintly figure of her beloved father with her own more enlightened views”.

The closest to an intimate look at Lee (and endorsed by her) is a book, “The Mockingbird Next Door: Life with Harper Lee” by Marja Mills (Penguin Books), detailing life with Lee and her sister after Mills lived next door to them for 18 months. How autobiographical is “Watchman“, which roughly follows the path of Lee’s life in the 1950s? But “Mockingbird suggested that we should have compassion for outsiders like Boo and Tom Robinson, while Watchman asks us to have understanding for a bigot named Atticus”.

And how surprised should any of us be?